Interestingly I came to a similar decsion only recently….to only engage with those who are questioning…..to not publicize the opponents comments or activities and to not allow any contrary comments to appear on my facebook. I deleted the people who said those negative tired arguments. Life is too short…and there are too many good people out there to spend my time with.

Anthony Venn-Brown

Co-founder & Convenor of Freedom 2 b[e]

October 15, 2009

A Manifesto! The Time Has Come!

I have made a decision. I will no longer debate the issue of homosexuality in the church with anyone. I will no longer engage the biblical ignorance that emanates from so many right-wing Christians about how the Bible condemns homosexuality, as if that point of view still has any credibility. I will no longer discuss with them or listen to them tell me how homosexuality is “an abomination to God,” about how homosexuality is a “chosen lifestyle,” or about how through prayer and “spiritual counseling” homosexual persons can be “cured.” Those arguments are no longer worthy of my time or energy. I will no longer dignify by listening to the thoughts of those who advocate “reparative therapy,” as if homosexual persons are somehow broken and need to be repaired. I will no longer talk to those who believe that the unity of the church can or should be achieved by rejecting the presence of, or at least at the expense of, gay and lesbian people. I will no longer take the time to refute the unlearned and undocumentable claims of certain world religious leaders who call homosexuality “deviant.” I will no longer listen to that pious sentimentality that certain Christian leaders continue to employ, which suggests some version of that strange and overtly dishonest phrase that “we love the sinner but hate the sin.” That statement is, I have concluded, nothing more than a self-serving lie designed to cover the fact that these people hate homosexual persons and fear homosexuality itself, but somehow know that hatred is incompatible with the Christ they claim to profess, so they adopt this face-saving and absolutely false statement. I will no longer temper my understanding of truth in order to pretend that I have even a tiny smidgen of respect for the appalling negativity that continues to emanate from religious circles where the church has for centuries conveniently perfumed its ongoing prejudices against blacks, Jews, women and homosexual persons with what it assumes is “high-sounding, pious rhetoric.” The day for that mentality has quite simply come to an end for me. I will personally neither tolerate it nor listen to it any longer. The world has moved on, leaving these elements of the Christian Church that cannot adjust to new knowledge or a new consciousness lost in a sea of their own irrelevance. They no longer talk to anyone but themselves. I will no longer seek to slow down the witness to inclusiveness by pretending that there is some middle ground between prejudice and oppression. There isn’t. Justice postponed is justice denied. That can be a resting place no longer for anyone. An old civil rights song proclaimed that the only choice awaiting those who cannot adjust to a new understanding was to “Roll on over or we’ll roll on over you!” Time waits for no one.

I will particularly ignore those members of my own Episcopal Church who seek to break away from this body to form a “new church,” claiming that this new and bigoted instrument alone now represents the Anglican Communion. Such a new ecclesiastical body is designed to allow these pathetic human beings, who are so deeply locked into a world that no longer exists, to form a community in which they can continue to hate gay people, distort gay people with their hopeless rhetoric and to be part of a religious fellowship in which they can continue to feel justified in their homophobic prejudices for the rest of their tortured lives. Church unity can never be a virtue that is preserved by allowing injustice, oppression and psychological tyranny to go unchallenged.

In my personal life, I will no longer listen to televised debates conducted by “fair-minded” channels that seek to give “both sides” of this issue “equal time.” I am aware that these stations no longer give equal time to the advocates of treating women as if they are the property of men or to the advocates of reinstating either segregation or slavery, despite the fact that when these evil institutions were coming to an end the Bible was still being quoted frequently on each of these subjects. It is time for the media to announce that there are no longer two sides to the issue of full humanity for gay and lesbian people. There is no way that justice for homosexual people can be compromised any longer.

