Ninety-nine percent of the time I am vehemently criticizing anything Senator Trent Lott (R-MS) says. But I have to agree with this statement that he made on November 8, 1996 to a conservative columnist.
“I’m a firm believer in feeding people their own words back to them, when it’s appropriate.”
It’s time to serve dinner to my fundamentalist friends. On the menu is one of their signature phrases with a generous portion of hypocrisy on the side.
Over the years we’ve heard ad nauseum from them the oft-quoted statement ‘Love the sinner but hate the sin’. They have wielded it like a baton to beat down GLBT people with. Only one problem: Nowhere in the Bible do those words appear together in scripture in either the Old or New Testaments.
I’ll repeat this once again: ‘Love the sinner but hate the sin’ does not appear as a single verse ANYWHERE in the Bible.
Now it is true that God tells us in John 15:12 to love one another as he has loved us. It's also true that God says He hates sin. But unfortunately Fundamentalists have taken these two separate scriptures and melded them into an attack weapon that in their convoluted thought process gives them carte blanche to denigrate gays, abortion doctors, women and anyone else who wants equal rights with impunity.
When you call them out for their Jurassic attitudes against gays, for example, it becomes their all purpose defense for the hatred, bigotry and discrimination they liberally heap upon them. They’ll reply that their actions are okay in "God's eyes." They are just following a literal interpretation of the Bible by denying gay people their constitutional rights to equal and fair treatment under the law and are only showing their displeasure with the sin. Fundamentalists aren't "hating" the sinner when they claim that gays are sick and need healing, should wear warning labels or undergo a godly fumigation. They’re just simply fulfilling their ‘Christian’ mission by showing they need to be "healed."
Yeah right. And Reverend Stanley Kirk Burrell is gonna make a comeback touring as a gangsta rapper.
Fundamentalists have conveniently forgotten that anyone who professes to be a Christian is supposed to forgive the sin, not ‘hate’ it. It is mandatory that you must forgive the sins of any other sinner – including the GLBT peeps you hate. If they can’t or won’t do it and start uttering that ‘love the sinner but hate the sin’ pseudo argument, they will find themselves being condemned by the very God that they claim they love and serve.
Albert Einstein stated that “You cannot simultaneously say that you love someone and use your power against them." Explain to me how you can say with a straight face (pardon the pun) from the pulpit that you ‘love’ someone but demonize them, pass constitutional amendments to deny them the ability to get married, fight tooth and nail to strip away their civil rights protections, openly discriminate against them and work to pressure companies to revoke their domestic partner benefits? That’s not ‘Christian’, that’s just plain evil. You know something? When The Rapture does happen some of you folks are gonna be in for a big surprise in terms of who gets Left Behind.
Got room for dessert? Let me get that Devil’s food cake for you. Bon appetit.