Graystone, I know it gives you immense satisfaction to accuse others of hatred and bigotry. I understand that. But no, a belief that homosexuality is wrong is not being hateful. That view has been intellectually defeated long ago.
When you try to "prove" that people who do believe that are being hateful, you only make yourself look silly.
You don't know a thing about Christianity, and unfortunately neither does Christine. If your mantra is that nobody has a right to believe in right and wrong, you've lost the debate, end of story. There are a whole host of people who do know the importance of moral guidelines, and what to avoid for a healthy life.
It's obviously true that everyone will always have differing viewpoints on what is right and what is wrong. To hate other people is always wrong. Any Christian knows this, because the Bible teaches this very plainly throughout it.
What is it to hate someone? To hate a person is to dislike them intensely. To hate a person is different than disapproving of their actions or words.
The homosexual issue is obviously a hot potato, because the obvious goal of the greater society is to break the will of anyone who believes something is wrong, because homosexuals desperately need approval, for some reason. Yet Christians AND A whole heap of OTHERS are not going to accept the idiocy that there shouldn't be any such things as moral guidelines.
There are, unfortunately, always going to be those people in society who have an urge to harm others, and sometimes gays are victims of violence. Should that be preached against? Of course. But it's not as if the only people being victims of violence are gays. There's mean evil people in this world, and that's just sad and unfortunate, and obviously violence is universally taught against in really any rational segment of society. We have the fringe lunatic groups, but hasn't all societies been plagued by common criminals and crackpots? It's not church going respectable people who are the perpetrators of hate crimes and violence, and you're waisting your time if you think they are the enemy.
But the fact is that people who view homosexuality as wrong, just as they view a host of other things as wrong, DO NOT appreciate efforts by some (probably a minority) gay public school teachers to indoctrinate and change their children's beliefs while the children are attending public school.
A religious person (if they are indeed "religious") won't mind at all if the public schools are used to teach kids not to hate and cause harm to others, but when the schools are used to try to change kids' religious beliefs, which are NOT harmful to others in and of themselves; people don't appreciate that.
FOR EXAMPLE: If I from my personal moral viewpoint believed that sex should be saved for marriage, I would not at all appreciate overt efforts by a public school teacher to make very overt and deliberate attempts to contradict what I've taught my child, particularly when having those personal moral viewpoints certainly DO NOT harm others, and in fact are for the benefit of my school-age child whom I am raising.
Unfortunately like I say, there are some pretty aggressive gay teachers out there (probably very few) who have some kind of personal agenda to change other people's personal religious and/or moral viewpoints. These are the teachers which some people really wish would ease off the crusade and get back to teaching the 3 R's. Unfortunately the schools have become places where some people have taken advantage of to push their own views of morality, which may differ from what others believe. This kind of encroachment is exactly what an early prominent Baptist minister was referring to when he coined the phrase "wall of separation", which phrase Thomas Jefferson borrowed when writing to the Danbury Baptist church, assuring them that no one denomination would become the official State religion of the US.
That early prominent Baptist minister was Roger Williams, who said, "When they have opened a gap in the hedge or wall of separation between the garden of the church and the wilderness of the world, God hath ever broke down the wall itself...And that therefore if He will ever please to restore His garden to paradise again, it must of necessity be walled in peculiarly unto Himself from the world..."
Thomas Jefferson mentioned in writing the first amendment several times, including in a letter to Samuel Miller, in 1808:
"I consider the government of the United States as interdicted [prohibited] by the Constitution from intermeddling with religious institutions, their doctrines, disciplines, or exercises. This results not only from the provision that no law shall be made respecting the establishment or free exercise of religion, but from that also which reserves to the States the powers not delegated to the United States [10th Amendment]. Certainly, no power to prescribe any religious exercise, or to assume the authority in religious discipline, has been delegated to the General Government. It must then rest to the States, as far as it can be in any human authority."
Those are Thomas Jefferson's words. Unfortunately, our modern Supreme Court have totally twisted this viewpoint, to the point that now if Federal funds are considered to be allowed to be used for religious schools, some people make the ridiculous claim that that goes against the "separation of church and state". Humbug. For 150 years Courts appropriately approved of all manner of voluntary religious excercises etc., in public schools in the several States, but nowdays the Supreme Court has become a dictatorial being, which holds the personal views of its nine members to be superior to the Constitution of the United States! Incredible. |