I will no longer act as if the Papal office is to be respected if the present occupant of that office is either not willing or not able to inform and educate himself on public issues on which he dares to speak with embarrassing ineptitude. I will no longer be respectful of the leadership of the Archbishop of Canterbury, who seems to believe that rude behavior, intolerance and even killing prejudice is somehow acceptable, so long as it comes from third-world religious leaders, who more than anything else reveal in themselves the price that colonial oppression has required of the minds and hearts of so many of our world’s population. I see no way that ignorance and truth can be placed side by side, nor do I believe that evil is somehow less evil if the Bible is quoted to justify it. I will dismiss as unworthy of any more of my attention the wild, false and uninformed opinions of such would-be religious leaders as Pat Robertson, James Dobson, Jerry Falwell, Jimmy Swaggart, Albert Mohler, and Robert Duncan. My country and my church have both already spent too much time, energy and money trying to accommodate these backward points of view when they are no longer even tolerable.

I make these statements because it is time to move on. The battle is over. The victory has been won. There is no reasonable doubt as to what the final outcome of this struggle will be. Homosexual people will be accepted as equal, full human beings, who have a legitimate claim on every right that both church and society have to offer any of us. Homosexual marriages will become legal, recognized by the state and pronounced holy by the church. “Don’t ask, don’t tell” will be dismantled as the policy of our armed forces. We will and we must learn that equality of citizenship is not something that should ever be submitted to a referendum. Equality under and before the law is a solemn promise conveyed to all our citizens in the Constitution itself. Can any of us imagine having a public referendum on whether slavery should continue, whether segregation should be dismantled, whether voting privileges should be offered to women? The time has come for politicians to stop hiding behind unjust laws that they themselves helped to enact, and to abandon that convenient shield of demanding a vote on the rights of full citizenship because they do not understand the difference between a constitutional democracy, which this nation has, and a “mobocracy,” which this nation rejected when it adopted its constitution. We do not put the civil rights of a minority to the vote of a plebiscite.

I will also no longer act as if I need a majority vote of some ecclesiastical body in order to bless, ordain, recognize and celebrate the lives and gifts of gay and lesbian people in the life of the church. No one should ever again be forced to submit the privilege of citizenship in this nation or membership in the Christian Church to the will of a majority vote.

The battle in both our culture and our church to rid our souls of this dying prejudice is finished. A new consciousness has arisen. A decision has quite clearly been made. Inequality for gay and lesbian people is no longer a debatable issue in either church or state. Therefore, I will from this moment on refuse to dignify the continued public expression of ignorant prejudice by engaging it. I do not tolerate racism or sexism any longer. From this moment on, I will no longer tolerate our culture’s various forms of homophobia. I do not care who it is who articulates these attitudes or who tries to make them sound holy with religious jargon.

I have been part of this debate for years, but things do get settled and this issue is now settled for me. I do not debate any longer with members of the “Flat Earth Society” either. I do not debate with people who think we should treat epilepsy by casting demons out of the epileptic person; I do not waste time engaging those medical opinions that suggest that bleeding the patient might release the infection. I do not converse with people who think that Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans as punishment for the sin of being the birthplace of Ellen DeGeneres or that the terrorists hit the United Sates on 9/11 because we tolerated homosexual people, abortions, feminism or the American Civil Liberties Union. I am tired of being embarrassed by so much of my church’s participation in causes that are quite unworthy of the Christ I serve or the God whose mystery and wonder I appreciate more each day. Indeed I feel the Christian Church should not only apologize, but do public penance for the way we have treated people of color, women, adherents of other religions and those we designated heretics, as well as gay and lesbian people.

Life moves on. As the poet James Russell Lowell once put it more than a century ago: “New occasions teach new duties, Time makes ancient good uncouth.” I am ready now to claim the victory. I will from now on assume it and live into it. I am unwilling to argue about it or to discuss it as if there are two equally valid, competing positions any longer. The day for that mentality has simply gone forever.

This is my manifesto and my creed. I proclaim it today. I invite others to join me in this public declaration. I believe that such a public outpouring will help cleanse both the church and this nation of its own distorting past. It will restore integrity and honor to both church and state. It will signal that a new day has dawned and we are ready not just to embrace it, but also to rejoice in it and to celebrate it.

