With Christians like Zachary
Bailes, who needs secularists? Bailes’ blog
post [1] on the Associated Baptist Press website Jan.16 posed the question,
“What if Jesus were gay?”
In setting the table for the question, Bailes conflated Christianity with “war, torture, terror, slavery and annihilation against Jews, Muslims, black Africans, American Indians and others.” Having established Christianity’s guilt for so much over the centuries, Bailes turned to lamenting that Christians who don’t embrace homosexuality do not live out Jesus’ command to “Love your neighbor.”
The post, which has already received over 500 likes on Facebook, went even further, suggesting that to not accept homosexuality means to not love Jesus. Bailes even changed Jesus’ famous words in Matthew to the following: “When I was hungry, you fed me; when I was naked, you clothed me; when I was the homosexual, you welcomed me.”
What Bailes does here is nothing new, but it is disheartening to see it coming from a Christian website. Bailes, who holds a master’s degree in Divinity, doesn’t seem to understand basic hermeneutics and Biblical doctrine. What he did in this blog post was to use his own cultural lens to reinterpret words from a different era to suit his cultural bias.
Bailes employed another tired liberal talking point, equating homosexuals with “persecuted” peoples of the past, such as African-Americans. But African-Americans were actually denied their personal and civil liberties in American history, and to suggest that gays, who have never been enslaved, who can marry any person of the opposite sex they like, who can own property, vote, associate freely, sit in the front of the bus, and drink from the same water fountains as everyone else cheapens the real historical suffering for American blacks. Civil rights are not at issue. What Bailes and the gay lobby want is for the culture at large to embrace the gay lifestyle.
Therein lies the crux of the post. Bailes appropriated some of what Jesus said on unrelated issues to calling for Christians to side with liberal politics and theology at the expense of what Christians have plainly understood the Biblical text to say for millennia.
Misusing Jesus’ words in a political gabit is shameful. Bailes should stick to spreading Jesus’ actual words, instead of what he wishes Jesus had said.