Dan Savage Starts the NALT Christians Project

From the project's website:

The purpose of the NALT Christians Project is to give LGBT-affirming Christians a means of proclaiming to the world—and especially to young gay people—their belief and conviction that there is nothing anti-biblical or at all inherently sinful about being gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender.

NALT Christians Project Co-founder John Shore, progressive Christian writer and activist:

For much too long now, anti-LGBT Christians have used the Bible and the pulpit to bully, malign, and shame LGBT people. And not enough LGBT-affirming Christians have stood up to boldly and clearly say how terribly wrong that is—to say that’s not what Christianity is, that the Bible doesn’t condemn homosexuality, that ”Christian” leaders like Tony Perkins and Maggie Gallagher do not speak for us.

It’s time for us true NALT Christians—the ones who genuinely aren’t like that—to speak up and be heard, to affirm LGBT people as loudly and clearly as anti-LGBT Christians condemn them. We must stand up for young LGBT people, who are so vulnerable to feeling worthless and shunned. We must eradicate the culturally inculcated moral underpinnings that serves to support such bullying. And we must bring to the fore a renewed Christianity that, instead of standing for anti-gay bigotry, stands for the integrity and love that Jesus Christ himself so radically stood for.

Wayne Besen and Evan Hurst of Truth Wins Out are also co-founders of the project. 

Dan's It Gets Better Project was and remains wildly successful, receiving thousands of video contributions from around the world, including many prominent people in politics, sports, and the arts. It will be interesting to see if this new project generates a similar response among "nice" heterosexual Christians.

Watch more videos or get your straight friends and family to contribute one here.


P.S. - Your Head Trucker devoted much study to the topic over a period of many years, and cannot conclude otherwise than that the Bible does indeed condemn homosexuality in both the old and the new testaments. People who say different, even so-called experts, are playing fast and loose with the facts of history, culture, and language, in my considered opinion.

But the Bible - which of course is not one single book but a collection, a library, of 66 different books (73 if you're Catholic) written by nearly that many different writers over a period of more than a thousand years - the Bible in one place or another also commands genocide, forced marriage, the execution of promiscuous girls and rebellious boys, group stonings, and slavery - not to mention the utter subjection of women to their husbands. The Bible is a product of the straight men who wrote it for other straight men to read - which is to say, a product of the solidly patriarchal, virulently homophobic Hebraic culture in which its various parts were written.

You remember those sickening pictures of Iranian teenagers being publicly hanged for being homosexual?  Well, that's just what the ancient Hebrew society that produced the Bible was like.

The Bible is simply wrong about homosexuality, as it is about those other things I just mentioned, and more besides. Yet in other places, the Bible contains some of the highest, best thoughts and precepts of mankind in its long search for the meaning of life and the divine nature. The fact is, the Bible - rather like the Internet, it occurs to me - is a very mixed bag, which must be read with care, and interpreted with caution, based upon deep and wide learning.

But of course, the vast majority of folks won't take the time or trouble to do that.  In the meantime, here's all you really need to know from the Bible - presented as a public service by your Head Trucker:

He hath shewed thee, O man, what is good; and what doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?

 

Therefore all things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them: for this is the law and the prophets.

 

Love thy neighbor as thyself. 

 

See also the second half of the 25th chapter of Matthew for your quick-and-easy roadmap to Heaven.  Free gate pass included. 

You're welcome.