Reflections on Albert Hung’s Sermon “The Sinner’s Friend”
By Juan Zung
Sometimes being right isn’t really the point. Sometimes being right isn’t even right.
In the case of gay rights, the fight is already over. Americans, ever devoted to the principles of freedom and opportunity, have reached a tipping point. Larger systems will take time to work out the details. But we see, in pure numbers, even among evangelical and conservative young people, the change has already happened. People accept that LGBT Americans deserve the same rights as straight ones. [1] This, I believe, is the right position.
The problem, and it’s a big problem, is that a lot of people that we still love still aren’t there yet, and might never get there. They still hold what many of us consider to be wrong and bigoted ideas.
I’m actually lucky. My parents have a “live-and-let-live” approach to other peoples’ love lives. They’d never interfere with who’s marrying who. It’s not a moral position, but, as they’ve told me, they just don’t want to be responsible for someone else’s future.
But other folks, like my spouse, have overtly anti-gay activist parents. Parents that lament her pro-gay positions and have engaged her in emotional debates on the politics, theology and morality of homosexuality. It’s easy for me to just write them off.