“The Pride Game” by Joel Belz, World, June 28, 2003.
“Line in the Sand” by Joel Belz, World, July 19, 2003.
“Christ and Commitment” by Marvin Olasky, World, June 7, 2003.
by Dr. Ralph Blair
Antigay fundamentalists are more likely to divorce than are gay-friendly Christians and the unchurched. Southern Baptists are the most likely to divorce – at 29 percent. (Barna Research) Yet they have the illogical gall to call same-sex marriage an assault against their marriages. It was in the Bible Belt that married slaves were forced apart, single slaves forbidden to marry, and interracial marriage was against the law until the Supreme Court remedied that in 1967. The old-establishment ways were rationalized with Bible verses about the curse of Ham – as applicable to black folk as Bible verses about Sodom and fertility cults are applicable to gay folk. And it’s “to hell” with the Golden Rule.
Each year, some 4.6 million Americans get married – three-quarters of them in churches. They spend $2 billion on their wedding cake alone. Over 80 percent of Americans say “having a good marriage is absolutely necessary for them to consider their life a success.” Yet World and publisher Joel Belz (who notes this statistic) selfishly rail against the right of marriage for gay couples. And the Golden Rule doesn’t deter them.
Belz is an elder in a North Carolina congregation of the conservative Presbyterian Church in America (PCA), of which he’s just been elected moderator. In “Line in the Sand” he invokes the power of “3 to 10 million voters … for whom this may be the biggest public issue of their lifetimes.” He warns the Bush Administration: “Don’t you dare make a single concession on homosexual marriage.” He claims “the very character of human existence is at stake. … If you cannot hear us on this … there is no future at all for our society.”
In “The Pride Game,” he recalls an instance of anti-Semitism while waiting for an airport bus. He’d casually mentioned that his last name “is originally a Jewish name,” to which a friend quipped: “And you’re braggin’ about that?” Belz notes that “Some folks spend their whole lives both expecting and then taking such put-downs. Jews and blacks in particular.” He doesn’t mention gays here. “Sometimes Christians have defended them against such; sometimes, to our shame, we have joined in the piling on.”
Belz goes on to say that “more and more, we [Christians] have tasted what it is like to be made light of and regularly denigrated. It’s not fun.” He helpfully suggests that Christians now “accept as an unexpected gift some level of empathy for what it means to be at the bottom end of other people’s pride.” … [M]aybe we should lead the way by asking other minorities how they have responded to other people’s pride.” Here Belz shows a sensitivity he fails to apply in dealing with gay people. In page after page of World, the pain of gay men and lesbians is regularly dismissed with a smirk, a sneer or a call to arms. World runs a full-page ad for an antigay diatribe that promises to expose “the Myths and Deceptions of Homosexual Activism.” A leading Southern Baptist blurbs: “Read this book – get angry.” A PCA preacher says it “will reverse the tide of influence that this devastating vice is having on American society today.”
What happened to Belz’ “asking other minorities how they have responded to other people’s pride?” The writer of Proverbs said of the one “who answers before listening – that [that] is his folly and his shame, for who can bear a crushed spirit?” Matthew applied this text from Isaiah to the ministry of Jesus: “A bruised reed he will not break, and a smoldering wick he will not snuff out till he leads justice to victory.” Where is the justice in the fundamentalists’ turning a deaf ear to the cries of their homosexual neighbors, crushed by Christians’ refusal to listen? Where is the justice in the fundamentalists’ withholding from gay people what fundamentalists demand for themselves? Where is the Golden Rule here?
Belz grants that Christians can come across as “cocky, proud and exclusive. So,” he says, “if during this proposed conversation we slip back into that bad behavior again, we invite our other minority friends to remind us of a basic ground rule: Leave your pride at the door. It’s what got us into this mess in the first place.” And so we remind him.
Olasky, editor-in-chief at World, is a Jewish Christian who teaches journalism at the University of Texas. In “Christ and Commitment,” he celebrates his survey of long-term marriages, noting the “stability [and] contentment” they bring. Anticipating the recent Supreme Court ruling, he plays “the pride game” to the hilt: “This month may bring court rulings that establish sodomy as constitutionally protected and push ‘gay marriage’ one step higher on the ladder leaning up against the Tower of Babel.” People who happen to be same-sex oriented are disdainfully dismissed as all about “sodomy,” their desire for the “stability [and] contentment” of a committed relationship is mocked with belittling quotation marks (“gay marriage”), and it’s all put down as evil rebellion against God.
Olasky warns that “marriage is not merely a private matter [and that] faithfulness in marriage contributes security and stability to the family, neighborhood, church, school, and municipality, and that ripples through society.” Indeed it does. Just ask gay men and lesbians, and their parents, neighbors, their friends at church and their classmates. It’s what Olasky needs to do. Just ask! Listen! Stop crushing the spirits of gay people and their families – all of whom are closer to home than he allows.
So instead of “the pride game,” Olasky, Belz and Company: Aim to “do unto others as you want others to do unto you” – especially in what you rightly cherish to be the most tenderly intimate of human relationships: one’s marriage with one’s helpmate.