A Letter To True Christians: Stop the Hate in the GOP

Dear Christians,

My daughter is afraid that the world is going to end next year. As a matter of fact, so are most of my students. She has heard about Armageddon, the Mayan Calendar, and Nostradamus because that is all she and her friends talk about. It strikes me as strange that we wonder why our children have no attention spans when they are constantly bombarded with media messages about their mortality.

I am writing this letter to you because you have the ability to change this. You see, I believe that many of you have bought into a philosophy of hate that Jesus would strongly disagree with. I think that hate resides is some really crazy people who want to start Armageddon and are constantly scaring our children that if they cannot act right that they are going to hell.

Many of my liberal friends have told me that I believe in fairytales because I believe in the bible and I adhere to my belief in Christ as my Lord and savior. I say that the stories I was told about George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and Babe Ruth were fairytales too. “Truth is truth, no matter where you find it.” So I try to read everything and mine it for the reality that is there. That is why I chose to believe what I believe and no one will ever shake me from that conviction.

You see, more than I care about the miracles that Jesus did, I care about the life that he led and expects us to lead in him. So, I ask you how many of those 5000 people that Jesus fed with fishes and loaves do you think were gay? How many of them do you think were criminals? How many of them do you think were immigrants? All of them were sinners.

When Jesus went to wedding where he turned water to wine, what kind of party do you think that was?

I think that our mandate is to watch and live. I also think that by rejecting those who simply want to be human we become more like the religious zealots of the day and less like God. Now you have these zealots in your party who want to deny human beings their basic rights and I do not hear your voice. I do not see you turning over their proverbial money tables and telling them to stop defiling the house of the Lord.

Most of you vote for the Republican Party because of certain tenets that they espouse too that are basic to the Christian beliefs: marriage between a man and woman and no abortion being the main two. You say that you see signs of the “End Times”. You see, people believed in Jesus’ day that the end times were here too and here we are over 2000 years later. You remember that the Romans were in charge then. There were homosexuals, there were prostitutes, and people had abortions without much success. They also had people who wanted to start Armageddon.

This fringe you have in your party. This hateful base that believes that they have the right to take away what is basic to every human being: their right to be human is not of Christ, should not be a part of his body and you condone it. Jesus would not have. He called religious people like them “white washed tombs with dead men’s bones inside.” What an insult to Jewish person.

He would have been a member of the Green Party and we would have called the first church a hippie compound. He would have stood up to lies and injustice and inequality. He did not believe in stoning. He believed in forgiveness and second chances. He would have embraced the differences in people.

I always look at the story of Abraham and Lot as a way to peer into the mind of God. Remember that Abraham knew that destruction was coming to Sodom and Gomorrah and he kept bargaining with God about saving the cities if there were so many righteous men.  I think that had Abraham just asked God to not destroy the cities, he would have said yes.

Now people ask me, do you believe this story about Sodom and Gomorrah is absolutely true. I say to that that we know that there are two cities in the area where Sodom and Gomorrah were supposed to be that were destroyed at the same time. An earthquake destroyed them. We know this because archaeologists are digging there now. Do I believe that there were gay people there? Yes. Do I believe they were raping young men? Not so much. I believe that they were modern cities and someone needed to explain their destruction.

Here is what I do believe:

• I believe that Homosexual rights are a matter of Human rights. I believe that it is a Civil Rights issue and am ashamed of black churches and black people for not standing by for the rights of other humans.
• I believe that what a woman does with her body is between she, her doctor and her God.
• I believe that we have a responsibility to make sure that widows, orphans, and the poor are cared for.
• I believe when you hate you live outside of what Jesus taught.
• I believe President Barack Hussein Obama was born here and is a Christian because he has confessed to be so.
• I believe there are crazies in the Republican Party who honestly think they are called to start Armageddon.

My daughter is 11 and she has never, to my knowledge, seen the inside of a church. The reason is that I do not want her focusing on some end times and hate. I want her focusing on the people who need our love and support. I tried to teach here that when she was little and now she is grasping it as he enters her teens. I taught her everything I know about God, religions, and the bible and she chose to believe in Jesus and now she’s afraid of Him because you will not stand up to the hate. Stop living in the “End Times” and live where we are right now.