"Too Perfect a Tool for the Devil to Use to Lead Us Astray"

Jen, who writes at et tu?, never ceases to amaze me with her clear understanding - and, even better, clear explanations - of the Catholic faith. I have learned more about the Faith I grew up in by reading her blog than I have from most of my time in the pew. Really.

Today, she once again touches on a part of her conversion. She discusses how her decision to become a Christian might have affected her friendship with people who live a homosexual lifestyle. (Some day, I think her blog posts will make a really wonderful book.)

Here is a bit of the beginning of her post on the topic:

Back in what I suppose you could call "Phase I" of my conversion, when I had been looking into Christianity for a while and, to my great surprise, found it more and more compelling, there was one concern that weighed heavily on my mind: what would this mean for my relationships with my gay friends?

Three of my husband and my very dearest friends and many of our acquaintances are gay, and live gay lifestyles. And though I didn't know many of the details, I knew enough about Christianity to be pretty sure that if I were to become a Christian I would be part of a belief system that said that there was something wrong with the homosexual lifestyle. It gave me pause. On the one hand, so much seemed true about this religion's teachings. It seemed on so many different levels that I was on the right path here. But I just didn't see how I was ever going to make sense of the teaching that homosexuality is wrong. The gay couples I knew didn't seem to be doing anything all that different than the straight couples I knew. It didn't feel right to say that Julie and Tom's relationship was somehow superior to David and Mark's when the sole difference between them was that Julie and Tom are of opposite genders and had a piece of paper from the state saying they were "married". Who cares?

Something about the whole thing felt wrong. It seemed that what I would essentially need to say to my gay friends based on my newfound belief system (as I understood it) was, "As a person who is attracted to the opposite sex, I get a sort of 'get out of sin free' card as soon as I commit to sexual monogamy through marriage. Sex is a gift God gave us for pleasure...but only heterosexuals can indulge in that pleasure." Based on that view, it made heterosexuals sound like some kind of chosen people. If God's law is such that sexual acts between two people of the same gender are always wrong, even if those same acts might be committed by a heterosexual couple with no problem, it kind of makes it feel like God has something against people who are attracted to the same gender.

All of this nagged at me for months, and was a real sticking point for me in moving forward with Christianity

The road to her understanding of how Christians see this (and especially Catholics) was not a straight one, but reading about how she came to this understanding is eye-opening.

(And, Jen, thanks for the links you put in there, too.)

Christine