We talk about welcoming churches.

How about this truly welcoming lesbian couple?

Two women open their home to Katrina victims
[10-10-05]

It is, sadly, a common thing to hear how "gay marriage" would be a terrible threat to what some would define as the only "real" marriage.

But among the many stories of true goodness to come out of the mess of Katrina, there’s one about a lesbian couple in small-town Minnesota who have invited into their home a family from New Orleans – a mother, her mother, and her six children.

Dorothy, the grandmother, says that when her daughter told her they would be moving into a home with a same-sex couple, she replied "‘What’s that got to do with it?’ They were offering us their home. I was just glad they were saying we were welcome."

"Many self-professed Christians seem to think so," wrote Robert McElvaine, a history professor at Millsaps College in Jackson, Miss. "The devastation of New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina provided a sodden, gruesome opportunity for some who call themselves Christians to vent their distortions of the religion of Jesus. They did so by extending the old idea that a deadly storm like Katrina is an ‘act of God.’"
The Almighty's aim could have been better, according to the wife of a retired Southern Baptist minister."He should have destroyed the French Quarter," she said. Apparently, she wasn't kidding. I wouldn't be surprised if she and her spouse think "French Quarter" and "Sodom and Gomorrah" are synonyms.

McElvaine also quoted Michael Marcavage, head of Repent America. Marcavage suggested it wasn't a coincidence that Katrina clobbered the Crescent City on "the day that 125,000 homosexuals were going to be celebrating sin in the streets. We're calling it an act of God."

Repent America says it aims "to be in the full WILL OF GOD and to adhere entirely to the teachings of the Bible." Doubtless, Lefemine and the Rev. Alex McFarland of James Dobson’s Focus on the Family are sure they're doing God's work, too.

McFarland, according to McElvaine, said, "God did create a perfect world. But we humans introduced moral evil, sin, rebellion and disobedience. And after God judged human sin in Noah's flood, the weather patterns that we know today developed."

"Nutty as a fruitcake," my Presbyterian grandmother, God rest her soul, would have said of the "self-professed Christians" McElvaine quoted. "Just be thankful you’re not like them," Bobo would have added.

More than a few people who profess to be Bible-believing Christians are 14-karat bigots – on race and religion – especially in Red States like McElvaine’s Mississippi and my old Kentucky home. Racial and religious prejudice usually go together in the Bible Belt South, like pinto beans and ham hocks or belonging to the Sons of Confederate Veterans and voting Republican.

"So apparently all those heathen liberals, scientists, and foreigners who think that it's global warming that's changing our weather are wrong," McElvaine proposed. "God changed the weather patterns at the time of Noah's Flood. And Katrina was another in a series of instances of God's utilization of WMD --Weather of Mass Destruction – to wreak death and destruction on sinful humans."
Professor McElvaine dismissed "all such interpretations" as nonsense. "Killing innocent people to stop the killing of innocent people: That is the modus operandi of a terrorist, not of the God Jesus tells of in the Gospels," he said.

We Presbyterians – the Frozen Chosen – don’t do "amens." But I’ll add one to McElvaine’s musings.

"God’s gonna run from people like that," Roy used to say of folks who preach Christian love but practice a gospel of hate.