Dan Cathy’s lifestyle.

A week and a half after the infamous Chick-fil-A Day, this quote by Rick Warren is still making it’s rounds on the internets.

Our culture has accepted two huge lies. The first is that if you disagree with someone’s lifestyle, you must fear them or hate them. The second is that to love someone means you agree with everything they believe or do. Both are nonsense. You don’t have to compromise convictions to be compassionate.

It’s been a couple of years since I actually held the conviction that loving a person of the same gender is wrong. It’s been years since I grabbed by giant, red-lettered KJV Bible, and decided that I was going to read the whole thing straight through as if I’d never read it before. Years since I poured my heart into learning how to divorce what I’d been taught in Christian Fundamentalism from what the Bible actually said. Years since I read the article by Walter Wink that finally convinced me that affirming the one lesbian friend I had at the time was a position completely compatible with my faith in Jesus.

Now, with a fresh perspective on the Bible, I look at this Chick-fil-A fiasco and I only have one conviction and that is this: Dan Cathy, and those supporting him, are not being like Christ in this area. Not at all. He is living a lifestyle of fear and hatred, putting vast amounts of money into hurting others just to appease his own conscious.

Jesus did not life a lifestyle of hatred.

My convictions are that donating money to hate groups that spread lies about and take away the rights of the friends that I love is the farthest thing from the compassion of Christ. I don’t hate Dan Cathy, and I certainly don’t fear him. But I refuse to compromise my convictions by giving him my money so he can use it to hurt my friends with his lifestyle of hate.

That’s the lifestyle I oppose.