Bruce Gerencser has a long post about a sad, too-familiar subject — a family breach wrought by Godly condemnation of a gay family member. The gist of it is that a pastor and his wife broke relations with their son because he is gay and — WORSE! GASP! — got married.
It has been said that in marriage, the pain and stress of divorce is greater than even the pain of losing a spouse to death. I believe the same can be said of breaking ties with your child. Unless one has experienced this kind of loss and grief, they cannot fully understand the depth of pain experienced by a parent.
Someone may ask, “Why would anyone break ties with her own child?” The answer is, “loyalty to Jesus.” Being a disciple of Jesus demands our relationship to him be greater than our relationship to our own family, even our own children (Matthew 10:37).
Fortunately, however, we’re not talking about a teenager thrown out on the street; the son is provided for.
These stories have two elements that can’t be emphasized forcefully enough.
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Matthew Vines to the contrary, the Biblical condemnation of homosexuality is fierce and unambiguous, and so is the cultish insistence that pleasing Jesus is more important than your family; what these parents did is not un-Biblical. It’s lousy, and it ought to place them outside decent society forever, but it’s not un-Biblical.
The Bible is just an awful guide to ethics, because it is the literature of outcasts struggling for survival. The Jews have been tormented for millennia, and the 1st-century Christian church was no better than a cult birthed by the despised Jews.
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We do know today that sexual orientation is an operating system switch set before birth, and varies according to the chemistry of the mother’s womb during gestation. There is even serious speculation that the widespread use of progesterone as an element of prenatal medical care may be promoting the incidence of same-sex attraction.
When you choose resolute ignorance in favor of evidence, and then damage the lives of others in obeisance to Bronze Age superstitions, there is a character problem.