The people of Jesus' time hated Samaritans, so Jesus told them the parable of the Good Samaritan and asked them not to judge others by their prejudices. The people of his time also stoned prostitutes to death, but Jesus showed mercy to the prostitute brought before him and told the people, "Let him who is without sin throw the first stone." He told people to "judge not your brother." (Matthew 7:4) "Or how can you say to your brother, 'Let me take the speck out of your eye,' and behold, the log is in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye." He pointed out to them the hypocrisy of taking pride in one's own "goodness" while judging others, when he told them the story of the Pharisee and the publican praying in the temple. (LUKE 18:9-14)
Religious people who practice their religions according to their own narrow beliefs have given a bad name to religions over the centuries. Think of all the wars that have been fought in the name of God, but were actually fought on the made-up "rules" of men's own minds. It's staggering to contemplate. When I see people wanting to deny equal rights to gays, and doing it in the name of their own distorted ideas about their religion, I want to say to them, "What would Jesus do?" But I know from sad experience that their minds are set, and they wouldn't be able to hear me.
Excerpt from essay below: If his religion teaches prejudice toward certain people, and if he chooses to accept those dictated prejudices, that's ok with me, right up to the point where he decides those religious prejudices need to be codified into laws that extend the power of his religious beliefs to people who don't share them. Once my former friend decided that gay people should be denied rights, he threw in with a long history of oppression, a history that, ironically, once defined members of his own religion as weird, undesirable, and deserving of scorn from "normal" people, or "real" Christians. Like those who once persecuted members of his own faith, my former friend allied himself with those who would oppress other people out of a misguided sense of moral and personal superiority.
An Episode in the Culture Wars
by Jaime O'Neill
A few months back, I lost a friend over the issue of gay rights. During nearly two decades of working together, we had differed on a number of issues, none of them threatening to our friendship. He is more conservative than I am, and that seldom bothered me much. He was and is a man who stands by what he believes, and I admire that in people, even when I think they're wrong. He's also a pretty good writer, and I admire that, too. He's been dedicated to education, a teacher devoted to serving students.
He has a real doctorate in English, paper from a real school with real standards, unlike some of my former colleagues who merely racked up a bunch of often bogus units in order to propel themselves up the salary schedule once they'd gotten the degrees that made them eligible to be hired in the first place.
He's a Mormon, and he's been on the receiving end of some prejudice on that front, or had his religion flung in his face when people who disagreed with him ran out of other arguments against one or another position he'd taken. So, during the years I counted him as a distant friend, I did so with both affection and esteem.
All that changed, irrevocably, during the debate over Proposition 8. Prior to that split, I'd known his conservative views on marriage, and I respected those views, and the tradition that sustained them. If he wanted to believe that the Mormon Church shouldn't perform marriages between people of the same gender, then I had no problem with that. But when he moved from that position to advocating that NO ONE of any faith or belief should be allowed to perform such marriages, and that his personal sanction against such marriages should be enforced by laws that govern all, and that gay and lesbian couples would not be allowed the legal rights or respect granted to people like himself even outside of his church, I parted company with him, and lost the respect I'd once held for him.
If his religion teaches prejudice toward certain people, and if he chooses to accept those dictated prejudices, that's ok with me, right up to the point where he decides those religious prejudices need to be codified into laws that extend the power of his religious beliefs to people who don't share them. Once my former friend decided that gay people should be denied rights, he threw in with a long history of oppression, a history that, ironically, once defined members of his own religion as weird, undesirable, and deserving of scorn from "normal" people, or "real" Christians. Like those who once persecuted members of his own faith, my former friend allied himself with those who would oppress other people out of a misguided sense of moral and personal superiority.
I don't even want to deny my former friend and his fellow religionists the right to their sense of superiority. As far as I'm concerned, they can preach against damn near anything they can think to call "sin," and that falls under the heading of freedom of speech and freedom of religion. But when those teachings lead to hate crimes, or when that preaching encourages discriminatory laws, then his freedoms are in conflict with the freedoms of others and, since his freedom to believe and worship as he pleases is not jeopardized by giving others the right to wed, then fair and reasonable people must take sides with those people whose freedoms ARE being denied.
Those old analogies apply here: Your freedom to swing your arms stops at my nose, and your freedom of speech does not include the freedom to yell "fire" in a crowded theatre. In other words, when your rights are in conflict with the rights of others, then those rights must be exercised with responsibility, and must cease at the point harm to others has been demonstrated. As bad as prejudice is, and as much as I hate the sanctimoniousness that paints prejudice in stained-glass colors, what really tore it for me was the dishonesty of the Prop. 8 campaign, the fear mongering that prompted my former friend to stand up at a school board meeting and deliver a grandstanding speech to an audience packed with his co-religionists. In that speech, he promised the audience that if gay marriage became legal, then teachers would begin to school little kids in the legitimacy of the homosexuality. "If you don't believe that will happen," he said, "then I've got a bridge to nowhere to sell you up in Alaska."
It was that little rhetorical flourish that made me decide I no longer needed to count this man among my circle of friends. He knew he was throwing red meat to those who shared his position, knew he was playing to their fears, knew he'd appear to be a stalwart defender of the faith to those who shared his prejudices - including those Mormons on the local school Board who had decided to vote their personal religious beliefs even before that meeting started. But, unlike many who supported Prop. 8, my former friend was smart enough to know that Proposition 8 was not about teachers, not about schools, and most certainly not about indoctrinating young people on the merits of homosexuality in our taxpayer-supported public classrooms.
Or, if he wasn't smart enough to know that, then he surely should have been. And, as a teacher himself, he should have known that schools are public institutions, supported by people of all manner of belief, and attended by children who come from homes that span a range of lifestyles. In view of all that, the loss of this particular friend hardly seems like much of a loss at all.
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