God's Love is Big Tent for Gay Rights

I remember only bits and pieces from my college education and I’m not sure why certain things have stuck. I can still recite the definition of “paradox” learned in an upper level lit class. And I remember vividly one thing I picked up in my Biblical Interpretation class at Concordia Lutheran College in Ann Arbor: The first principle is “Let scripture interpret scripture.”
This is as much a warning as a principle: Don’t go pulling out little bits of scripture to use as building blocks until you’ve studied the entire blueprint. It’s good advice for our politicians as well as our religious leaders. Unfortunately, our high-profile preachers, with help from the media, have made it difficult.
Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney, now a candidate for his party’s presidential nomination, seemed to understand this in 1994 when he was running for the U.S. Senate. Writing from a perspective that saw our great democracy as inclusive, he said, “If we are to achieve the goals we share, we must make equality for gays and lesbians a mainstream concern.” He knew then, his oldest son Tagg Romney said in a recent New York Times article, “… it was very wrong to discriminate.
But now, in the heat of a tough primary campaign and dogged by conservative religious leaders and their media publicists, Gov. Romney has been forced to wear the approved mask when facing the gay rights issue. And he doesn’t stand alone. His dilemma is no different than that of others running for public office. The conservative branch of Christianity is very adept at making the media believe their view is God’s view.
I don’t expect the media to know that first principle of Biblical Interpretation, but you’d think these theologians, many of them proudly sporting the title “Reverend Doctor” before their names, would have this basic knowledge. Jesus, for example, once told a Canaanite woman he “was sent only to the lost sheep of Israel,” but today’s Christian leaders don’t run around saying, “Well, golly, I guess we shouldn’t be Christians after all.” They understand in the larger context of scripture that Jesus came to make God’s presence real for all people. That larger context, put simply, is God’s Love. It’s a big tent, a universal tent, with room for all God’s children, and certainly not limited by sexual orientation.