Alaska forum rethinks Christian response to LGBTQ issues

CatholicAnchor.org

On a recent evening in Anchorage, about 200 people of varying politics attended a town hall forum on how Christians should engage the public on LGBTQ — lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer/questioning — issues. During the three-hour discussion — titled “Loving My Gay Neighbor” — several gender issue researchers and commentators including a former lesbian and a former homosexual man — addressed myriad questions, from the spiritual meaning of human sexuality to the fallacy of fluctuating gender to the complex causes of homosexuality to the essence of marriage and the universality of sin.

The May 9 forum at East High School and another on May 10 in Palmer were hosted by Alaska Family Council, a Christian pro-family advocacy organization. In an interview with the Catholic Anchor, Jim Minnery, the group’s executive director and moderator at the forums, said they were “long in the making” — an effort to help Christians heal divisions in the local community that have surfaced as LGBTQ rights groups have increasingly attempted, with varying success, to expand legal and cultural acceptance of homosexuality in Alaska in recent years.

Minnery said he hoped the talks would help give Christians confidence in addressing LGBTQ issues in a manner that is “Christ-like.” While the events were geared toward Protestants and Catholics with like minds on human sexuality, gay activists — including Democratic State Senator Hollis French – attended, too.

THE MEANING OF HUMAN SEXUALITY

The truth on human sexuality extends to everyone, explained panelist Andrew Walker, the director of policy studies at the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention.

“The sexuality that the Bible teaches isn’t just for Christians,” he said. The fact of natural law that “God designed us male and female is true, whether or not you may be a Christian.”

Human sexuality is an image of the triune God, Melinda Selmys explained, referencing Saint Pope John Paul II’s writings on the issues.

Selmys, a former atheist lesbian, is now a married, Catholic mother of six and writer and commentator on LGBTQ issues. She wrote the book, “Sexual Authenticity: An Intimate Reflection on Homosexuality and Catholicism.” She noted that marriage is “not just a duality” of man and woman, but the potential for a child to be conceived from that union is “intrinsic to the reason why sex exists in the first place.”

Men and women are made in the image of God, added Jeff Johnson, and their complimentarity “says something about who God is.”

Johnson is a gender issues analyst at Focus on the Family and former gay-identified man who is now a married father of three.

The marriage relationship is the “most consistent” biblical metaphor of humanity’s relationship with God, he noted. In the Old Testament, God is described as the husband and Israel as his wife; in the New Testament, Christ is the groom and the church is his bride.

“When that picture is distorted,” he said, “it’s a distorted picture of our relationship with God. So two men together don’t image the full image of God.”

Selmys cautioned that focusing exclusively on the image of marriage can distract from the “highly exalted form of love” in celibate, same-sex friendship — which alongside marriage reflects God’s relationship with the church.

“We have to recognize that Christ didn’t get married. Christ had friends,” she observed, adding that Christ said the greatest love is to “lay down your life for your friend.”

Selmys believes biblical sexuality can be alienating to those with same-sex attraction because Christians have lost appreciation for the long Christian tradition of celibate friendship, a life that lay Christians with same-sex attraction can embrace.

If Christians focus solely on marriage as the “ultimate” form of love, she said, persons with same-sex attraction as well as single, heterosexual persons will wonder, “‘Where do I stand? Am I some sort of inferior image of God or broken image of God?’” Selmys said, “We need to provide a sense of, this is your vocation, this is how your vocation is a vocation to love and to love fully as a completely integrated person, and this is how your sexuality plays into that.”

Johnson said acknowledging and celebrating the distinctions between the sexes can help dispel the current “cultural confusion” about sexuality.

“Men and women are different,” he said, and “those differences are good.” He noted that “we’re not born eunuchs or asexual or both sexes put together typically,” and that the proposition that gender can differ from one’s biological sex is a recent theory.

Johnson said that in the 1950s, a Johns Hopkins University researcher pushed applying “gender” from linguistics to persons.

“Gender became something that is just felt on the inside, and that has led to a great deal of gender confusion,” he said. As a result, he noted that Facebook now offers subscribers one of over 50 custom genders to use in their profile. Johnson said Christians “need to be clear” about the differences between men and women, though “I’m not talking about rigid hierarchical rules…where women wore head coverings in church and were silent. …We’re talking about the goodness of a woman and the goodness of the man, and we need to understand what that means across culture, across time, the way God intended it to be.”

