

I got the letter in below (which, of course, I share with permission). It’s from the woman whose letter I shared in She’s having an affair with her pastor’s wife.

Dear John, I just wanted to update you all on the fact that I ended the affair. It wasn’t easy and it was hard to let go. There were many tears, but I suppose we both knew that it wouldn’t last forever. I knew the more immediate it was, the better. Perhaps it could have gone smoother; these things never quite happen how they do in your head. I will be “mysteriously” leaving the church, and I won’t be in contact with her. I hope to give her time to think. I gave her the choice of being with me or being with her husband, but I gave her my support either way. We read the blog piece together and one of her last requests was to ask for your advice. She does love me and her husband, just in different ways. He is a lovely man. She is gay and married him because she was raised thinking homosexuality is a sin. She knew he was a kind man and that she would have security so took the chance she thought God had given to “correct” herself. To her, he is her best friend. Also, she doesn’t want to hurt her children, who are 17, 16 and 14. She expressed a desire to leave but she doesn’t know how to. We know that such a thing is damage limitation. I want what is best for her. I know that it may not be me. Please, we’d be grateful for your and your readers input again. God bless, [Anonymous]

I appreciate the pastor’s wife asking for my advice; somewhere along the line here I’ll give it. But for now I want to say only: Look. Look at the devastation that anti-gay “Christian” theology visits upon people’s lives. The woman who wrote me this letter is forced to live a lie about who she is. She’s now had to leave her church. Her lesbian paramour was so convinced that she was an abomination to God that she married and spent her life with a man she could never love in the way straight people love their spouses. Her husband married a lesbian. Their children have grown up with parents living as great and terrible a lie as any that can be told.

All this destruction, all this denial, all this deception, all this suppression, all this perversion of nature, all of this nightmare because straight people are so repulsed by gay people having sex that they twisted the words of their Holy Book in an attempt to legitimize the horrendous lie that Jesus Christ commands that gay people either magically become straight or spend their lives celibate.

And Christian pastors taught and taught and taught the vicious lie that homosexuality is a sin, because nothing puts people in the pews like a punishing God ever ready to distinguish between those living “righteous lives” and everybody else.

How wonderful to be straight, and by that fact alone deserve God’s favor!

Meanwhile, year in and year out, gay kids commit suicide at three times the rate of straight kids.

Thanks to all of you who write to tell me how “Christian” anti-gay bigotry is losing or has lost its power in your own life. I don’t know what I’d do without those testimonies, which so often feel to me like lifelines.

If you’re a Christian—especially a straight Christian—who knows it’s no sin to be gay, make a NALT video.