"God has better for you."
My response to this week's "Pray The Gay Away?" episode
from "Our America with Lisa Ling"
The sentiment "God has better for you," which was repeated often by the ex-gay side is disingenuous, and cruel at best. God may have had better for all of us in the beginning, but we now live in a broken world. People are born missing limbs, blind, with holes in the heart, underdeveloped spinal chords, deaf, with syndromes that are incurable and brains that will never function the way God originally intended. In the past, these conditions were regarded as a curse and as evidence of sin and deemed to make the person unclean and unequal by some cultures, and babies were allowed to die. In very recent history, in rural China, where if the firstborn was not a boy, newborn baby girls were placed in a boiling pot of water and a lid place over it to indicate a child had not been born. None of these children ever chose to be born with missing parts or irreparable bodies. We would never think of saying to them "God has better for you" in the same way we would never say that to one of these firstborn Chinese baby girls. I'm sorry to use such a horrible example, but I feel the same way about telling someone that their gender identity or orientation, which they never chose for themselves, is something God is offended by and will therefore judge them for it. "Call nothing unclean which God has made clean." Wasn't this the hard lesson Peter learned one day?
from "Our America with Lisa Ling"
The sentiment "God has better for you," which was repeated often by the ex-gay side is disingenuous, and cruel at best. God may have had better for all of us in the beginning, but we now live in a broken world. People are born missing limbs, blind, with holes in the heart, underdeveloped spinal chords, deaf, with syndromes that are incurable and brains that will never function the way God originally intended. In the past, these conditions were regarded as a curse and as evidence of sin and deemed to make the person unclean and unequal by some cultures, and babies were allowed to die. In very recent history, in rural China, where if the firstborn was not a boy, newborn baby girls were placed in a boiling pot of water and a lid place over it to indicate a child had not been born. None of these children ever chose to be born with missing parts or irreparable bodies. We would never think of saying to them "God has better for you" in the same way we would never say that to one of these firstborn Chinese baby girls. I'm sorry to use such a horrible example, but I feel the same way about telling someone that their gender identity or orientation, which they never chose for themselves, is something God is offended by and will therefore judge them for it. "Call nothing unclean which God has made clean." Wasn't this the hard lesson Peter learned one day?
