Gay Marriage: Do We Follow The Bible Or Follow Our Hearts?

I recently read Jenna Birch's article A Christian's Take: God Doesn't Approve Of Gay Marriage and found it entertainingly disturbing. I would like to thank the author for a well-written opinion piece that is more "personal opinion" than "gay-bashing," and using the Bible as a reference and not as a shield. That being said, I cannot agree with you, or disagree with you, because I don't fully understand the point to your article, other than to add to the thousands of other articles that suggest homosexuality is an abomination, written with Biblical references that have arguably been taken out of context.

The question isn't whether or not homosexuality is an abomination, or if it's wrong, or if the Bible does or doesn't say so. The more meaningful question is how should we, as a culture and a society, respond and react to homosexuals, the rights of homosexuals, and the inclusion of homosexuals into accepted society?

The most important and valuable statement that I took from your article was your bottom line: "God hates sin. But he loves the one who commits the sin."

Granted, there are members of the homosexual community who are not great people, just as there are members of each culture and society who are less than desirable, and we should not, as humans nor as Americans, place judgment on groups as a whole because of the actions or intentions of a sub-group of their community. But that could be summed up with the good Christian saying "Thou shalt not judge," (another element of the Christian community that is often forgotten about).

So if we shouldn't judge, and if we shouldn't hate, then what should we—as Christians or otherwise—and human beings do? Love. As a psychologist, I've seen and dealt with my fair share of members in the gay community. For the most part, they just want to be loved, and to love one another. And as long as there isn't someone shouting in their face telling them how horrible they are, how they're bound for a life in hell and that in order to save themselves they should join the group who's doing the yelling and the screaming and the hating, the majority will approach you with open arms and with love. One of my former clients put it best when he said, "Anti-gay Evangelical Christians, with their hate-speak and their screaming, do not paint a pretty picture of Heaven if Heaven is filled with people like them."

And back to the sin is sin comment—sins are equal, which makes murdering a child equally as horrible in God's eyes as wearing polyester or planting two crops side by side or touching the skin of a dead pig. We can't choose which sins we want to see as sins and which ones we want to ignore, the Bible doesn't work that way. For most religions, sins of omission carry the same weight as sins of commission.