Christians and Gay Marriage

I am very happy about the recent SCOTUS decision to overturn bans on gay marriage. I think this is a wonderful thing for the many gay people who are in loving relationships who will now have an opportunity to be equally protected under the law of the land and have their relationships legitimized by the state and some churches (though, in my opinion, churches shouldn't worry all that much about how the US defines marriage). And, I hope that this will help the church to begin/continue to work to heal the many wounds inflicted on the LGBTQIA community by the church. So, in this respect I am both happy and hopeful because of the ruling today. There are two additional issues, however, that I think, at least, could use a little more attention, and those issues are what I will mostly be talking about in this post. The first is that I believe it is possible to be a loving Christian, who loves gay people, and still think that Christians ought not to support gay marriage. The second is that Christians need to be careful that we do not simply go along with whatever is popular at the time, but rather stick to those things that we believe to be morally right based on the Wesleyan Quadrilateral, which consists of reason, experience, tradition and scripture (I'm still a Greenville College student at heart).

Before I begin this section I would like to throw out a disclaimer, namely I am coming at this issue from a privileged perspective given that I am a straight, white, cis-gendered male who grew up in the upper middle class and has had some, but not all that much, experience with the homosexual community (wow, after typing that I feel like I should tell you to stop reading this and go find a better source). That said, I think it is possible for Christians to love homosexuals and still think that it would be better for homosexuals to not be "practicing." This is because I think it is possible to hang out with, eat with and generally be loving towards someone without agreeing with the way that they live their life. Additionally, I think it is possible for someone to disagree with homosexuality out of a place of love for the homosexual community. For example, one could think that men and women complement one another, and that two men or two women cannot be as happy together as a heterosexual couple. This is not to say that I agree with the aforementioned position, it is just to say that we ought not to label all of those who think that practicing homosexuals are doing something wrong as inherently hateful towards the homosexual community. And, lastly, I think we (we being Christians who do not think homosexuality is wrong) do the church a disservice if we merely dismiss those Christians that disagree with us as outdated or unloving.

I now come to my second point, which is that Christians ought not to support homosexuality because it is now popular to do so (at least among younger people, and increasingly among the entire population). To put it differently, I have more respect for a Christian who opposes homosexuality because they think it is not supported by their faith, than for a Christian who supports homosexuality merely because it is increasingly the normative cultural position. I say this because I think one of the most important things the church has to offer the secular world is a set of grounded moral principles that is opposed to the moral relativism that is, in my experience, becoming the social norm. So, I suppose what I am saying is that I think Christians ought to support "practicing" homosexuals, but I think that they ought to do so because that practice is supported by the intersection of reason, experience, tradition and scripture. In the interest of trying to keep this post manageable I am going to stop typing shortly, however if you have any comments, concerns or questions please let me know.