I’m a gay rights activist. I want to give $150,000 to someone who opposes gay marriage -- by Matt Stolhandske

As a gay man, I should hate Melissa and Aaron Klein.

They’re the Portland-based Christian bakery owners who, in 2013, refused to make a cake for a lesbian couple’s wedding. And despite their insistence that they’re only morally opposed to gay marriage, not gays, they make their disdain for equality quite clear: “I didn’t want to be a part of her marriage, which I think is wrong,” Aaron Klein recently said of one of the women he rebuked.

I’m also an evangelical Christian. I can’t understand why Klein or any other Christians twist the words of Jesus Christ to justify this behavior. To me, it’s a deeply harmful and embarrassing bastardization of our faith.

But I don’t hate the Kleins. In fact, I’m raising money to cover the $150,000 punitive fine they received from Oregon.

* * *

To be a gay Evangelical is to live what some may view as a paradox. I grew up in a loving, supportive Christian home and my faith eventually led me to a conservative Presbyterian seminary. I was yearning to study my faith more fully, but I was also deeply burdened by my same-sex attraction.

I believed it to be evil – the most revolting and damning of all sins. Looking back on those dark days, I now see the hate I had for myself. I was also secretly angry at everyone in the church who had tried to lead me to believe that something so fundamental to me was disgusting and wrong.

It wasn’t until I stepped away from the church, albeit briefly, that I was I able to find love and forgiveness for myself and the true heart of the Christian gospel; the love of a Father so stubbornly refusing to condemn that He would send His Son to die in my place. And that gospel has so deeply permeated my soul that I cannot find it in myself to hate the Kleins.

In the face of intolerance, I am yet called to love.

I know some Evangelicals are convinced that being gay is a grave moral sin. And I believe that they, and all people, should have the right to decide whether or not to condone religious marriage ceremonies for gay couples. But the Oregon case is not a question of religious marriage. This couple didn’t ask the Kleins for their blessing. They simply asked to pay for a cake.

Last I checked, a pastry is not moral approval of a religious ceremony.

As he was suffering an agonizing death on the cross, Jesus Christ forgave even those who slaughtered Him. He welcomed the poor, the indigent, the scourges of society, into his arms. It’s impossible to imagine the same Jesus who humbled Himself to the point of crawling on the floor to wash the feet of Judas, today standing in the Klein’s bakery and telling them not to bake cakes for gay weddings. Regardless of what you believe Jesus’s position would have been on gay marriage, the Bible makes it clear that the posture with which He would approach gay and lesbian couples is infused with love.

I know this is a lot to ask of Christians like Klein; to shower love on people like me who represent something she abhors. So I’m trying to live that challenge myself.

The Kleins say the $150,000 fee will bankrupt her family. I’m raising money to help offset that cost. I’ll send whatever we raise along to the Klein family with a message of love and peace. I don’t want them to suffer. But I am also pleading with them and other Christians to stop using the name of Jesus to explain to the LGBT community why we don’t deserve access to the civil rights afforded to heterosexuals through the legal institution of marriage.

I hope the Kleins will accept this sign of good will. After all, they must see that our goals here are the same – to live our lives as we see fit and be treated equally under the law.

Already I can hear the shouts from progressive and gay friends.

“You’re an apologist for homophobes,” they tell me. “How can you reward this anti-gay behavior? Who next will they choose not to serve? African Americans? Single mothers? Muslims? We cannot support this.” To them I say: this is what an olive branch looks like. I am not rewarding their behavior, but rather loving them in spite of it. It is time for these two communities, which both cite genuine love as our motivation, to put aside our prejudices and put down our pitchforks to clear the path for progress.

Why the surprise at learning how much evangelicals hate gay people?

There’s been a lot of chatter around the Internet lately from Christians who, thanks to the World Vision debacle, have been surprised to learn just how deeply the evangelical right despises gay people.

How can that possibly be a surprise to anyone? Where in “You’re going to hell because God deplores you!” does anyone see even a hint of affection or respect?

The evangelical right’s attitude toward gay people has always been about pure hatred. The Bible’s just an excuse (and a shallow one at that) for that hatred.

The difference between the Westboro Baptist hate-mongers and the Southern Baptist Convention (the largest Protestant body in the United States) has never been a difference of substance; it’s only been a difference in style.