– John Shelby Spong

I really, really like what he has to say and I think that at a certain point in time that this is a necessary position to take. However, I can’t help but think this may be too early for such a stance to be taken. On certain points of the debate, (can gay people be Christians? to that I say who are you to decide what kinds of people can or can’t be Christians?) I think so, absolutely. However, my concern is that this attitude overall will simply further the cultural war we already see happening between the church and the GLBT community. I agree with the vast majority of what he says and I think he is raising an important point, but I think it is important to remember that there are many people in the church who are genuinely searching for answers and who genuinely just don’t know any better because nobody taught them the truth, so having an attitude that says “I’m not going to talk to you because you’re wrong” just doesn’t seem like a helpful attitude to me. I understand what he is trying to say and I support him because I think he’s moving a good direction, but I’m just concerned that if it is not tempered the end result will be the gay rights movement will be furthered at the cost of greater alienation from the church. Maybe I’m wrong, but still, it doesn’t totally sit right with me.

And by the way, he makes it sound as though a discussion about something implies that you feel the other position is valid. That is absolutely not true. You can have a discussion and think the other person is an utter lunatic for believing what he or she believes. It happens all the time. To have him suggest that debating or discussing these issues implies that one believes homophobia is acceptable strikes me as utterly ridiculous and misleading. These issues need to be discussed in churches because by and large, it still has not happened as much as it should be happening. To have Bishop Spong say, in effect, that he can decide for every church how it should conduct itself is a bit presumptuous, don’t you think? Churches need the opportunity to wrestle with these issues and come to their own conclusions. Churches doctrinally differ all over the board and they should be given opportunity to do so because the Bible is a complicated book, more complicated to understand than we oftentimes give it credit for being. This forceful attitude will deny them that opportunity to look into things for themselves. And I feel kind of bad for disagreeing with some of what he says, because I realize that his stance is an empowering and perhaps an important one, but I still can’t help but think it’s misguided. And I would like to add a major asterisk to my stance here – I do believe all churches should accept and love gay people as they are and I cannot be moved on that point, however I think that churches should not be forced into thinking that they have to affirm gay marriage or allow gay clergy. In the same way, many churches still don’t allow women to speak. I think they’re wrong, but it’s the church’s interpretation of the Bible, and it’s not my place to offer correction. To me, that’s the way I view situations like that.

I couldn’t help thinking that it’s easy for a heterosexual person to say things like the battle is over and the victory has been won… I assume that’s intended to be a bit of a Biblical reference, but it still irked me.

Sometimes I wonder what is more annoying the christians who constantly speak negatively and condemn GLBT poeple or the GLBT people who constantly condemn all christians and the church….never stopping to acknowledge the progress that is being made. maybe they are both the same…they both generalise and stereotype. The model I use http://gayambassador2.blogspot.com/ is getting better results. I used to always only hear bad stories….nowadays I’m hearing 50/50.

I’ve shifted my focus some time ago.

I am currently reading Philip Yancey’s book, “What’s so amazing about grace?” and finding it a huge challenge.

Yancey uses the term Grace Vs Ungrace.

Ungrace is the unwillingness for someone on either side of a debate/issue to extend mercy and forgiveness to the other side. We have the attitude that: “Well, they’re not showing much mercy or forgiveness to me, so I won’t show it to them, either.” He doesn’t say that this is a bad thing, just that “Ungrace” is the natural condition of the human heart and it is reflexive and instinctive for humans to come from a place of Ungrace, rather than a position of grace…

This has been a hard thing for me to hear. The reason it was so hard to hear is because I recognize this pattern of ungrace in myself. 😳

I am not saying that ALL people in churches, or ALL GLBTIQ persons are doing this, but it’s just something to think about.

Would the squabbling stop if we came to each other in a state of grace, offering forgiveness and mercy and not prejudging? hmmm…

I’m trying to apply this in my own dealings with this issue. It’s not easy, and I am not posting this in order to give anyone a hard time. Just sharing the hard time I am having, really.

BTW…..I loved Yancy’s What’s so Amazing About Grace…..most refreshing…..and in Koorong Bookshop