Love your (homosexual) neighbor as yourself

Micah Stefan Dagaerag

Honest Engagements

In any divisive social issue, the enterprise of thinking truthfully and honestly can often be
rather costly. Eventually one realizes that both sides have contributed to the problem and
that there can be no real solution without first calling both to account, which is no enviable
task, whatever the conflict at hand. In effect, you risk losing friends on both sides for what
you see and know to be the truth. “A pox on both your houses!” Mercutio gravely cried to
both Montague and Capulet houses.

June is LGBT Pride Month, and it’s no secret that I come from, and still hold to, a religious
tradition that cannot endorse or support most of the political platforms of the LGBT
movement. I can back legislation that protects them from anti-LGBT discrimination and
violence, for instance, but cannot, on religious grounds, advocate for gay marriage. As that
famous quote attributed to Martin Luther goes, “My conscience is captive to the Word of
God.” There are, of course, other churches and theologians who have formulated a biblical
argument in favor of the full spectrum of LGBT rights, but that’s for a different article
altogether.

That is why it remains a welcome surprise that through the years I still do have close and
enjoyable friendships with my gay friends, despite even more than a few frank and honest
conversations about my faith and their respective gender identities. I imagine it’s difficult
both ways, for me to understand them and for them to understand me. But I am grateful for
every opportunity to learn more with each person that comes along, although admittedly
I’ve had misfires along the way.

My interest here is to gently remind my brothers and sisters in the more self-consciously
conservative and traditional parts of the Christian church that LGBT Pride Month presents
to us a God-given opportunity to reflect and reform as to how we show the love of Christ to
our LGBT neighbors. I suspect that how we treat those in the LGBT movement, with whom
bear fundamental disagreements, can actually be a meaningful indicator of the overall
spiritual health of our congregations.

We evangelicals and conservatives are generally clueless and ill-equipped as to how to be

nice and sincere with homosexuals. In too many churches, gays are silently expected and
made to feel like they have to wave a flag of surrender first before they can feel truly
welcomed and received by the congregation.

No doubt, this is in no small measure due to all the verses in the Bible that
straightforwardly depict homosexuality as sinful. But harshness particularly towards gays
in church simply has no place in an assembly of sinners who themselves were forgiven by a
loving and merciful God for things no less sinful. Churches (and Christians) that develop a
specific hard-heartedness and mean-spiritedness towards homosexuals are a symptom, not
of too much Bible, but of too little.

“He who is forgiven little, loves little,” Jesus said (Luke 7:48). We who have been forgiven
much should be able to love much in turn – to love the Lord our God with all heart, mind,
soul, and strength as well as to love our neighbor as ourselves (Mark 12:30-31). And that
includes genuinely wanting to get to know and understand our gay neighbors, to offer
unconditional friendship and goodwill to them, and to speak up for them whenever they
are in the right.

It’s a bridge that is challenging to build and sustain between two immovable positions, but
it must be done. In Dumaguete, both LGBT and conservative communities are continuing to
grow. But it shouldn’t have to become a culturally divided city, as is often the case right
now in the United States. We will learn to be better together. And for traditional Christians,
this is the month to start thinking how.