Ohio Votes to Ban Gay Marriage

Keep the candle burning until justice is achieved for God's lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered children.

It is disheartening to realize that Christianity has taken us to this point. We are willing as the State of Ohio to take away the constitutional rights and protections afforded un-married straight couples, just to be sure that gay couples could not receive those rights. That seems very mean-spirited and un-Christ-like. We have made the Bible “The Living Word”, rather than Christ.

If we were to really study the Scriptures, and comprehend that is a collection of books written thousands of years ago, and contains the understandings of different culture's understandings of the Divine, maybe we wouldn’t be using it as a biology text book. Maybe we would look to discover Jesus’ liberating spirit and mission, and not imprison modern people with little understood laws of a primitive people.

The Church at the local level has taught the Bible is infallible, that the knowledge contained in it supersedes knowledge gained by logic, science, and the reality we can see with our own eyes. They resist any expansion in our current concepts of God. "Consecrated ignorance is still ignorance", as Reinhold Niebuhr once stated.

I don’t know how complicit the members of my congregation are in this, but I’m having trouble going back there. I wish I could just go to a denomination that has already fought this battle, but I realize that nothing will change if I leave. More generations of gay children will grow up with unhealthy notions of God and themselves.