I read one of the most well written articles I have seen yet on the current events we are all talking about in one form or another. (Included below) Jen Engel has perfectly summed up my thoughts. I strongly commend her for being the kind of human, especially a women in a tough male dominated area of sports, where she has said what so many have been scared to state. She is receiving much negative feedback for voicing what should be glaringly obvious! I have great respect for someone that can truly stand up for a minority group and not just go the easy route with the status quo or by not saying anything at all.
A friend in Australia posted a piece on FB about why it’s silly to be against gay marriage. It led to one of her male friends saying gays should not be allowed same-sex marriage rights because the purpose for marriage is to beget children. I then stated that would mean if I can’t or choose not to have children then marriage rights for me would also be banned. (I also question what happens to a man or woman who gets married and then finds out either one is unable to produce children. Is that a cause for automatic divorce?)
I added that not every woman wants to, should or can have children, and don’t believe this should be a qualifying factor for having a life partner.
My final comment was regarding the thousands of children that are brought into this world where their biological parents for whatever reason do not tend to their needs. Perhaps this is due to too much pressure to have children, or became pregnant through horrific circumstances and needs another option. I’ve been pressured many times throughout my life where I’ve been asked what was wrong with me. Why wasn’t I married with kids?!?! It’s horrendous to hear people, especially in your own family, talk to you as though you are less than for choosing a different road. Instead of understanding a person’s decision to not have children, whether it be due to health issues, not feeling it’s the right time, or any other number of personal reasons, too many are quick to judge someone’s qualities by some ridiculous standard. Is it not a gift to be able to give children love and attention in other circumstances than to only bear your own? I’d have given my own life if it would have saved my best friend’s daughter from her brain tumor, and I’d give my life for my niece in a heartbeat – no questions asked!! Is that not the kind of love every child in this world deserves no matter who is willing to give that to them? So whether a biological parent either can’t or won’t take care of their children, are we really going to ignore someone that wants to give these children a home filled with love, food, shelter, clothing, etc simply because of their sexual orientation?
The man that was vocal about being against gay marriage didn’t further respond but two other men commented to commend my responses.
You know what I believe it comes down to? People’s fears! They don’t understand gays, lesbians, transgenders so they judge them as somehow being sub-human. They’re scared of them because they have only listened to the various media diatribes and have made their decisions based on whatever preposterous ideas put out there. (i.e – A gay couple raising a child will make the child gay.) Even if it were true, which I know it is not, does it even matter? Do we think if people truly had a “choice” that they would honestly choose to be persecuted, bullied, and suffer various abuses their entire life? Did we not learn our lessons with the hate that was/is focused towards the Native Americans, Blacks, Latinos, Middle Eastern, etc?
When do we finally step up and say, “Enough is enough! No more hate on my watch?”
I have sat down and heard the heart breaking stories my own gay friends have gone through. This is just with the ones I know!! How much more for the millions we don’t personally know.
Please, I plead with you, open your minds and hearts to learn and understand the hardships that others go through and why it’s important that ALL humans be given the same basic rights!
I completely agree with another friend who also spoke up this week in NC as she said she no longer wants to read or hear how any God/Higher Power hates anyone!
It’s time to realize life is only about L-O-V-E!!!!
Aren’t we supposed to be a country that prides itself on diversity, freedom/equal rights, and the pursuit of happiness for ALL? Isn’t this the reason that so many people bring their tired, poor, huddled masses to our borders with yearning to be free? How can anyone moan about their Constitutional Rights being violated when they are the same people gladly willing to remove another’s Constitutional Rights?
How specifically does it hurt anyone to give equal rights to another human being?
As Jen also states in her article below, how about we each follow what is best in our own lives and let others make their own decisions for what is best for them. (This is not saying that I believe gay people “choose” to be gay. On the contrary. What I am saying is that if they choose to marry, then let them have the right to make that decision.) How would you enjoy your state or country invading your private life and telling you who you can and can’t marry? Most people have enough of a time dealing with their parents and relatives bombarding them with their opinions.
Or could it be that people worry that the gay community will portray the sanctity of marriage with more respect than the heterosexuals?
I really loved what my cousin’s son had to say, and absolutely agreed with him!! “Marriage is nothing more than the state recognizing you as a couple. We don’t need the state/country to define us.” (I love this young man!!)
However, in order to obtain the same benefits that heterosexual couples receive, for this reason marriage equality is important to my friends and I!
I hope in time this is something people will recognize is important to a group of our citizens and we can grant them this privilege.
At the end of the day let’s remember what is important. It’s as simple as the Golden Rule: “Treat others the way you want to be treated.”
“Don’t ever let somebody tell you you can’t do something. Not even me. All right? You got a dream, you gotta protect it. People can’t do somethin’ themselves, they wanna tell you you can’t do it. If you want somethin’, go get it. Period.”
