I'm admittedly no Rhodes Scholar. I know there are plenty of people with a lot of advanced degrees, a lot of folks who can point to a stream of alphabet soup after their names, that all could run circles around my intellect. But I can't help but get this discomforting feeling like I'm being played … like we're all being played.
For years, decades actually, I've heard how my Christian convictions and conservative political preferences are dehumanizing to "the gays." Never mind that my faith in Christ compels me to love my neighbor as myself, to sacrifice for the good of even my enemies, the fact that I testify to the truth that homosexual romantic and sexual relationships are sinful means I possess a dehumanizing hatred of the people who live them.
If I can be honest, that's always been frustrating and confusing. I have never in my life been accused of dehumanizing or hating the countless people I interact with who casually view pornography, cohabitate before marriage, divorce for reasons other than marital unfaithfulness, live promiscuously, or commit adultery. Yet I testify to the truth that each of those are sinful as well.
Why is only one group of people dehumanized by the profession of my beliefs? Moreover, how is it dehumanizing? If I am convicted that the Bible is true, that it is authoritative, and that it stands as the only completely reliable and trustworthy guide for navigating the confusing moral questions of life, then why would anyone perceive my proclamation of its words as anything but altruistic? My tone, my approach, my demeanor? Yes, that could be fairly called into question.
But if you believed God had given guidelines that I was violating, shouldn't I expect you to tell me if you actually cared about me?
But that's only half of it.
So often the same crowd that calls me names and accuses me of this dehumanizing or hating gay people, seems to actually be dehumanizing and hating gay people themselves - and everyone just looks the other way. Like this:
Port St. Lucie, Florida has announced that its regional "pride parade" has to be canceled because Florida has passed a law protecting kids from seeing sexual performances from drag queens.
Basically, they are admitting that they cannot put on a pride parade WITHOUT exposing kids to all sorts of sexual deviancy, so it's easier to just cancel it altogether rather than change the parade.
Is it not dehumanizing gay people to say that they cannot celebrate themselves and their sexuality without exposing kids to nudity and sexually explicit deviancy?
Or this:
First of all, why are we to the point that we allow public officials to blatantly lie about legislation without any fear of reprisal? The law says nothing about homosexuality. Nothing. Newsom's tweet is as misleading as the media "don't say gay" narrative that they promoted when Florida passed a parental rights in education law.
But read what the law actually does ban and tell me how this isn't the height of bigotry:
My faith teaches me to believe that any human being is capable of committing sins like indecent exposure, public nudity, and lewd conduct. Thus, a ban on such things would not be targeting any particular group of people. The governor of California apparently disagrees.
Perhaps the governor was citing the city's overturned ordinance that used to prohibit "homosexuality." Not The Bee wrote an extensive article showing how the Murfreesboro City Council had already removed that language from the city code, which begs the question: Why would Gavin Newsom, who apparently hates disinformation, peddle in such a lie? Did he really not do his research, or is it something else?
Does Gavin Newsom believe only the LGBT community commits these offenses and therefore is the sole focus of any law banning such transgressions? Is it not dehumanizing gay people to read a ban on "public indecency" as a ban on gay people? How poorly must you think of a community of individuals to equate their very existence with lewdness? How do we not see this comment as morally repugnant as when President Biden insulted all black people by saying, "Poor kids are just as bright as white kids."
Add to all this the visceral reactions from LGBT allies when Moms for Liberty groups successfully remove literary pornography from elementary school libraries and you can't help but see why so many of us tire of facing baseless, slanderous accusations from such quarters.
Do we Christians always do a good job of expressing our convictions to gay people in a loving way? No, we don't. But if you're looking for the dehumanizing, hateful crowd, I'd start with the progressive folks who seem to think gay people are nothing but a bunch of sexual miscreants and exhibitionists.
