Jesus must be spinning in his grave

Wait, what? Oh, right.

Anyway, a baptist minister has come out and said that the gays might not be so bad after all.

Religion's only real commodity, after all, is its moral authority. Lose that, and we lose our credibility. Lose credibility, and we might as well close up shop.

It's happened to Christianity before, most famously when we dug in our heels over Galileo's challenge to the biblical view that the Earth, rather than the sun, was at the center of our solar system. You know the story. Galileo was persecuted for what turned out to be incontrovertibly true. For many, especially in the scientific community, Christianity never recovered.

This time, Christianity is in danger of squandering its moral authority by continuing its pattern of discrimination against gays and lesbians in the face of mounting scientific evidence that sexual orientation has little or nothing to do with choice. To the contrary, whether sexual orientation arises as a result of the mother's hormones or the child's brain structure or DNA, it is almost certainly an accident of birth. The point is this: Without choice, there can be no moral culpability.

I'm not a big fan of the word choice he used in calling it an "accident of birth", but the message is clear: stop calling homosexuals "sinner" for simply being themselves. That's a message I'd be glad to see all religions, everywhere, adopt.

UPDATE: I should point out that, whether homosexuality is a choice or not, I'd like to see the Church kindly shut the hell up about it. So what if they're choosing to do something you're not fond of? It's their choice. It has literally zero impact on the lives of religious people. So what's the big fuckin' deal, Church? Just shut up about it and judge the gays from afar, quietly. The rest of us will be over here, treating human beings like human beings.

Oh, and no more anti-marriage amendments please. Same reasoning as above.