Anti-Bullying Post 4: Most Americans Beleive Churches Contribute to Gay Suicide

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(The image to the right is Dan Savage, gay rights campaigner.)

This is from CNN's Belief Blog:

Two out of three Americans believe gay people commit suicide at  least partly because of messages coming out of churches and other places of  worship, a survey released Thursday found.

More than four out of 10 Americans say the message coming out of churches  about gay people is negative, and about the same number say those messages  contribute "a lot" to negative perceptions of gay and lesbian people.

Catholics were the most critical of their own churches' messages on  homosexuality, while white evangelical Christians gave their churches the  highest grades, the survey found.

The Public Religion Research Institute asked 1,017 Americans their views  on religion and homosexuality between October 14 and 17, in the wake of a highly publicized rash of suicides by gay people.

Gay rights campaigner Dan Savage said the idea that churches send out an  anti-gay message "totally jibes with my experience and that of millions of  other gay and lesbian people."

He cited Joel Burns, a Forth Worth, Texas, city councilman whose  emotional tale of being bullied as a young gay man went viral on the internet.

"He remembers being told to go home and commit suicide and that he was  going to hell," Savage said, adding that the source of such attitudes "wasn't  in algebra."

Leaders of the Christian right "have redefined Christianity so that it is  about being anti-gay," he said.

And he cited other poll findings that suggest more Americans than ever  before define themselves as having no religion.

Have we "redefined Christianity so that it is about being anti-gay?"  I think we have at some point.  In fact, I know that I'm sometimes really careful of the crowd I'm with and couch my words carefully so that I'm not dismissed as "being anti-gay" without someone getting to know me and getting to see how Scripture, and reason, and tradition, and experience shape by understanding of this issue and a Christian response.  I hope that I'm not that easily classified and not that easily dismissed.  I hope that, as we deal with issues of bullying homosexuals I will be found on the side of compassion and love and that nothing I have said or done would have contributed to that bullying.

I'm not sure I can say that same for some of my brothers and sisters in Christ.