ABOUT THE COLUMNIST
Gracie Bonds Staples is an award-winning journalist who has been writing for daily newspapers since 1979, when she graduated from the University of Southern Mississippi. She joined The Atlanta Journal-Constitution in 2000 after stints at the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, the Sacramento Bee, Raleigh Times and two Mississippi dailies. Staples was recently promoted to Senior Features Enterprise Writer. Look for her columns Thursdays and Saturdays in Living and alternating Sundays in Metro.
Rarely am I in attendance at church that I’m not reminded of some wrong I’ve committed, of something that I should’ve done but didn’t, of something I should have said but never found the courage to utter.
That happens even when I’m alone just reading the Holy Scripture as I do in the wee hours of each day.
That’s the nature of God’s word. It cuts like a two-edged sword, forcing me to consider my ways, to turn from the things that don’t glorify God. Funny thing is what feels like love and correction to me, can look like hate and rejection to another.
The latter is cause enough for many people to turn and run as far away from church, from organized religion, as they can get.
I hear this a lot from people in and outside the gay community.
After the Southern Baptist Convention recently declared spiritual war on gays, Richard Pearce-Moses, who's been married to his partner for six years and with him 24 years total, says such attitudes drove him from church.
“So many Christians go on and on about how theirs is a faith of love,” he said. “…But I don’t remember Jesus declaring a “spiritual war” on the sinners he met. Rather, he treated them with compassion. Where is their compassion?”
It’s a good question. But Christians have been asking a similar one.
“Homosexuals have made it clear that they want people of faith to love not only them, but the sin of homosexuality,” one reader wrote to me. “Christians and other people of faith are derided as bigots and haters when we do not accept unrepentant homosexuality.”
Thus, the divide.
In its ruling in favor of same-sex marriage in all 50 states Friday, the U.S. Supreme Court made it clear the First Amendment "ensures that religious organizations and persons are given proper protection as they seek to teach the principles that are so fulfilling and so central to their lives and faiths, and to their own deep aspirations to continue the family structure they have long revered. The same is true of those who oppose same-sex marriage for other reasons. In turn, those who believe allowing same-sex marriage is proper or indeed essential, whether as a matter of religious conviction or secular belief, may engage those who disagree with their view in an open and searching debate."
On the eve of the High Court decision, I spoke to the Rev. Bryant Wright, pastor of Johnson Ferry Baptist Church, who is opposed to same-sex marriage.
I asked him if there was anything he wanted to say that my earlier questions hadn’t prompted.
“Yes,” he said. “This isn’t a matter of not loving homosexuals.”
I believe that what Wright and other Christians want, myself included, is the right to have our own opinion, for those supportive of gay marriage to simply look across the divide and understand our need to abide by Scripture.
Many Christians believe homosexuality is a sin. People in the gay community do not.
Many Christians believe that marriage should only be between a man and woman. People in the gay community do not.
Many Christians believe it’s sinful for divorced men and women to remarry. Some Christians do not.
Some believe marriage was first instituted in the garden of Eden when God joined Adam and Eve, proof the institution should only be between a man and a woman. Some do not.
There are many things about which we disagree. But we shouldn’t allow those things to divides us. Right or wrong, we need each other.
I think Archbishop Wilton Gregory said it best.
“Each U.S. Supreme Court decision that has ever been rendered has resulted in deep disappointment for some people and vindication for others,” he wrote in statement Friday. “If we all agreed on the outcomes of these divisive cases, there would simply be no reason for the Court to convene. This most recent decision is no different.”
Still, Gregory said every court decision is limited in what it can achieve. This one is no exception.
“It does not change the biological differences between male and female human beings or the requirements for the generation of human life, which still demands the participation of both. It does not change the Catholic Church’s teaching regarding the Sacrament of Matrimony, which beautifully joins a man and woman in a loving union that is permanent in commitment and open to God’s blessing of precious new life.”
This is what I hope people on each side of this debate will hold onto: This judgment does not absolve any of us from obligations of civility toward one another. Neither is it a license for more venomous language or vile behavior against those whose opinions continue to differ from our own.
“It is a decision that confers a civil entitlement to some people who could not claim it before,” Gregory wrote. “It does not resolve the moral debate that preceded it and will most certainly continue in its wake.”
This moral debate must also include the way that we treat one another – especially those with whom we may disagree, he said.
And that, dear friends, is my prayer.
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