Leonard Pitts Addresses North Carolina Anti-Gay Amendment: Trying to Hide in the Bible

Leonard Pitts is, as usual, clear and passionate in his defense of reason and justice in his statement about what underlies the drive to enshrine anti-gay language in the North Carolina state constitution.  Pitts' essays is appearing today at various papers around the U.S. that syndicate his columns.  This version is from the Miami Herald, and is entitled "Don't Blame the Bible."

Pitts notes that North Carolina already has a law prohibiting same-sex marriage.  And so the purpose of the constitutional amendment is to "double down on exclusion."  Those promoting this discriminatory amendment are, Pitts proposing, seeking to "hide inside the bible."

As he states, 

Sometimes, people hide inside the Bible. 

That is, they use the Christian holy book as authority and excuse for biases that have nothing to do with God. They did this when women sought to vote and when African Americans sought freedom. 

They are doing it now, as gay men and lesbians seek the right to be married.

And as he concludes,

Many in North Carolina — many around the country — are swimming against the tide of human freedom and blaming God for it. Again, this is not a new thing. We saw it back when God was for segregation and against women’s suffrage. 

How convenient it must be to lay your own narrowness and smallness off on God, to accept no responsibility for the niggardly nature of your own soul. Vines’ video is a welcome, overdue and eloquent rebuke of the moral and intellectual laziness of throwing rocks, then hiding inside Scripture. It is a reminder, too. 

You don’t go to the Bible to hide. You go there to seek. 

How convenient it must be to lay your own narrowness and smallness off on God, to accept no responsibility for the niggardly nature of your own soul.  I appreciate Pitts for putting his finger on one of the most troubling dynamics of all in the anti-gay hatred fomented by some people of faith today; that anti-gay hatred allows people who are ignorant, cruel, tone-deaf to compassion and justice, to imagine that their souls are large and free.

When their souls are, in fact, constricted by the ignorance, hate, cruelty, lack of compassion, and injustice they want to dish out in the name of God to a targeted minority they've constructed as despised others.  When good Christian people can laugh and clap about beating children who show any signs of deviating from rigid gender norms, or boast that laws targeting the gay community will protect the "Caucasian race" and its values, something has gone wildly wrong with the definition of Christianity in the public square.

It has departed from anything at all that Jesus proclaimed, stood for, or embodied, and anything at all that is central to the gospel proclaimed by the Christian churches when they are faithful to Jesus.