One audience member asked what a child with “two moms” would miss. Johnson replied, “A dad. Men and women, and this is universal and cross-cultural, tend to parent differently,” he said. “Kids without a dad miss having a dad.”

Later in the discussion, he added, “When a child loses a parent, we consider that a tragedy. When they lose both parents, we consider that a tragedy and we try to replace what they’ve lost, a mother and a father, with a new mother and father that can take that place in some way. So we want kids to have moms and dads because they get the full spectrum of humanity, and they learn about how men and women relate to each other and they learn what it means to be a man and what it means to be a woman.”

IS IT A CHOICE?

On the question of whether same-sex attraction is a choice, the panelists agreed that homosexuality arises from a complex amalgam of circumstance, choice and addiction.

“It’s not as simple … as are you born this way or is it a choice,” Johnson said. “There are a whole lot of other options in the middle, and there are a lot of roads into homosexuality and a lot of roads out of it.”

Peter Hubbard, a Protestant pastor and author of “Love into Light,” said that both sides of the debate over homosexuality need a more nuanced understanding. “So many times our culture says, you were born this way, and if you don’t live out who you are, you’re going to be suicidal. And then the church responds, no, you chose to be this way, and both of those are horribly simplistic,” he said.

Hubbard observed that because everyone is born sinful, all “are tuned into attractions, desires that are broken, sinful” — attractions that one can convince oneself of and to which one can then “orient” oneself.

Johnson explained that same-sex attraction can be symptomatic of deep-seated, unresolved problems.

“My same sex attractions in some way were a sign of things that were missing in my life and things I really needed,” he said. “I needed to have good connections with other men, and those didn’t really happen as a kid.”

As an adult he said he stopped “looking at my same-sex attractions as who I was and began to look at them as something that could tell me things that I needed in my life, that I needed to fulfill them in healthy ways.”

To the question, “If God put this desire in me why can’t I fulfill it?” Johnson responded: “I don’t believe God put this desire in my heart … I am born into a world that is sinful, I am sinful and acted on by sinful sources outside of me, so I am subject to that kind of a world … but that doesn’t mean that that is who I am. I don’t let it define me. And it doesn’t mean that I have to act on that.”

Selmys added that acting on these desires would contravene Christ’s salvific work.

“I would not be pursuing the vocation that God has given me,” she said.

WHAT IS MARRIAGE?

The panel also highlighted the importance of identifying what marriage is when discussing the issue of marriage rights for same-sex couples.

“That’s what this debate is really about,” Walker said. “It’s not about discrimination. It’s about whether or not marriage really has a composition or a substance. Water is H2O, right? In the same way, marriage actually has a definition.”

He argued that marriage isn’t exclusively about validating the romantic feelings of adults but about “channeling sexuality toward particular ends” so that if children come from that sexual union there is an institution set up to provide and care for them – namely a mother and father who are committed to each other.

This way of distinguishing traditional marriage from the romantic actions of same-sex couples is not discriminatory, but observational, he said.

OTHER RIGHTS

Selmys stressed the importance of protecting the “legitimate” rights — outside marriage — of persons with same-sex attraction, such as the right to visit each other in the hospital and share property.

Walker agreed and advocated for a “plus-one system” whereby every person would be allowed to identify one other who would hold such rights. He said that that relationship shouldn’t have to be sexual, as in the case of two widowers who are friends.

LOVE AND TRUTH

Throughout the discussion, the panelists highlighted that all have sinned and therefore Christians should express compassion when addressing persons with same-sex attraction.

Selmys stressed the need for “profound and constant acceptance” of one’s sinfulness.

As sinners, “We’re all in this together,” Minnery observed.

Hubbard noted that struggles with homosexual sin “are very similar to all of our struggles” from drug addiction to pornography to marriage problems.

“You and I are called upon to love people personally, to reach out to them in love, and then to speak the truth,” said Johnson. “I want to speak the truth about marriage, too, that marriage has always been throughout all cultures the union of a man and a woman and it unites them with any children that they have … I can say that and talk about it honestly and courageously and still love people who I disagree with.”

Walker said: “We need to rid ourselves of this kind of white-knuckled angst with those we disagree with.” The Gospels call Christians to “humanize those who the world would say we ought to dehumanize,” he said.

He urged pastors to welcome individuals struggling with same-sex attraction and “provide the type of hope that Gospel does.” He explained: “Christ died for all people, for all sins.”