What would you lose?

Not even a baker, just someone ranting on about how bakers who refuse cakes to gay couples are persecuted. So I asked her, what would you lose if you baked the cake? And she answered,

my fellowship with God.

She would be separated from Him and grieve the Holy Spirit. She would be demoralised. She would have sold out. In marrying, the gay couple are flaunting their sin and she must not approve or participate.

Wow. It is a poor thing to gain the World and lose my soul- no sanction or promise will beat that. She is like the brothers in 4 Maccabees. But gay couples are infinitely dangerous to her, carrying the risk of separation from God, because they flaunt their sin in other ways than by marrying- by handholding, or a peck on the cheek, perhaps. Imagine if she thought, well, that’s not so bad, really. Even such a thought might grieve the Holy Spirit.

And yet adulterous couples, marrying for a second time where the first spouse is still alive, do not bother her at all. She simply imagines that there is an excuse for such a marriage.

The thing about Eliazar and the seven brothers, though, is that they were subject to law. In Jesus, God is revealed as Love. However, she has an answer for this: love for the gay couple means proclaiming their sin, and shunning them as long as they persist with it. She “Loves” them by doing what anyone else would call hate.

She has an answer for everything. She is hermetically sealed from the Gospel. Her God is the God of Hell, delighting in torturing creation and calling it Love- made in her image, in fact.

I worried that she would be constantly needing to proclaim the sins of the people she meets, to avoid condoning that sin and betraying God; but only the gay couple, and only their sinful union, merit such condemnation. Everything else might have a perfectly innocent explanation.

This Slate article has a measured response to the ridiculous pizza restaurant which would not hold a gay wedding reception. And Gronda the Republican reassures me that not all US Christians are like that: I am just tired of these far right Christians giving other Christians like myself a bad name. I can’t help but believe that the my God That I know wants to welcome everyone into his arms including the poor, the sick, the sinner, the downtrodden, etc. no matter whether they are gay, from another religious background, the immigrant population, white or people of color or whatever. These far right peoples who call themselves Christians and spout their hate and bigotry are blocking this path and are doing real harm.I lock my bike to the bike-stands in the town centre, and affecting insouciance, take my wig from my saddle-bags, take off my helmet, mop my sweaty brow, and put my wig on.

Jayne thinks I should go into the toilets thirty yards away to do this. Someone might see me wigless and abuse me.

I have met a few arseholes who would abuse a complete stranger merely because I am trans. I will not fearfully constrain my life like this in case one is walking past Bright House and happens to notice me.

I met a man who had been walking through the station when someone psychotic leapt on his back and drew a razor blade across his forehead. He could have been blinded. Thereafter he was terrified to leave his house.