OK, I’m going to cheat a little here today. It took a loving Mother’s Day message earlier this month to get Mrs. Blue to even post a comment on this blog. And even though she writes a monthly column for a newspaper and blogs periodically, I’ll be damned if I can get her to do a guest post around here. Well, we had an interesting conversation recently that she was quite fired up about, so I’m going to re-channel and re-work as much as I can remember of what she said and write the guest post for her since she can’t free up the time to do so. My wife’s thoughts/words, but my fingers doing the typing. Don’t worry, she read, altered and approved this before I posted it.

The passion with which some Christian folks worry about children reared by same-sex couple amazes me. It also can make me really sick to my stomach. My husband shared with all of you not so long ago a little story about “Mrs. Eager” and now let me share my own.

Don’t get me wrong, by the way, I like Mrs. Eager. Sadly, I find that just about all we ever have to talk about is the Lord, and just as sadly, I find that she has a lot of the same focus on pointless issues as do so many other fundamentalist Christians (of which I consider myself a member, by the way, I just don’t go into lockstep with the “party line”).

So, I recently had a conversation with Mrs. Eager during which we were talking about the owners of a local bistro-style eatery. The owners are a couple. The are both men. They have a nearly two-year-old girl they adopted who is often at the cafe. Can you guess where this is going yet?

Mrs. Eager starts going into major hand-wringing mode about how it’s bad enough for two men to be together that way, but how could they be raising a little girl? What is this going to do to this little girl? What were they thinking?

Mind you, she’s nearly in tears. She’s all frothed up about how this little girl will be brought up in a godless home filled with immoral actions. How this little girl is going to be a lost soul most likely. How she’ll be damaged growing up.

It was all I could do to hold my tongue and not rip this woman a new exit passage for her bowel movements. I had that serious of a visceral reaction to her frantic panic about this child’s future. Mind you, it’s not because I agree that homosexual sex is right. I’ve had lots of gay friends, and I consider the cafe owners I’m talking about now to be friends-in-the-making. I cherish those friends and I don’t get any more bent out of shape about their sin than I do the sins of any other friends who have or continue to flaunt certain of God’s rules. Much like Jesus, I don’t simply hang around the believers; it’s the people who sin (and don’t have Jesus to clear up those sins) who need my company on the off chance a little Jesus might rub off on them.

What I don’t understand about Mrs. Eager or any of the other many, many Christians I know who I am 90% certain hold the same concerns is why they are so worried about a child like this. This gay couple is very warm, very open, very caring, very involved in the community, very responsible and just all around good people. Do they have any Jesus in their lives? I don’t know. But just like there are plenty of people who claim Christ and are horrible folks, there are many wonderful people who remain unsaved.

The point is, they are obviously great parents. And their little girl is clearly a happy and secure child. I’ve worked in social work, so I know the signs of f-ed up people. If these two guys are doing something nefarious in their lives aside from flouting the no-homosexual-sex rule, they have the best poker faces on the planet.

Mrs. Eager seems worried that this child won’t ever know Jesus. That may be, but I know an awful lot of people in heterosexual family structures who don’t know Jesus either…and most likely never will.

Mrs. Eager seems worried that this child will be exposed to deviant activities. In this day and age, are there really people who still believe that gays are any more overt in their intimacy around children than other sexually active adults? C’mon people, they aren’t having sex on the floor in front of her playpen.

Mrs. Eager told me she “weeps for that little girl.” Why? I know so many kids in heterosexual families who would kill to have parents as devoted and involved as these two guys. So many dysfunctional families in the world, so many abusive or uncaring parents, so many families in poverty…and Mrs. Eager is weeping over this kid? Why isn’t she weeping over the orphans left in the Sudan or the children who have to pick through garbage dumps in Central America or who have to drink disease-ridden water in India? Or how about weeping over homeless children in this country? Sexually abused children in this country? Children who aren’t “perfect” enough or young enough to be adopted by families who are in search of healthy babies only…and who languish in the family services systems in this nation that are, in many cases, so utterly screwed up?

Mrs. Eager is full of crap. I like her, but she is full…of…crap. This child is fortunate. It’s high time that we as Christians look at the REAL problems around us. If we are going to worry about people’s daily lives, let’s start with the abused and neglected, shall we? And let’s not worry about the soul of some little girl who, frankly, isn’t any more at risk of missing out on Jesus than any other child in this country…or this world. Let’s worry about everyone’s souls and reach out to people as humans.

And let’s stop singling out those whose choices we simply don’t agree with (and which don’t impact our lives) to weep over THEIR children.

(Image is of a print by Mark Ryden, titled “Weeping”)

(If you want to read any of Mrs. Blue’s other infrequent posts around these parts, go here)