What if your daughter is a lesbian?

Obama's silence on all gay issues has Seething Mom (who can be quite eloquent in her rage) writing a letter to the president and putting it bluntly. Nice to have a Supreme Court nominee with empathy. Now, what about you? Do you have empathy? What if one of your daughters is a lesbian? Could you bear to tell her she's a second class citizen?

Seething Mom also writes about church-based hate while summarizing an article in The Christian Century by David Gushee and on the book Crisis: 40 Stories Revealing the Personal, Social, and Religious Pain and Trauma of Growing Up Gay in America edited by Mitchell Gold and Mindy Drucker. Seething Mom's conclusion: Christians owe gays an apology. Gushee notes:

I must say I find it scandalous that the most physically and psychologically dangerous place to be (or even appear to be) gay or lesbian in America is in the most religiously conservative families, congregations and regions of this country. Most often these are Christian contexts. Many of the most disturbing stories in this volume come from the Bible Belt. This marks an appalling Christian moral failure.

Gushee also takes on the Hate the Sin, Love the Sinner: The love gets lost. We need to refine our ability to love. We can't compartmentalize hate.

Yes, churches have a First Amendment right to teach their beliefs. But religious hostility is at the heart of violence against gays. Many gays have been saying, fine, teach what you want in your own churches, but please keep those words out of the public debate. Gold takes the debate to the source. The problem is religion. We must change the religion. The greatest harm to gay kids happens within the church building and in Christian homes. Some church leaders may think their explanation of their interpretation of the bible's stance on gays is nuanced, full of that "love the sinner" stuff. But the teens in the pews, who aren't biblical scholars, don't hear it as nuanced. They hear it as hate.

Many Christians act as if opposing gays and lesbians is fundamental to the church's mission, which leads many gay and lesbian people to perceive Christianity as their mortal enemy. Is this how we want to be perceived?

Gays have good reason for that perception. The church's position is literally killing them.

I've followed Seething Mom for quite a while (and have linked to her in the past). She had been regular Catholic until she found out her son is gay. Love of son trumped religion, though it took a while to work through the shame her religion made her feel.