Menonomore, I’m confused. Was your original comment supposed to be in favor of 91����Ƶ hiring gay people? I would have never known.

Thank you, Magdalen. This is the very heart of the whole thing.

If I believe that God created me in his/her image and loves me as I am than I know that God also loves my child, neighbor, stranger because they were made in his/her image as well. Who am I to say how this image has to look like or that our image has to be identical?

Throughout history we have failed over and over to believe in God’s love for all humankind (his/her creation) and ostracized people of color, sexual orientation, physical disabilities, ability to have children and the list goes on.

God is love and we are called to love him/her and our neighbors just as ourselves.

If discussing the rights of gay people is destructive, let’s get to it! Smash it all down.

I’m also curious if you are able to look people in the eyes when you trivialize their human rights. Is it easy? Or just something for the Internet?

Amen.

Beautifully, sensitively written, Jasmine. Thank you.

The absurd disconnect is pretty hilarious sometimes.

Acceptance of gay people is not only a secular belief. It is a Mennonite belief. Gay people are not other people, they are us. While sexuality is not the entire identity of a person, it is an integral part. Straight people don’t have to cut off a part of their identity to be in the Mennonite church and gay people shouldn’t have to either.

Also, feeling unwelcome for one’s beliefs is a very different thing than feeling unwelcome for one’s actual identity. In other words: If you’re a racist and feel that your community doesn’t welcome those racist beliefs, that is not on a par with being a person of color who feels unwelcome because they happen to be black.

I guess that means we’re not ahead of the curve on relief and development, disaster relief, sustainability, peace building, an ethic of service and volunteerism, a genuinely Christ-centered faith/practice, very high participation rates in our mission/service/university institutions, charitable giving, a tradition of spiritual accountability, interfaith dialogue, diversity across nations/peoples/races, and vibrant and involved church communities, then. Funny, pretty much every relevant observation in my life suggests that we are ahead of the curve on most of those things. I suppose your comment is open to interpretation, perhaps we might be ahead of the curve on such things, but they are unimportant.

The attitude expressed in your post Becky, is one of a multitude of reasons for why I left the Mennonite church and never looked back. I was elated to see that 91����Ƶ of all places had finally entered into this discussion, but I fear that complete change will be a long way in coming. Thank you for reaffirming my belief that Mennonites, the LGBTQ community, and their allies are decidedly two-faced in their proclamation of love and equality. As long as you continue to silence and marginalize those of us whose sexual orientations and practices fall outside of what you deem acceptable the hate will continue. While you jump to your conclusions and scramble for your bible verses with which to condemn me, I hope that your eyes will somehow be opened. Equality for everyone – that is all I ask. I’m finished here.

You know…you may be on to something. Why shouldn’t we love people who do things we find despicable and provide them with a chance to make a living, feed themselves and their loved ones, and maybe change their hearts. Call me crazy…but isn’t that what Jesus would have done?

Well, let’s look at that those Greek words used for verse 10 that you want to wave around.
The first one is “pornos,” the second one is “arsenokoites,” and the third one is “malakos.” “Pornos” is sometimes translated to refer to male prostitutes, “arsenokoites” to refer to men who have sex with men, and “malakos” to refer to slave-traders (or traders of sex slaves). Whenever you translate a foreign language, you end up having to make assumptions as to what words can mean because one word can mean several different things (and that’s even if you’ve got the hang of the declension of nouns and conjugation of verbs). Given that prostitutes are often sex slaves, one could probably connect the dots of those three to refer to three different groups, making it something like this: “male prostitutes, the men who have sex with them, and the men who rent/sell them out.” One can even turn that toward describing pederasty (the practice of using boys, who were often slaves to get sexual pleasure) or temple prostitution, both of which had similar social structures.

The alternative is to take a broad translation of “pornos” to refer to all sexually immoral men, then get specific with men who have sex with men with “arsenokoites,” and then just use “malakos” to really generally refer to slave traders and move on. Yet, wording it that way doesn’t have the same organized flow that either of the two other possible translations have.