Facebook Conversations I Regret Starting: Part 13049

Once upon a time, before I had this blog, I would have very few avenues to vent my frustrations or openly express my opinions. Unfortunately this meant that occasionally I would lose all self control on Facebook and respond to one of the inane posts that comes across my feed daily from my extremely conservative Christian friends.

What follows is an example I decided to keep.

Back in March, an extreme group of evangelists set up on the SDSU campus with a lot of crazy signs.

The one that sparked controversy was "homosexuality is a sin" and the Gay Straight Alliance held a very successful counter-protest.

One of my friends however, I'll call him Steve, was saying a lot of negative things about the way the GSA responded and about their beliefs.

A couple days later Steve posted the following to Facebook and I lost my cool.  (Steve's comments in red, mine in orange).

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Most of the conversation speaks for itself, but I want to draw special attention to Steve's last comment:

It is possible that gays were in fact oppressed in ancient Israel, much as they are today. (I mean ostracized, hated, etc.) -- The problem is, I can't see how [Lev 20:13] oppresses them.  They don't have a right to have whatever kind of sexual activity they want to.  If homosexuals are oppressed, then so are zoophiles or people who commit incest. [emphasis added]

They don't have a right to have whatever kind of sexual activity they want to? Maybe not, but damn right they can have whatever kind of consensual sexual relationship that they want.  Animals don't consent to bestiality and children aren't consenting adults when it comes to pedophilic incest. There simply is no comparison here. I get so frustrated when I have to deal with these arguments again and again.

But this approach was novel in its stupidity.  It doesn't say put homosexuals to death, only to kill them if they have gay sex?  It boggles the mind to realize people can compartmentalize that way.

Other people jumped onto the thread at this point, and I largely abandoned the conversation since I knew it wasn't going to get better.  Still, I kept this snippet, ironically, as a reality check for when I need to remember what I used to sound like when I was a Christian of that sort.  I was not far from where Steve is today, and reminding myself of that helps keep me honest.