Destiny Star's Blog

So, apparently because I’ve done something immoral in my past, I’m not allowed to have opinions about other people doing immoral things… Here I thought I understood that Jesus forgives sins…

Yesterday I did a little bitter of Twitter activism in the Maine referendum on allowing gay marriage. I’m Catholic, as I’m sure you’ve all figured out by now, and so my opinion on that is pretty set. I agree with the church’s teaching that homosexuality is a sin and shouldn’t be endorsed by the state through the marriage subsidy.

Because I endorsed the radical position on twitter that marriage means a man and a woman starting a family together, I was roundly criticized by a large number of people, some of them claiming to be Christians, which makes me curious as to their rationale for rejecting the teachings of Christianity in that matter over the last 2000 years?

Christ created His Church to provide guidance in the lives of His followers on earth until His return, and for the last 2000 years, that Church, through all it’s mainstream incarnations, Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant, has recognized that homosexual actions are sinful in the eyes of God.

Now, however, at the dawn of Christianity’s third millennium, some churches have decided that God doesn’t think sodomy is such a bad thing after all.

Some compare this to teachings on slavery. I fail to see the comparison. The bible and church tradition, while recognizing the existence of slavery among mankind, sought to control it by creating restrictions on the keeping and treatment of slaves.

The controls placed on the sin of Sodom have always been among the strictest. Leviticus places it among the things bearing the penalty of death (admittedly, most Levitican laws bore death sentences for their violation), and St. Paul, whose divinely inspired writings tempered many of the restrictions placed on Leviticus saw no reason to indicate that homosexual activity should be one of those laws that were no longer binding on Christians under the New Covenant.

For two thousand years homosexual actions have been held to be mortal sins of the highest order. The Catholic Church counts them among the sins “crying out to heaven for vengeance.” The others are Willful Murder, Sins of Sodom, Oppression of the Poor, and Defrauding Workers of Their Wages. (In case you didn’t notice, keeping slaves would violate at least two of those.)

Now, whatever you may think about homosexuals and their place in society, it’s hard to find any justification for a change in the way any church claiming to follow Jesus Christ to reject the clear teachings of all of Christian history. The only justification I’ve found is people’s unwillingness to accept that their friends and family may be entirely lost to their sins.

The Church’s teaching on the matter is fairly simple. If one’s sexual predisposition is towards homosexuality, then God has called one to be single and chaste, just as surely as those called to the religious life are called to remain unmarried and chaste.

Apparently loving Christ and refusing to accept that society should sanction and subsidize something inherently sinful that provides no clear benefit to society makes one mean, hateful, intolerant, evil, and a host of other unsavory adjectives. Jesus never said that it would be easy to follow Him. In fact, He was pretty clear that it would be hard, and that we would be hated for it.

We are all called to be like Jesus in His ability to love the sinner and hate the sin. I know it’s hard knowing that your homosexual friend is sinning and will likely never stop, but that doesn’t mean we can ignore 2000 years of God’s teaching to feel better about our friends’ lives.

Tags: forgiveness, hate, homosexuality, Jesus, love, sin

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 4th, 2009 at 5:55 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.