Kidnapping Is Not A Christian Value

By Rev. Susan Russell, Huffington Post

There’s been much ado this week about the call by anti-gay activist Bryan Fischer for an “underground railroad” that would effectively abduct children from same-sex parents. According to The New Civil Rights Movement, Fischer tweeted that he believes it’s his duty to Christ to steal the children of gay people and same-sex couples, noting that “we need an Underground Railroad to deliver innocent children from same-sex households,” and concluding, “We must obey God’s law, not man’s law,” at the end of the video posted by his organization, the American Family Association.

And because statements like that get headlines like this one in the Toronto Tribune — “US pastor advocates kidnapping children from same-sex homes” — people like me feel the need to step up and say things like this: Kidnapping is not a traditional Christian value!

Clearing that up is not only in the service of defending same-sex families, who, as long as the so-called Defense of Marriage Act exists, already deal with not being equally protected by the equal protection guaranteed all Americans by their Constitution, and who now have to cope with the so-called American Family Association turning their children into fair game in the culture wars. It is also about recognizing that if people like me don’t step up and set the record straight when a radical like Bryan Fischer hijacks the Good News of God’s inclusive love and turns it into a weapon to hurt rather than a message to heal, then we have no room to complain when more and more people think they know enough about being a Christian not to want to be one. And who can blame them? If the only thing I knew about Christians was what I read in The New Civil Rights Movement or the Toronto Tribune, I wouldn’t want to be one, either!

Read the whole story at Huffington Post

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Image courtesy of Susan Russell