Response to a book challenge

By day, I am a librarian. I don't get into that too much here. However, I read a letter this morning and want to be able to find it again. This is basically a way of bookmarking it. It is a rather lengthy response to someone who protested the presence in the library of a picture book involving gay marriage.

It's interesting to me that the social grouping with which I most identify myself - the church - would tend to be on the side of the protest in this case rather than the measured response. Sometimes I wonder why I associate myself with organized religion. (For some ideas in that area, you can look here.) But I also wonder what percentage of people who radically follow the teachings of Jesus Christ are truly committed to the position of homophobia so often encountered in the church and "Christian" media. Some of the "ain't it awful" statistics such people share with us about the decay of moral absolutes in the church seem to indicate that it might not be so ubiquitous as it may sometimes appear.

Don't get me wrong here. I'm not an activist in favor of gay rights. I'm more in favor of people, of dealing with people as wondrous creations rather than putting labels on them and discarding them as not fit for society because they don't fit the standard definition of "normal." I ache for those who have been told through various means that God hates something so integral to who and what they are as their sexuality. And, having substantial exposure to the Bible itself rather than simply those who would tell me what it says, I suspect that many from the gay community are entering the kingdom of God ahead of the religious people who are heading up the fight for "family values." (If you want some background for this suspicion, check out the gospel according to Matthew: chapter 21, verse 31 and context.)

Lord, save us from the hopeless quest of making the world inoffensive to the self-righteous.