Coming Out Strong

So, as it happens, I didn’t manage to keep writing throughout the week at San Jose or even give a report from the San Francisco conference. For that, I am sorry. If you are hoping for regular posts on this blog, I’m afraid I will have a hard time filling that bill on my own. If other voices want to add their two cents, we might get closer to regular posting. Sign up or email me if you want to share - kaleidoscope@bmclgbt.org.

I do want to share one little bit I found interesting during one of the presentations at the Mennonite Conference in San Jose. One of the items that the delegate body voted on was a resolution (pdf) in support of bill in the US Congress to “acknowledge a long history of official depredations and ill-conceived policies by the United States government regarding Indian tribes and offer an apology to all Native Peoples on behalf of the United States.” Part of the presentation before this vote included some words by Steve Cheramie Risingsun, a Chitimacha Indian who leads Native Mennonite congregations in Louisiana and Alabama. You can read more about it at the Mennonite Weekly Review article.

The thing that I found particularly interesting about this was a comment made by Risingsun. He was talking about the various ways white colonizers mistreated Native Americans and tried to take away their culture and were generally pretty nasty. He said that there was a phrase that was often used by these white folks: “Kill the Indian, Save the Man.”

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Hi all,

It’s great to see this blog up & running. A (very) short intro to me: I’m currently halfway through medical school at the University of Chicago. My partner and I have now been together for six years - we had a commitment ceremony a year ago.

I think that LTH, HTS is really about Christians who are good people and feel like good people wanting to continue to feel like good people. They may have heard something about the injustices that queer people have undergone, but in general their worldview is pretty clear on heterosexuality being the only possible expression of sexuality. So the idea of “loving the sinner, hating the sin” feels to them like a way of continuing to feel like they love everyone without really changing their ideas about sexuality.

The thing that just doesn’t work about it is that people can’t be separated from their sexual natures in the way that people can be separated from a “sin.” A sin is usually something you DO, usually knowing that you shouldn’t do it because it will cause others harm (I’m sure there are more profound theological examinations of sin, although I actually find the concept a rather weak way of thinking about behavior.) But someone’s sexual nature is a part of who they are that runs deep into so many areas of their life and being. “The sin” (presumably a certain sexual act) is just one small part or facet of that person’s sexuality - it becomes kind of ridiculous to fixate on “it.” So to me, LTS HTS seems like a very primitive way of talking about queer sexuality that shows only the very faintest notion of what such sexuality even is. For example, my relationship with my partner includes eating together, sleeping in the same bed together, kissing each other hello and goodbye, relying on each other for emotional comfort, sex, being each other’s main confidant, lying on the beach together, on and on… notice that sex is just one aspect of a whole relationship, a relationships that cuts through every area of life. Supposedly “the sin” in all that is exclusively the sex part, but that seems to me like trying to pick one little area of a whole picture and claiming something about that piece that ignores its relation to the whole.

Sexuality is integral to humans relating to each other. I’m not sure most straight people even understand that, probably because the way it affects their relating has always been so taken for granted that they’ve never had to think about it. That’s the main reason why, to me, the church hasn’t even really begun to address the issue of queer sexuality. The only teaching they have is a ban on gay sex (”the sin”) but they’re absolutely silent on sexuality itself.

Thank you Katie for commencing the topic of LTS, HTS. I cannot count the number of times I have felt personally saddened at hearing this phrase from non-accepting and understanding mennonites and other christians. To expound on what I mean, I think that I must share the multiple thoughts that come to mind when I hear this. The phrase itself allows for the following analysis. First of all we must accept that EVERYONE sins, so this phrase is meant for everyone including the pastor who preaches every sunday, the nice little old woman teaching sunday school, and the elderly twins in your home church who never married. However, how often is this phrase actually used for these people? I think that I have only known of it being referenced to people continually living in what the church calls sin or those who have committed societal immoralities such as theft, murder, or rape.

