The "gay agenda"

Sometimes, people write me and raise curiosity in my mind. The writer says that he and his wife “moved away from Methodism because of the ‘gay agenda’.” While we are probably better off, I have thought about what he could mean by the “gay agenda”?
 
Is he is insinuating that by welcoming queer people, we are inviting in sexual predators, or a cabal that will groom children? While I hesitate to name this “stupidity,” I will say that he is fearfully misinformed. If this is his assumption, wonder how he got to it? What, in his homophobia is scaring or disgusting him?
 
No doubt there are sexual predators. Most of the ones most recently named in the news are priests, coaches, boy scout leaders and other supposedly respectable folks. To broadly cast homosexuals as predators is to not know much about or know many homosexuals. 
 
I have known queer people for most of my life. Most everyone I have known is gentle in spirit, and quiet about their intimate life details. Hopefully, homosexuals are becoming more comfortable in their own bodies with the widening of minds and the opening up of opportunities. 
 
Even though there are haters who would make them scapegoats for all the ills of this broken culture, they are finding allies who will be more vocal in outlining what the “gay agenda” is. I am not gay, but here is what this ally thinks.
 
Gay people are just people. Just like you and me they want acceptance of their personhood. They want to be out of closets and free to be themselves. They want what we want – loving community, families, access to all the spaces and places of a free world. 
 
Sadly, there are those intent on denying people their humanity for their sexual differences. It’s apparent that the same people who want to disenfranchise queer people want to do the same to Black people and women. It’s a trying time for people who are not white heterosexual men. The world is on the cusp of an earthquake, when disenfranchised people begin to raise their voices against the haters. 
 
I wrote a quote on the back of a receipt from Outback. I don’t know who said it or where I read or heard it, but it states a truth of the human condition that is being lived among us today. It is “the lust to be mean to other human beings.”  Lots of meanness happening now. We feel license to threaten to “burn you into a pile of ashes” and call names that are even hard to reprint. How does meanness serve us? 
 
Today we watched a film, “Jesus Revolution,” a story based on a great spiritual awakening that took place among young people from about 1968 to 1972. The Jesus Freaks found that being high on Jesus was life-giving and life-affirming. We could use a little Jesus Revolution right this very minute. It is Christ who welcomes the outcast, the marginalized, the persecuted, the people who have been cast away by the world, those who seek wholeness and new life. A lot of people have majored in the minors of the Bible to justify their exclusion of queer people, Blacks, and women. 
 
The “gay agenda” is the human agenda – freedom to love who you love, live without fear, and find joy in companionship. We all want that. The church leads the parade in a lot of these discussions. Not that many years ago, in Methodism there was a split to exclude Black People. Now the split is over homosexuality. When the major message of the Bible is to love one another as God has loved us, the witness we too often bear is to a “lust to be mean to other human beings.” Spiritual awakening is a hope of this new day. Love, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control are what life in the Spirit of the Living God looks like. There is no law against such things. 
 
A final word, to any of my LGBTQ+ friends, in my social circle, in the church and in my family, who happen to read this column. Know I love you. Know I am your ally. I cannot know and speak your experience, like I cannot know the Black experience. But I can speak into what I perceive as hate. I can give voice to what it means to include all people, and that means ALL, people. Until the welcome mat is out for everybody equally, I will not be quiet. 
 
Lib Campbell is a retired Methodist pastor, retreat leader, columnist and host of the blogsite www.avirtualchurch.com. She can be contacted at libcam05@gmail.com