Here’s the thread that’s upsetting me – the bunchteen-dozenth discussion of homosexuality, Christianity, the Episcopal Church, the Rt. Rev. V. Gene Robinson, and related short subjects.
I’m not upset with Homebrew – he even, thanks to my first post in that thread, made it a point to contact me off-board to ensure that I wasn’t disturbed with him, and I assured him I’m not. And it’s not gigi or Skammer either; I understand full well where they are coming from.
Maybe what I’m pitting is my own inability to communicate as well as I’d like. I’ve gotten enough compliments on my ability to make issues clear, though, that I think I’m in a minority in feeling as I do about it.
But what the FUCK is the cosmic problem with getting across a simple point of view, that I have tried to phrase, one way or another, a hundred times in the last five years: You are entitled to make your own moral decisions, based on who you are and not who someone else wants you to be, and you should live them out according to the Golden Rule, compassion, fairness, and mercy.
And that’s not merely what I have to say, but what Jesus said about it.
You know: Jesus said it; I believe it; that settles it.
I honestly do not see where anything whatsoever, in the Constitution, the Bible, or anything else, licenses someone else to come up and, figuratively, take a shit in the middle of someone else’s dinner plate, whether the issue is homosexuality or anything else.
And that, friends, Dopers, and countrymen, is precisely what’s been happening since day one of this whole episode.
If you’re not gay and you’re not Christian, the issue should be of minimal interest to you whatsoever. If you are gay, can you accept the idea that a majority of Episcopalians are people of good will who believe in respecting your dignity and your right to a loving relationship? If you are not gay and a non-Episcopalian Christian, you have some rules laid down by your Lord about how to behave towards your brothers and sisters in Christ, and bluntly, a lot of you are doing one piss-poor job of following them.
That narrows it down to about a dozen of us who are Episcopalians, one or two of whom happen to be gay, who are supposed to be seeking unity in diversity and following the Baptismal Covenant to the best of our abilities – and I think we’re doing our best to do so, Skammer explicitly included in that despite his divergence from some of the rest of us on the sexuality issue.
But it seems like everybody else is finding it necessary to get into the act as well. And dumping on the church I love, and/or on the people that God told us to love as our brothers and sisters, and/or on those who are having problems dealing with concepts they themelves cannot feel.
And the whole thing has given me a bad case of disturbed emotions – not really anger, and not really depression, but something queasy inbetween them.
So am I just not making sense to people? Have I gone completely off the deep end on this? Am I making a big thing out of nothing? Or are people really taking the opportunity to take potshots at things I love and value?