~ Will Smith in “The Pursuit of Happyness” movie
Thanks for reading and feel free to share your thoughts.
Jen’s article starts below:
This is probably a generational thing, but, for the life of me, I cannot figure out why we are talking about whether homosexual Americans deserve equal protection under the law.
They do, in my opinion.
And poll after poll show an overwhelming majority of people of my generation and younger agree.
Yet, this is all we seem to be talking about lately — a fact at least somewhat attributable to this being an election year. President Obama said he believes gay marriage should be legal, a day after citizens of North Carolina made it unconstitutional. This debate even has infiltrated sports, which, on their best days (and somewhat ironically), provide insulation from the “us vs. them” attitudes that pervade so much of society nowadays.
Sports’ inclusion in the gay-rights debate comes courtesy of Ron Brown, the Nebraska assistant football coach who was preaching hell fire and damnation in March while speaking against a proposed ordinance that would safeguard Omahans from being fired for their sexual orientation.
“The question I have for you all is, like Pontius Pilate, what are you going to do with Jesus?” Brown asked an assembled crowd that day in Omaha, his words carrying more weight because of where he coaches and the import that program has in the state. “Ultimately, if you don’t have a relationship with Him, and you don’t have a Bible-believing mentality, really anything goes . . . At the end of the days, it matters what God thinks most.”
What I also fervently believe is a column is a conversation. And nine months into my relationship with you, my FoxSports.com reader, it is long past time I answered a question that came after almost every Tim Tebow column I wrote.
Yes, I am a Bible-believing Christian.
And I wholeheartedly agree it matters most what God thinks.
What I cannot quite wrap my brain around in this whole gay-rights debate is why so many feel so comfortable speaking for Jesus — how He feels, whom He hates, why He thinks the log in their eye is OK and the speck in a brother’s is unforgivable, why He believes they are right and anybody who disagrees is wrong, preaching the sanctity of marriage while on their fourth wife, using Jesus as a defense for every vile and mean thing that flies from their mouths.
If the question is WWJD, I find no Biblical justification for the answer, “demonize, villainize and condemn to hell anybody who does not believe, or look or act as you do.”
This is not to say I believe Ron Brown deserves to be fired for what he said in Omaha or what he believes about gays and their rights. Just as Ozzie Guillen has a right to be an idiot, so does Ron Brown to his version of the Bible, however bigoted some might find his interpretation. What I do believe is Ron Brown, and really all of us, would be wise to embrace a basic tenet of sports.
Coach your own team.
This is not Biblical, of course. Jesus did not say this; at least, not exactly. Yet so much of His teachings had this theme of focusing on getting your own life right with God. He exhorted only he who is without sin to cast the first stone. He was constantly turning people’s judgment back on them in the Gospels, confronting them with their own fallibility and biases.
My favorite hymn growing up was “They Will Know We Are Christians by Our Love.” And I often wonder how well they know us now — certainly not by our love.
What do we tell people about Jesus when we condemn them to hell in His name? Or perform the lingual gymnastics of loving the sinner and hating the sin in His name? Or do anything except that which He commanded again and again, which was to love one another as we love ourselves?
“One of my questions for people like this who clearly see themselves on the side of the truth is, ‘What do you lose in this?’ ” said my friend, pastor Daniel, when I called him posing this question. “What does Ron Brown stand to lose by this ordinance being enacted?”
I know what the argument has been over the years — that giving gay Americans equal protection under the law condones what some people of faith believe to be a sin, that gay marriage threatens their own marriage. None of which feels true to me; nor does this idea that treating one another with decency and kindness somehow diminishes my faith. It actually feels like a basic tenet.
So why do we do this, the faithful among us being the most incendiary about enforcing our views of Scripture on others?
“The problem is, everybody picks and chooses the verses they like and the ones that they don’t. And rather than being honest about that and having an honest conversation, they say, ‘I take everything in the Bible seriously and literally,’ ” pastor Daniel explained. “What I would say to them is I will take you through the Levitical code, none of which you do. But you are going to pull this one verse out and the 26 others you ignore because they are culturally irrelevant to you.”
Bible cherry-picking has been used throughout history to justify things we now universally view as vile — slavery, discrimination against blacks and women, condemnation of interracial marriage. It is likely my 3-year-old daughter will one day say to me, “Mom, why on earth were y’all debating that?”
I do not have a good answer.
“This is going to sound terribly cynical. For a lot of people, a lot of religious people, one of the most important things is to want to be right, and sometimes our desire to be right and on the correct side of issues and history — to be on the winning team, to use a sports term — that is so important it trumps all rationality for people,” pastor Daniel said. “And I just think that blinds people, and it makes them unable to question themselves or be self critical or hold what they think with a little bit of humility.”
Humility requires Ron Brown and the rest of us to coach our own teams and let Jesus speak for himself when it comes to the sins of others.
Empowered Journeys 