My philosophy is rather like that of Jesus Christ: Love the sinners. It doesn’t mean to confirm what’s wrong, but to love them in our heart, to understand them, to relate to them, to find out why they’re like that, to find out their good points (including and especially good points they have that we may lack ourselves!) and also their defective or lacking points, what troubles them, help heal their resentments (and homosexuals have mountains of resentment and anger!). Only then are we qualified and indeed capable of helping them to overcome whatever ails them. And, in fact, we may learn something from them, and surely we’ll expand and deepen our heart. God approached me way back in 1975, when I was sent to gay bars to fundraise, and asked me to figure out what’s with these people. It’s taken the better part of a lifetime to understand them.
Let me note here, in saying “Love the sinners”–in fact that means all of us. But we may evaluate and categorize a certain segment of the population, with a certain culture and conviction, as “sinners”, and we may do that subconsciously even. Thus I’m suggesting a viewpoint more like that of cultural anthropology, where we take interest in a culture or sub-culture, and through interfacing with that group and their people, we come to understand them deeply, and identify their core values.
Moreover, this applies not only to the gay community, but also to other religious faiths and denominations, to smokers and people who drink, to subcultures like “Mafia”, even to ones we find antithetical — be that Republicans, or the Woke Mob. These are all people!
Frankly, even the term “they” (them, these, that type, etc.) is depersonalizing, dehumanizing, alienating. We build a barrier or boundary: “Beyond that I shall not tread!” “We are human; they are not.” So pardon me for using that word myself. It shows a kind of ingrained or inbred consciousness of segregation and categorizing that we have inherited.
And I feel that, now, after these fifty years, I have finally built that bridge.
williamstoertz 