I remember, many years ago, while visiting family friends in Lancaster, PA at a church service the pastor and congregation asked a man to stand up and speak about his sin and his forgiveness. I remember him talking about sinning because he had sexually assualted a woman, a friend, and he was now asking for god’s forgiveness and for forgiveness from his congregation. As a child, I did not completely understand what was going on or what he meant, but that image of this man asking for forgiveness has never left me. Whether someone is christian or not and believes what he did was a sin, he had done much worse than that by violating someone’s body, privacy, and personal rights as well as breaking a law. In that moment, his congregation was accepting to love him and commit themselves to him and his recovery (as some might say) while hating the very act that he committed. Love the Sinner, Hate the Sin. What a perfect example of how this should be used. Love the violator, Help him heal.
So, how is it that when churches say LTS, HTS for queer persons, how in any way is this comparable? How is it at all possible that someone can correlate a brutal illegal crime with loving someone of the same sex, or consensual sexual relations with someone of the same sex?

Looking back at when I was in college, I think of the cliques that I was not immediately involved in of mostly heterosexual white men and women, made up of pseudo-jocks, athletes, incredibly intelligent persons, and your average joe/jane. The majority of these well known people were liked, not for their looks alone , capabilities, or brains, but mostly because they knew how to have a good time. I’m talking about constant partying every weekend, drinking like we were in a bad water crisis, pre-marital sex, even the occasional non-consensual sexual assualt. All this, from those who our church deems sexually moral simply because outside of their clique and others around them, everyone thinks that they are the good little mennonite boy or girl who occasionally has fun with friends. Unknowingly, the church is Loving the Sinner and secretly accepting the sin, because they are not doing anything to stop it. Yet, when the church finds out someone is queer and in a relationship, the mere fact that they are in a relationship means that they are sinning because they are engaging in some sort of physical behavior. However when the “good little mennonites” are in a relationship they may still be having sex and the church does not know this because their sexuality allows for physical actions that may not be sexual that are not sinful (as deemed by the church). So basically I’m trying to say that there is not equal treatment between queer and heterosexual relationships when it comes to what the church sees.

So when I hear LTS, HTS I am filled with sadness, anger, and sometimes a painfully sick feeling in my stomach. I think it is unfair how the church uses the term for some and cannot for others, I think that when someone says this I know that I cannot and do not want to be around them nor would I ever want to attend their church, and I think that it’s simply a cheap answer for a church that will not study the issue and get beyond their fears of understanding and acceptance.

If you’ve been perusing the categories section, you may have noticed this jumble of letters and wondered, what is LTS HTS? It means “Love the sinner, hate the sin.” It gets used so much in the church that I decided to just abbreviate it here.

If anybody feels inspired to write about their thoughts and feelings on LTS HTS, I welcome some comments, or even a post. I’ll wait a bit to write more about it.

For some more of my thoughts on the language of like this: check this out. Like a lot of my other stuff here, it was at young.anabaptistradicals.org first because that is where I was writing before I started this blog here.

This might come in handy the next time you hear or see anything that seems a little bigoted (or a lot bigoted). It was made by Willie Hewes. I don’t know her but she knows her anti-gay rhetoric up and down, side to side, and diagonally. She also creates comics and writes a blog, you can check her out here. She inspired me to make a knock-off version of it of things I’ve heard around the Mennonite and Brethren churches and elsewhere (in addition to the ones she used here, which I’ve also heard plenty of times). Here’s my version (I posted it inside the mothership because I haven’t figured out how to make a table here yet).

Wouldn’t it be fun to print off a bunch of BINGO cards and take them to your next district/conference meeting or the denominational assemblies in Cleveland or San Jose and pass them out to your friends? Whovever gets 5 in a row first can shout “ANTI-GAY BINGO!” in the middle of the meeting. You could then take your card up to the moderator and ask for a prize. That would be a riot though maybe not everyone there would find it as amusing as I do.

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