Who is it ok to hate?

I’m no longer a Christian, see Lost and How I went to theology school and lost my faith
Also the causes a CEO supports will absolutely have an impact on their CEO-ing and their company’s work environment.
They have a huge responsibility to so many people (employees, customers, random people who see their company’s ads, interacting with staff in other businesses, etc), many of whom will be queer. The same if they were racist, or sexist, or etc.

Yesterday Brendan Eich, the new CEO of Mozilla was forced out, primarily because he’d made donations to opposing same sex marriage. This last week I saw so much vitriol about him in my twitter feed from generally-mild-mannered individuals. Would the causes he supports really have that much affect on his CEO-ing, or Mozilla’s work environment, over strong organisational support of the LGBT community?

A few weeks ago Fred Phelps of the Westboro Baptist god-hates-fags church died. This man is almost-singlehandedly responsible for my and many others’ inability to be neutral on these issues, and I’ve never even met him. I’ve always known that whatever it is I believe it is not that. And so I sought out books like Torn, and blogs like Registered Runaway.

Just last week World Vision US decided they would change their hiring practices to include gay Christians in same-sex marriages. World Vision US claimed they didn’t want to take a stance on an issue that isn’t clear in the wider church. They emphasised they weren’t being forced to.

The next day because of massive outcry and calls to boycott they reversed the decision. They were forced to give in to the ‘christian agenda’ instead. And they folded.

I cried when I read these posts.

Clearly in the secular world it is there is list of people and groups whom it’s allowed, deserved, or even completely invisible to hate.

Equally clearly, in a conservative Christian context there a similar but occasionally opposing list.

For those of us (Christians who affirm same-sex marriage) it all seems insane and can’t we all just get along?

Yet I’ve recently realised that I too have my own list.¹

I don’t know what the correct response is. I don’t think there should be space for ‘Yeah, but it’s ok to hate this person/group because they’re whatever’. I need to remember the people we’re disagreeing with are still human, still worth having grace for. Still redeemable.

I’ll leave you with this.