#6-June 13, 2016

Orlando shows we can’t

“Love the sinner, but hate the sin.”

by Dave Jackson

Two weeks ago, James Dobson, founder of Focus on the Family, published an article in WND.com entitled, “Protect Your Kids from Tyrant Obama.” He primarily railed against laws protecting transgender people, laws he claimed would allow men “dressed like a woman” in order to enter a woman’s bathroom to “watch women and girls in their stalls” or expose themselves. Then Dobson said, “If this had happened 100 years ago, someone might have been shot. Where is today’s manhood?”

In a sense, Omar Mateen responded to his call early Sunday morning, June 12, when he entered a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, and shot 49 individuals before dying himself.

How dare I suggest such a connection?

Not only is Dobson’s rant based on misinformation and used to incite unfounded fears about transgender people, it encourages and justifies hate for all LBGTQ people. Mateen may never have heard of James Dobson, and he allegedly declared his allegiance to ISIS just prior to the massacre. But he was undoubtedly aware of and encouraged by the prevailing rhetoric against LGBTQ people, much of it rekindled around the transgender bathroom issue primarily by people claiming to be Christians. But how ironic that Mateen would pick up the gauntlet, since Muslims—especially those espousing radical Islam—are also a group feared and even hated by many Christians.

Oh, I forgot, it’s not Muslims or LGBTQ people we hate. We’re supposed to love them while characterizing their sin on a magnitude so much greater than our own that it merits hate, but that inevitably evolves into hating them. This is because the distinction between who people are and hating what they do is almost universally impossible for human beings to maintain.

At least that distinction eludes me when I listen to a certain political candidate who preaches like the antichrist while claiming to be an evangelical Christian. We have a postage-stamp size picture of him on our bulletin board with a large pin deliberately jammed up his snout. See? I just can’t manage the separation, and it leads to hatred. And neither could James Dobson when he lauded shooting transgender people in the past and then implicitly challenged someone to do the same today. Hate always has a target, and that target always ends up on a person . . . or 49 of them, or all Muslims, or all immigrants, or all LGBTQ people . . . or all Christians (who believe a little differently than me).

I spend a chapter in my book, RISKING GRACE, Loving Our Gay Family and Friends Like Jesus, exploring why even God doesn’t throw the term “hate” around loosely. It’s true that there are things he hates—things that actually hurt other people—but the adage, love the sinner, but hate the sin, is nowhere found in the Bible, neither is anything like it prescribed for Christians . . . perhaps because any time hate is introduced into actual human relationships, people get hurt. And you can’t describe a challenge to shoot people—even a metaphorical challenge—as anything other than an encouragement to hate.

God’s instruction to us is to love unconditionally: Love our brothers and sisters, love our neighbor, and love even our enemies. The truth is, we don’t know how to love unconditionally, but we can begin by focusing on saying, “I love you,” period! No buts, no exceptions, no qualifiers, no conditions.

Uh . . . maybe I should take down that mutilated picture of you-know-who from my bulletin board.