Sullivan and Evangelicals

Even Andrew Sullivan eventually gets it -- if you rub his nose in it.

I ran across this post on the fly sometime in the last couple of days and didn't have time to comment then. What did strike me was the overwhelming arrogance of the evangelical position on homosexuality, together with the cognitive dissonance of this comment from one of Sullivan's correspondents:

I’m for gay marriage, I’m for gay rights, I have many gay friends and bristle when my Christianist friends mention “They were gay, but really nice” or “He is gay, but seems like a great guy”, as if homosexuality is somehow incompatible with any other virtue.

But I cannot keep from standing on the ground to which my morals are attached. And so, on some distant day, once my friend has realized I still love and care for him, I will also have to tell him what my religious beliefs dictate concerning homosexual behavior. To stay silent would be to live as morally compromised a lie as those who choose not to come out of the closet.

If that's not a WTF? moment, I don't know what is.

Sullivan's comment:

But I understand that some evangelicals really do want to maintain legal proscriptions against gay relationships, while affecting tolerance in everyday life. Does that make them "bigots"? Not all of them, I'd say. Just reasons for us gay people to explain ourselves a lot better.

Yes, it does make them bigots -- just because your religion justifies your bigotry doesn't make it right. As for explaining myself? Sorry, I don't owe anyone an explanation -- I think, rather, they owe me an explanation for their attempts to cut me out of full citizenship.

At any rate, after hearing back from a few people, Sullian got it, and even admits to finding evangelism unspeakably rude.

Lest you think that's a shallow reaction, consider this: what kind of arrogance does it take to assume that someone whose beliefs do not match yours has not spent time and careful thought arriving at those beliefs? (Y'know, I wasn't raised a Pagan. I got here under my own power, and it was not easy, because real Paganism is hard. It's really, really hard.) How demeaning is it to assume that you are right and they are necessarily wrong simply because they don't agree with your beliefs? And how completely lacking in respect, love, and understanding is it? I think evangelicals are wrong, but I don't go around telling them about it unless they come at me first. I figure they've taken their own path to get there, even if they took a wrong turn, and maybe, if they have good examples in front of them, they'll eventually figure it out.