Christian church promotes gay rights
September 10, 2009 by Michael Nugent
A Christian Church in Texas has launched a public billboard campaign in support of gay rights.
The slogan is Would Jesus Discriminate? and it is run by five of the worldwide Metropolitan Community Churches. And the Rev Dr Cindi Love has published a book of the same title.
I believe that atheist and humanist groups should be working with religious groups like these to promote an ethical and secular society.
The billboards will be displayed in north Texas throughout September, and their use of scripture has already been challenged by other Texas Christians. One local baptist Pastor, Sam Dennis, while agreeing that Christians shouldn’t hate gay people, told CBS: “I’m hard pressed to find that scripture advocates that it’s alright to live in a gay lifestyle.”
Bizarrely, he felt the need to add: “Just like I’m hard pressed to find that scripture advocates that’s it’s alright to live in an adulterous relationship or as a wife abuser or as a murderer.” So that’s the collective category in which Rev Dennis places gay people in his mind: alongside adulterers, wife abusers and murderers.
The first Metropolitan Community Church was founded in 1968 in Los Angeles, as the world’s first church group with a primary, positive ministry to gays, lesbians, bisexual, and transgender persons. The Churches now have over 40,000 members in 22 countries.
The Would Jesus Discriminate? campaign is organised in several American States as well as in the UK and Australia. You can download campaign materials from their website.
The campaign asks Christians to consider, “What if we are wrong about the issue of gay people’s place in society and in our churches? What if we offered them full citizenship and life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness? How would our country improve if we simply stopped oppressing at least ten percent of our best and brightest people?”
The Metropolitan Community Churches also support initiatives like next year’s Soulforce Q Equality Ride in which young adults travel around America to illuminate the damaging consequences of discriminatory religious doctrine through non-violent resistance.
And here is a speech by Rev Candy Holmes, a lesbian clergywoman with Metropolitan Community Churches, giving testimony to a US Congress Committee in support of domestic partnership benefits and obligations.
My question is, what are the possibilities for formal campaigns on secular and equality issues, organised jointly by atheist and humanist groups and Christian groups like these? What are the advantages and disadvantages? How could such campaigns work in practice?
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Christians should start thinking for themselves instead of searching the bible. True morality doesn't come from a holy book. It never will.
I agree, Kor. But, whatever their motivations, at least these particular churches are campaigning for something that would help to minimize injustice and suffering.
Exactly! They are so mindless. They can't even come up with their own oppinions, they have to look into a book. It's like they don't even think. If they thought, they would understand.
Can any of you make anything out of nothing? Like a solar system or even something small, like the earth.
A Logical mind has to be able decern the truth and an absolut truth is every where and a theroy is not fact!
Even though it is such a long time since the last post, I had to comment.
You all don't get it. Christians choose to serve a God that is bigger than man. Bigger than anything you can imagine. Why in the world would I rely on my own limited experiential knowledge when I can seek knowledge that is eternal and omniscient? The Bible isn't just a book. It's 66 books written by 40 different people over thousands of years — all saying the same redemptive story. The scriptures in the billboards are being twisted to support the secularists agenda of moral decline. As it has been throughout the ages, once a society begins to allow it's moral fabric to unravel, that society has been doomed to extinction.
You can't intelligently comment on things you do not know. If you have never read the Bible with a keen and honest desire to have God reveal Himself to you— if He is, indeed, real — then you cannot comment on those that follow it. The best you can do is say, "They choose to, I choose not." And so to your detriment.