Sigh. You know, most of my writing for the last few weeks has been in the form of interviews with LGBTQ people – teenagers, their families, and folks who run or volunteer at agencies to help them.
I interviewed a 16-year-old trans kid and his mom, for example, who literally fled Florida to live in a New York State homeless shelter. The mom spent her last penny getting out of Florida to get away from mocking "Christians" like the one you're writing about. Only instead of mocking on Twitter, these people wield enough power in real life that they made the boy's life hell. (I did not intend a spiritual pun there, but you can read one into it if you want to.)
Mom and son had just arrived in New York when I first talked to them, and I hooked them up with somebody else I had interviewed who happened to be living nearby, a transgender woman running for political office.
She drove over the moment she heard where they were, hugged them, took them out to dinner, and introduced them to people who could support them.
The mother cried when she talked to me about that. For the first time in months, she felt safe and supported instead of mocked for taking care of her son the best way she knew how.
I think we could probably shoehorn that tale into a New Testament story about Jesus, don't you?
Only Jesus's self-declared followers today (the ones who mockingly drove that little family out of state) sure wouldn't look like the Samaritan who stopped to help a traveler in need. They'd look like a different group of people in that story, people Jesus was criticizing for being unloving and unneighborly.
LGBTQ people living in the United States right now are scared. It's not just mocking we're scared of; things are getting a lot worse than that. Oh, things are fine in lots of places, but travel anywhere where self-declared Jesus followers weild political power, and you'll find suffering LGBTQ kids and their families.
I don't know whether this is some sort of temporary mass psychosis, an out-of-control moral panic, or what, but it sure does look like a religion founded on love has turned itself on its head.
Oh, and that boy in the homeless shelter? He's going to school, doing his homework in the single room he shares with his mom, and — believe it or not — neither threatening nor harming anyone. Because he's a kid. Who deserves to live without being continuously mocked and worse.
