Delayed Friday

This is the post that would have been up last Friday, but got delayed by my EP/music video announcement:

Yet another week over. Yet another week closer to Christmas. Three weeks left! Three weeks of waiting in anticipation. Three weeks of trying to keep my big mouth shut. Three weeks still that I might spoil the surprise. But enough about Christmas— today is Friday!

Earlier this week, I spent my night discussing the "Clobber Passages," verses in Scripture that are used to "prove" that homosexuality is a sin. In all honesty, I had no interest in going to the discussion. I've had my fair share of debates about whether God thinks homosexuality is okay, and I'm over it. I'm over debates. You have to choose your battles, and I'm just not into battling Christians over a couple lines in the Bible. So much so that I was actually pretty annoyed that we were going to spend an entire evening trying to "arm" ourselves to "fight bigotry." To me, it felt a bit like heterophobia.

Maybe it's just me, but I've never felt particularly comfortable in homogeneous groups. It freaks me out. Whether I "fit in" with the group or not, it bugs me. When everyone is of the same race or sex or religious belief or profession or anything else you could think of, I start feeling like anyone who doesn't have that common factor wouldn't be accepted. When I found out that someone who identified as straight wouldn't be allowed in the group about affirming and integrating spirituality and sexuality, my red alert went off. The reasoning is that we wouldn't want someone who was just an observer, due to how personal a lot of the things people have shared are, and I totally get that, but it bugs me.

We didn't discuss the Clobber Passages to fight anyone though, it turned out. Despite my anxiety, the discussion made me realise that I had turned myself from caring about the Bible at all after hearing over and over about how the Bible condemned homosexuality. The God I knew would never do that, so the Bible wasn't the "Word of God" in my mind. It was just a bunch of stories, maybe influenced by God, but screwed up by humans. After discussing how each of the Clobber Passages had been twisted to fit a homophobic belief system and how, taken in context and translated better, they were condemnations of things like rape, promiscuity, and inhospitality, not homosexuality, I felt liberated.

The point of the group is to make peace with our sexuality and our spirituality, and that happened for me suddenly. I hadn't even realised how much in turmoil I was over a couple sentences in that massive book, and I definitely had no idea how badly I wanted to believe in the Bible like I had as a kid, but our discussion finally freed me of that conundrum which had been plaguing me for so many years without my even knowing it. So it turned out that it wasn't heterophobia in the least. It was about solving that inner turmoil which I'm sure most, if not all, members of the group faced on some level. It was about showing that you can take the Bible and God seriously and still be an open, tolerant human being.

It still bugs me that someone identifying as straight wouldn't be allowed in the group though. It feels so black and white. Who are we to say whether straight people struggle with making peace between their spiritual beliefs and their beliefs about sexuality? The debate about homosexuality is all around us and in everyone's lives nowadays. It seems almost idiotic that we wouldn't allow straight people into a group which is about, in a lot of ways, accepting homosexuality as okay and natural and totally fine in the eyes of God. We all could benefit from some open discussion.