Most of what “traditional values” asks of people is pretty hard. All the infidelity and divorce and premarital sex and bad parenting and whatnot take place because people actually want to do the things traditional values is telling them not to do. And the same goes for most of the rest of the Christian recipe. Acting in a charitable and forgiving manner all the time is hard. Loving your enemies is hard. Turning the other cheek is hard. Homosexuality is totally different. For a small minority of the population, of course, the injunction “don’t have sex with other men!” (or, as the case may be, other women) is painfully difficult to live up to. But for the vast majority of people this is really, really easy to do. Campaigns against gay rights, gay people, and gay sex thus have a lot of the structural elements of other forms of crusading against sexual excess or immorality, but they’re not really asking most people to do anything other than become self-righteous about their pre-existing preferences.

Bottom line, it’s really easy to campaign against a sin you don’t struggle with. In other words, its really easy to be hard or even non-gracious towards the homosexual when you do not struggle with that sin. The same goes for other sins like alcoholism or co-dependency.

The next time we get the temptation to look down upon someone because of their “heinous” sin perhaps we should consider how difficult it is for us to do something as “easy” as loving our neighbor on a consistent basis. Maybe when we see our own major shortcomings and constant battle with sin we will realize two things:

1. We need to be more gracious and loving towards those who have major sin struggles in areas we do not. And we should try to understand their struggle as much as possible rather than involving ourselves with sin crusades.
2. We sin because we want to sin. It is in our nature to sin. Sin feels good to us. And for this reason we should shudder at the fact that God still loves us (a sinner) as much as he love the “other sinners” too.

Image credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/alexandranicolephotography/ / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

I understand that just because someone is in prison (whether really guilty or not) this does not mean they are any less human than I am. Their life is no less precious or important than mine. More importantly God cares for me no more than he cares for them.

Hearing that news lets me know that I have a lot more growing to do in the area of human dignity.

How do you feel about the news that inmates will get the H1N1 vaccination before the general public?

Let the chastisement being. Fire away in the comments below.

The image: http://www.flickr.com/photos/stillburning/ / CC BY-NC 2.0