Check your facts

It's a shame that Chris Mooney didn't enlist a fact checker for his column "How Christian is gay bashing?" [10/23/98, YH]. Had he done more research before tarring all Christians as actual or potential gay-bashers, he would have known that "Christianity" and "homophobia" are not actually synonymous.

Mooney calls for "waffling in liberal Christian congregations" to cease. In fact, many "liberal" and "conservative" Christian leaders have stood up to denounce both Matthew Shepard's killing and the sinful attitudes behind such acts. Rev. Jesse Jackson has joined Rev. Troy Perry, the founder of the predominantly gay Metropolitan Community Church, in a campaign to enlist 200,000 American religious leaders to support national anti-hate crimes legislation. A myriad of ministers have published syndicated columns denouncing Christian homophobia. At Yale, 14 religious organizations and leaders paid for a full-page ad in The Yale Daily News to condemn Shepard's murder.

If Mooney had confined himself to expressing outrage at the Fred Phelpses of the world, we could have agreed with him wholeheartedly. But from the tone of his column, it seems that a deeper issue is at stake: the intellectual and moral legitimacy of Christianity itself, or indeed of any faith. Mooney ridicules certain Christian groups for pretending to draw a distinction between "loving the sinner and hating the sin." ("How gracious," he sarcastically quips.) Yet he himself makes no distinction between the appalling behavior of some fringe groups and the Christian faith in general. After asserting that "gay bashing in the name of God has become legitimate--even mainstream," he concedes that "pegging all Christians as anti-gay would be premature--but not by much." How gracious.

As Christians at Yale, we are here to tell Chris Mooney that there is hope.

--Sarah Morice, ES '99, Sarah Hammond, CC '99, and Ruddy Wang, SM '02, members of Salt of the Earth, the Student Christian Movement at Yale

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