The American Family Association recently sent men into women’s restrooms at Target stores.
This is the same organization that did everything it could to prevent same-sex marriage from becoming legal.
According to Sandy Rios, the director of governmental affairs for the evangelical organization, the purpose was to see what happened. I can hardly imagine what they thought would.
At any rate, nothing happened, but apparently that was bad news in their eyes. Rios said they discovered “there are no barriers in the bathroom.”
Imagine that. Target is not promoting discrimination against transgender people.
When I read this story my first thought was, “O God, forgive them for they know not what they are doing.”
Do they not know the deep pain and hurt they are causing, or do they just not care? Either way, this is what “morals regulators,” as scholar John Compton calls them, do. They hurt people.
They hurt people who just want to be left alone to be who they are, people who have done nothing to deserve the names they are called, the adjectives used to describe them, the laws passed to discriminate against them.
My goodness how deluded religious people can be!
Numerous times I listened to the pain and hurt our gay and lesbian church members expressed when they risked sharing their spiritual autobiographies.
It was never easy for them to talk about being rejected by their families and friends, of other kids making fun of them and calling them names when they were growing up, of feeling totally alone in a hostile world, of being afraid someone might physically hurt them.
We all cried every time one of them did. What other response is there when you see pain and hurt people you love have experienced simply because of who they are?
To this day I feel ashamed of the attitudes and actions of churches and Christians toward them.
And I still ask myself how Christians can be so misguided, so blind, so uniformed, so unthinking, so unloving as to think they are justified in causing such pain and suffering to others.
“Hate the sin, love the sinner” has to be at the top of the list of self-righteous statements. I cannot imagine how anyone can say such a thing with a straight face.
I also cannot understand how anyone can believe that putting subjective beliefs above love pleases God, or that what they believe is absolutely right and cannot possibly be wrong, or that what they say the Bible says is without question what the Bible actually says.
It seems to me that evangelicals believe that ends justify means so any personal hurt and pain their words and actions cause serve a greater good.
They are wrong. What they are really doing is leading a modern day moral crusade that is ugly and misguided because all moral crusades are.
Jesus said, treat others the way you want them to treat you.
That is the most basic moral principle there is in the world. Anyone and everyone who tries to live by it is truly one of the beloved of God.
The members of the LGBT community I know do try to live this way. I think it gives them the grace to rise above the hurtful words and actions of people who pay no attention to it.
If evangelicals ever stopped their “morals regulation” crusade long enough to listen to what Jesus did say, I am sure it would help them to actually become the Christians they think they already are.
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