Jesus Christ was a brown Jew in the Middle East, conceived out of wedlock in an arguably interracial if not interspecies (deity and human) relationship, raised by his mother and stepfather in place of his absent father. He may not have had a Y chromosome. He spent his early youth as a refugee in Egypt, where his family no doubt survived initially on handouts from the wealthy (You think they kept that gold, frankincense, and myrrh from the wise men? Hell no, they sold that stuff for food and lodging). He later returned with his parents to their occupied homeland and lived in poverty.
The religion of Jesus’s people has no concept of a permanent hell and instructed its priests on how to induce miscarriages. Jesus explicitly rejected the concept of disability as a divine punishment. He spoke out against religious hypocrites. He had enough respect for women to let his mother choose the time of his first miracle. He blessed a same sex couple. He told a rich man that he must give up his wealth to get to heaven, and also told a parable about a rich man suffering in agony in presumably Gehinnom (basically Purgatory) just to hammer the point home. He told people to pay their taxes. He declared “love your neighbor” to be one of the two commandments on which all laws hang. He commanded his followers to help the poor. He commanded them to help the sick and the needy. He spent time with social outcasts. He healed the servant of a high priest during his arrest rather than fighting back. He was put to death by the occupying government because he was a political radical.
Trump and his administration are xenophobic, misogynistic, racist, fear-mongering, warmongering, tax-dodging, anti-Semitic, anti-choice, anti-welfare, anti-equal pay, anti-LGBTQIA+, anti-immigration, support tax cuts for the rich, support Citizen’s United, want to keep refugees out of this country, want to limit our ability to speak against the government, plan to abolish the Affordable Care Act, and they wrap all of that up behind a banner of “Christian family values.” If you support them, you have no right to call yourself a follower of Christ.
I was talking to my mum once about why she thought homosexuality was wrong/a choice and she told me that it was partially because the bible says that “confusion comes from the devil” and that whenever she heard LGBTQ people talk about their experiences with figuring their sexuality out, they said they were confused at some point.
At the time, I didn’t know what to say to that. I had only recently come out to her, and I was still trying to find the best way to explain everything. But now I realize just how fucked up that statement is, because the confusion doesn’t come from liking someone of the same gender, it comes from adults demonizing that attraction.
If a kid grows up in a household where being gay/bi/pan/etc. is normalized, then if they ever feel attracted to the same gender, or more than one gender, there isn’t any reason to be confused, because they haven’t been told that it is wrong. When I figured out that I liked both boys and girls, I was confused because I had been lead to believe that only one of those attractions was valid and that I wasn’t supposed to feel the other one. And when the feelings wouldn’t go away, I felt lost because it was supposed to be a choice.
LGBTQ kids feeling confused has nothing to do with the devil, it has to do with society telling us that who we are is a mistake and that our feelings are possible to ignore/avoid.
this is my favorite post of all time