Apparently, it’s Christians Behaving Badly Thursday here on the blog.

First up, we have the Kansas teacher who misgendered one of her transgender students, was suspended, and then was rewarded with a $95,000 ruling against the district. And then she had the audacity to blame Jesus:

“Ms. Ricard is a Christian and holds sincere religious beliefs consistent with the traditional Christian and biblical understanding of the human person and biological sex,” the lawsuit said. “Ms. Ricard believes that God created human beings as either male or female, that this sex is fixed in each person from the moment of conception, and that it cannot be changed, regardless of an individual person’s feelings, desires, or preferences.”

Apparently, holding “traditional Christian” beliefs is code for treating people like shit. No one asked you to change your theology, ma’am, although your theology does deny modern science as well as fail to read scripture in light of the context it was written. But what does it hurt you to call someone what they want to be called?

Also, Ms. Ricard, love your neighbor as yourself is a traditional Christian and biblical understanding, but apparently you don’t like that one.

Secondly, there’s this:

“The Indiana Supreme Court ruled Wednesday that religious freedom rights protect the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Indianapolis from being sued by a teacher who was fired from his job at a Catholic high school for being in a same-sex marriage.
Joshua Payne-Elliott argued in his lawsuit that archdiocese leaders wrongfully forced his firing in 2019 from his job of 13 years as a world language and social studies teacher at Cathedral High School in Indianapolis by mandating that all Catholic schools under its purview enforce a morality clause barring employees from entering into same-sex marriages.”

Traditionalists are going to continue to see their churches hemorrhage people until their theology catches up with the science. Families will continue to be forced to choose between their church and their gay kid, and increasingly will choose their kid (which is the correct answer, both from a human standpoint AND from a Jesus standpoint).

By the way, approximately 1 in 6 Zoomers (AKA Gen Z) identify as LGBTQIA+, which means that the average family will have at least one queer member in a few years. So you either end up with that LGBTQIA+ family member getting pushed out of the church, or the entire family deciding they’re going to support their kid and leave en masse. The math is not in the favor of the “traditional understanding.”

I have every confidence that in the end, when the church finally reads the scriptures through the lens of love rather than the lens of legalism and tribalism, it will finally come to the conclusion that like with geocentrism, the crusades, the Doctrine of Discover, slavery, patriarchy and so many other ways it was wrong, it was wrong on the issue of LGBTQIA+ inclusion and affirmation. I just wonder if there will be any people left in the church by the time it realizes that.