Why does anyone think that so many of us out here have been fighting so hard for so long to bring a new and freaking better Christianity into the world? LGBT people getbeaten. They get killed. They get spat upon. They get run over. They get doused with gasoline and lit on fire. They get bullied so ferociously that they kill themselves rather than suffer another moment of it.

Those things don’t happen sometimes. They don’t happen every once in a while. They happen all the time, all over the world. And it’s all perpetrated in the name of Christianity. If you believe that the Bible teaches God condemns to hell all “unrepentant” gay people, then why wouldn’t you pound to death every gay person you saw? Doing so would be doing God’s work, by extending God’s will into the world. That’s what Christians are supposed to do.

We need a new Christianity. And we need it now. (I defined one, by the way. This shit’s not complicated.) And I think one of the first things we also need to do is be very clear about the fact that no one who believes that God finds gay people morally reprehensible is, in fact, a Christian.

They’re just not, okay? Saying “I’m a Christian, and gay people are going to hell” is like saying, “I’m a feminist, and women should remain pregnant and obey their husbands,” or “I’m not a racist, and white people should own black people.” One automatically cancels out the other.

No one gets to declare that they follow the Prince of Peace while at the same time declaring that gay people deserve to be burned alive forever. I don’t care who you are, or how respectable you pretend to be: that pig doesn’t fly. Ignorant bigotry is ignorant bigotry, whether it’s wearing a tie or not. I know it. You know it. And God sure as hell knows it.

This is a war, folks. It’s always been a war. It was a war when the evangelicals said the Bible supports slavery. It was a war when they said the Bible supports denying women the vote. And it’s a war when they say the Bible condemns homosexuality.

In a war people choose sides. They have to, because they realize that not doing so will only cause more death and suffering.

If you’re a Christian who is just now realizing that you are part of the problem if you don’t refute the Christian right with anywhere near the vigor with which they so horrendously persecute gay people, then hallelujah for World Vision’s ignorant cowardice.

The middle ground is where people fall and die. Stop standing there. Come to our side. Join us in fighting the good fight. We who know that the Bible does not condemn gay people will win this fight, because God is always on the side of what is right and just.

The sooner you join the winning team, the better for all. And most certainly the better for you, should you have to, say, answer to God tomorrow for why you waited.

And make a NALT video already.

BILLY GRAHAM'S SON: GAYS 'RECRUIT' CHILDREN THROUGH ADOPTION

After praising Russian President Vladimir Putin for his moral treatment of homosexuals as pedophiles, Franklin Graham — the evangelical spawn of anti-gay preacher Billy Graham — doubled-down on his love of Putin, adding that gays don't "adopt" children so much as "recruit" them; a distinction that he never actually explains.

During an interview with Tim Funk of The Charlotte Observer, Graham calls up the right-wing bogeymen of the president's lockstep march with the so-called "gay and lesbian agenda" and religious intolerance of gay people who dare label his "difference of opinion" as bigotry or homophobia.

In one delicious part of the interview, Funk asks Graham why he's opposed to enshrining Islamic Sharia law into the U.S. society when he supports enshrining Christian Biblical law into anti-marriage legislation. Graham, unsurprisingly, doesn't answer, only responding with "Well I believe the Bible from cover to cover. And I believe the Old Testament as well as the New Testament."

Would Rick Santorum Have Voted For Arizona's Anti-Gay 'Religious Freedom' Bill? 'Absolutely'

Rick Santorum sat down with the National Review after CPAC a few weeks ago to talk about Arizona's "religious freedom" bill that would have allowed the "sincerely held beliefs" of business owners to legally discriminate against homosexuals. When asked whether he would have signed the bill had Santorum been in Arizona Governor Jan Brewer's place, he emphatically said yes, surprising absolutely no one. Also, somehow Obamacare is the government infringing on people's freedom of religion. Also said during the interview, utterly lacking in self-awareness:

The trunk upon which all other branches of rights flow from is freedom of conscience. If you don't have freedom of conscience, then freedom of speech doesn't mean very much, freedom of assembly doesn't mean anything because you can't speak or do what you believe is right. And what we're seeing is the government increasingly encroaching upon this very sacrosanct area of our Constitution and using all sorts of excuses to suppress people's rights.