Yuck, I’m Sick

I’ve got the flu or a cold or something.  What a drag.  I think I know why though.  I drank some wine on Saturday and it used to be that whenever I drank I’d catch a cold.  I think it lowers my resistance somehow.  That’ll teach me.  I don’t usually drink ever, at all.  I know Jesus drank wine and all that, but the doctrine for my particular religious organization is opposed to drinking.  Since I’m not really into it, I usually don’t imbibe.  Anyway, I won’t be drinking anymore.  It’s just not worth it.  I don’t get sick to my stomach or anything, it just seems to lower my resistance to colds and stuff.

I wasn’t sure if I was going to write much tonight, but then I read Margaret’s entry and I got to thinking about gay marriage.  Years ago I was asked to speak at my “best friend’s” marriage.  He was/is a gay guy and had a long term partner.  I was very new back at church and didn’t agree with or really understand the church’s view on homosexuality.  I still felt the Bible was a sort of antiquated guide book written by men.  I asked my Pastor if I could speak at the wedding and he allowed it.  (Would I have done it if he had said no?  I’m not sure… probably.)  Anyway, I gave a good “speech,” if I do say so myself.  Many people commented on it. The subject of the speech was commitment.  As I was leaning into my backslide back then, it was ironic since the night before I gave the speech I had been on the net having cybersex with other men, but that is how sin is, isn’t it?  Deceitful.  Anyway, I gave the speech, treating my two friends as I would any married couple.

A few years after that marriage, my daughter got married and we, of course, invited my two friends to the wedding,  They asked me if they could dance together.  I said, “Of course,” and my daughter agreed.  It just didn’t seem wrong or strange to us because these two had a relationship that was long term and loving, more than many married (for real) people we know.  They were thrilled and grateful and although many of my church friends were there, nobody really had a problem with it.

Then one day, my friend confided something in me.  He said that he and his spouse were thinking of sharing their bed with another friend for a three-way.  He wanted to do it, but wondered what I thought about it… would it be a mistake in his marriage, etc.  I told him that it would be adultery.  He was flabbergasted.  He said that the people in whom he had confided had given him many different thoughts about it, but the adultery thing was not one of them.  Well, I told him, if it was indeed a marriage then the threesome would indeed be adultery.  They had the threesome anyway. 

Since that time, many adulterous and promiscuous things have gone on in this man’s life, to the point where he was the founder and host of a strangers-get-naked-and-get-off Saturday night gay club that began on the net.  Our friendship has faltered and I haven’t talked to him in months (prior to that we’d had a few brief emails and conversations but really hadn’t gotten together for maybe a year or so).  I love my friend, I really do.  He is fun and dear to me.  Homosexuality aside, he was rather a bad influence though as he has a very biting sense of humor and encouraged me to do the same at a cost to people’s feelings.  Also, he was a big complainer, not in a whiney way, but in a pointing things out way.  Unfortunately, that also influenced me, so my paradigm was often very negative when it didn’t need to be.  Much was fun with him, but he was so bad for me.  When I quit the job at the company where we worked together, we didn’t get together quite as much.  After awhile it was nil.   When we did get together, he would be talking about his gay club (and it IS a great example of web building, community building, and organization, but it is SO opposed to what I know from the Bible) and I would be talking about my church website (that I created and maintain).  It was just too weird.  I didn’t want to judge, but how could I listen to all he was doing without feeling horrible fear for his welfare in the final days.  Yet if I talked to him about Jesus and God and sin, it only served to make him more turned-off to religion because, believe me, these gay guys get the ugliest example of evangelism you could imagine.  So, I didn’t know what to do and ended up just avoided getting together with him. *Sigh*  If I thought I could influence him for the better, I would have continued the relationship, but I knew he was influencing me for the worse and I knew it would not change.  Better to lose anything than to lose my relationship with Jesus!

Anyway, what I was trying to get to before I meandered off course, was that I realized that THEY didn’t really take their marriage seriously, so why should I?  And, of course, being familiar with many gay people in relationships that they see as marriage, I see much adultery.  I’m sure there are some that are faithful, but my broad sampling of gay people (and, again, I know many), it seems the penchant for mulitple partners is greater than for straight married people (at least in my life) and that these partners don’t see it as cheating the same way heterosexuals do. 

I realize that God abhors homosexuals according to the Bible.  He also detests lying lips and arrogant eyes, hands that shed innocent blood and three or four other things quoted on Proverbs that have nothing to do with homosexuality (if I remember right).  We don’t say that liars or arrogant people can’t marry… I don’t know.  I don’t know that disallowing homosexuals to marry under the law will help build up families.  I don’t know if it will strengthen the family system.  I would be much more inclined to disallow ANY homosexual Christian clergy and to not allow homosexual marriage in the church.  Since when has it really mattered what the government said, anyway?  (When it comes to religion I mean.)  But I’m not FOR gay marriage either.  I mean if I, alone, had to make the decision, I’d say no just based on the Bible alone.  But I don’t have passionate feelings about it the way I am passionately, logically, and spiritually opposed to abortion.  I do know, however, that any time I’ve felt some skeptisism about something the Bible has commanded or forbidden, something has later come up to show me why it made sense.  Because the hit rate for good decisions based upon the Bible has been so high for me, I sort of have to blindly trust this one and, if given a chance to vote for or against, I would vote against gay marriage.  Today, I would have to excuse myself from standing up at a union ceremony for a gay friend as hard as that might be.