“You can be a Christian and have fellowship with people that you would not marry and that God does not want you to marry and that if you should marry you would be marrying outside of the will of God. Why can’t you see that? Why can’t good, solid, substantial people who do not have any prejudices and do not have any hatred and do not have any bitterness see this? Let’s approach this thing in a Christian way. Let’s make this battle a Christian battle.”
As Gov. Phil Bryant signed into law the country’s most oppressive anti-LGBT bill (giving North Carolina another second-place finish this week), I couldn’t help but think of this speech. It came from a 1960 sermon by the Rev. Bob Jones, the founder of Bob Jones University and one of the forerunners of the “religious liberty” argument. Back then, however, the issue wasn’t sexual orientation; rather, Jones and his ilk decried the attempts by the courts and the federal government to alter the clearly “biblical” system of segregation. Jones, along with fellow fundamentalists like Jerry Falwell, helped create the language and climate that gave rise to the culture wars and allowed hate-groups like the American Family Association and Family Research Council to prosper in this state, culminating in bills like HB-1523.
When I go to conferences or visit home, one of the questions I always get asked is how I like living in Oxford. I usually hem and haw a bit because I know, deep down, that they really just want me to wax rhapsodically about the quaintness of small-town Southern life. And, sure, I love my friends and colleagues and can’t argue that we are blessed with some great restaurants. But the continued actions of Bryant and his bigoted ilk in the legislature, fed by the social conservatism of most of the state’s residents, are what mark life in Mississippi for me (it almost seems fitting now that my first semester here was when homophobic slurs disrupted a “The Laramie Project” performance, which went virtually unpunished).
That all of this is being done in the name of “protecting” Christianity depresses me even more. Because the Bible is pretty clear that God doesn’t take kindly to religious persecution. For example, the real sin of Sodom, as the prophet Ezekiel made clear, was its inhospitality: “[Sodom] lived with her daughters in the lap of luxury—proud, gluttonous and lazy. They ignored the oppressed and the poor.” And for those who never graduated from those pocket New Testaments that the proselytizers hand out, Jesus uses the parable of the Good Samaritan to teach his affluent tutee that wealth, piety and privilege do not excuse believers from the duty to help their neighbors, even the ones most separate from their way of life.
The ultimate irony, of course, is that in their efforts to “protect” the rights of Mississippians to discriminate against LGBT people, Bryant and the state Legislature actually accomplished what they assume is the top priority on the “gay agenda:” they’ve turned Mississippi into a state of Sodomites.
Bryan Kessler is a doctoral candidate from Birmingham, Alabama.
