Christian couple disagrees, but preaches inclusion for gays

POTTSTOWN — For both Tony and Peggy Campolo, outspoken Christians wrestling to reconcile the teachings of their faith with the realities of being gay in today’s America, their journey began in high school.

Thursday, it brought them to Pottstown and to Congregation Mercy and Truth on Keim Street, where they shared their insights at a forum sponsored by the Pottstown Human Relations Commission.

They are insights drawn from reading and re-reading of scripture, from personal and scholarly experience and from the painful experiences of their many gay friends who find themselves ostracized and hated simply for who they are.

For Tony Campolo, it was a gay boy named Roger who, while attending West Philadelphia High School, would never shower with the other boys because he feared what they would do.

Roger had good reason.

“I was not there the day five boys pulled him into the shower, shoved him into a corner and, with this quivering, pleading boy in front of them, urinated all over him,” Campolo recalled quietly.

Roger went to bed at 10 p.m. that night. At 2 a.m., he got up, went down to the basement and hung himself.

“If I was a Christian, I would have done for Roger what Jesus would have done for Roger, been his friend,” he said. “But I was afraid to be Roger’s friend because then they would start talking about me.”

Peggy Campolo had a similar experience and now speaks with shame about her fear to stand up for her friend who was taunted and teased. “I didn’t find out until later that I needed God to give me courage,” she said.

Calling herself “the carrier pigeon from the misunderstood to the misinformed,” she warned against people who use the Bible to justify hatred and division.

“The Bible has been misinterpreted and misused to prosecute homosexual people,” she said.

Ironically, the couple differs in their interpretation of the several Biblical passages most often used to justify the argument that homosexuality and lesbianism are against the book’s teachings.

Tony Campolo, a Baptist pastor who described himself as a “theologically conservative evangelical,” interprets the first chapter of Romans, written by the Apostle Paul, to be “a clear description of homosexual behavior.”

And for 2,000 years, he said, the Christian tradition has interpreted the Bible to prohibit what he calls “same gender eroticism.”

Peggy Campolo retorts that “sometimes you have to transcend tradition,” saying the passage should be interpreted for the audience for which it was written — inhabitants of the Greek city of Corinth, who were practicing worship of Aphrodite, a hermaphroditic deity, worship of whom often involved orgies of all varieties.

“Paul was not writing about a homosexual person who has been in a committed monogamous relationship with the same person for 30 years,” she said. “That couple is embodying traditional family values in all the ways that really matter.”

Both warned against phrases like “the gay agenda” and “traditional values,” which they said “are just code words to shut gays out.”

“Any message saying there are people God has stopped loving is not true to Scripture,” Tony Campolo said.

For Christians, Tony Campolo offered the following: “Gay marriage is an important issue, but it is not a defining issue. Jesus said absolutely nothing about homosexuality and here we have people making it a defining issue of whether or not you are a Christian.”

He added, “it was not even number one on his hit parade of sin. His number one sin was religious people going around condemning others.”

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