I agree with you in many regards. The Christian community has overburdened the gay community with the need to prove they are authentic, while many Christians are unaware of their own inauthenticity. Good point. I’m not sure how many of the BTG blogs you looked at. There’s a mountain of stuff to wade through there. But the seed of something deeply meaningful has been planted.

Perhaps we are seeing the beginnings of a sea change in this whole debate. Clearly, changes need to happen. Both sides have done damage. This is an awfully big ship to turn around, so we will need to be patient.

I don’t think the church has placed ALL the burden on the gay community. I know of a number of non-gay Christians who have quietly (perhaps too quietly) gone about seeking to build that bridge for a while now. This is not a boulder we will move overnight. Neither, I hope, are we like the mythical Sispyhus, rolling it up the eternal hill, only to see it fall back down again.

Time will have to tell. I plan to commit much prayer to this effort and do what God speaks to my heart to do. I hope others will commit to doing the same.

I remember something I said to some very anti gay people: the difference between myself and them was I listened, I didn’t KNOW everything and was certain of nothing about gay people if it didn’t come directly FROM gay people.

This situation is treated as if believers have been silent, somehow isolated and never given enough of the floor of the collective societal consciousness to make a difference. As if participating in a life in faith is an alternative to being gay…or even non Christian or non religious.

No, being a believer is supposed to THE life, and everything else is considered broken and worthless or illegitimate.

That reaching the consciousness of the very people who CREATED homophobia is a burden placed on the wrong party.

I think we can learn a lot, if this synchroblog is sincere about bridging gaps is to mind not only the children and how they go about things, but to let those children teach us.
Children, unadulterated by intense scrutiny of their own peers, will be direct about their curiosity and much more fearless.
They will love who is kind and good to them, and they don’t care what that person is or looks like.

For the most part, the control and deprivation expected towards gay people is called love, and yet, faith communities are upset when gay people reject it. Especially when they are confronted with loving, connected couples and families who don’t have make ANY of the sacrifices a gay person is expected to.

There is a commercial running now showing a man and two little girls at a table. He asks one if she’d like a pony and he hands her a tiny plastic one. He asks the other little girl the same question and a live, beautiful pony is brought into the room. Leaving the other little girl to look at the plastic replica with disappointment.
The tag?
“Even children know when something isn’t equal.”
There are all kinds of hypocritical and contradictory messages sent out with regard to the lives of gay people and who threatens who and who is more suspicious.
At least in the commercial, those children have an opportunity to compare. We are conditioned in faith communities to take the word of an intangible entity, yet disavow what a flesh and blood gay person says or does right in front of us.

A bridge assumes an opportunity for both sides to visit each other. Perhaps somewhere in the middle.
Maybe.
But so far ALL the effort has been on gay people for far too long.

Defending gay folks is about undoing a lot of damage…and if there is a sea change here, neither party will have to defend themselves at all.
That IS the point, right?