If LGBTQ People Offend You Spiritually, Is Your Spirituality Healthy?
Or, the day I didn’t need a hospital chapel because my kid didn’t die.
The rainbow says, You’re welcome here, you’re wanted here, you belong here.
The other day, I read a provocative (okay, mean-spirited) article in The Telegraph about Christian parents in Scotland who claim they were so “offended” by temporary Pride Month rainbows in a hospital chapel that they felt barred from using the chapel. The same day, I read a story about Google canceling a scheduled San Francisco Pride event at the request of conservative-Christian Google workers who complained that drag queens “offend” them spiritually.
As I read, I thought about a certain conservative insistence that Christianity (and other religions) can or should exclude queer people as unclean, sinful, and offensive — at church and in the public square. I’m delighted that many Christian churches, including many in Scotland, fully affirm members of gender and sexual minorities, but to those Christians who insist on being spiritually exclusionary, I wish you would read this story about my own frightening experience with a child, a hospital, and a chapel.
