Jesus is NOT your homeboy

I am so sick of people using Jesus as a personal trump card.\nFrom national elections to conflicts homegrown on our otherwise idyllic Bloomington campus, people on the right and the left are using Jesus like Green Bay uses Brett Favre.\nIf Jesus is to respect any of us again, it has to stop.\nHomosexuality is always a hot-button issue, on this campus and everywhere else in the nation. Some accept it, some don't. Some discriminate, others won't. If we're going to use the Christian Bible as a point of reference, this is what it says in Romans 1:26-27 (New Testament).\n"For this reason God gave them up to dishonorable passions. Their women exchanged natural relations for unnatural, and the men likewise gave up natural relations with women and were consumed with passion for one another, men committing shameless acts with men and receiving in their own persons the due penalty for their error."\nThe passage is from the New Standard Translation, but the King James version, the one supported by most churches, reads much the same. There are two key points about this passage and its implications:\n1. The verses preceding this passage tell how the people (you and me) decided to not worship God anymore and follow false idols. In other words, God might not like what you do, but he'll let you do it, on your own consequence. And that's for anything that could be considered a sin, like talking to a girl's breasts instead of her face (guilty on two counts).\n2. When it's said that Jesus walked with the sinners, that's absolutely true. He walked among them to help them fix their problems.\nNow whether or not breast-staring, being gay or grand larceny are sins depends on how you interpret the Bible, if you interpret it at all. What's important to remember is that Jesus doesn't hate you for any of them. Humans hate. Jesus forgives. Humans use AK-47s and M16s.\nOn a national level, the human institutions of the Catholic and Baptist churches are playing a dangerous political game. Since Jesus won't be on the ballot Nov. 2, heads of the two churches are telling their members to vote for the next best thing: George W. Bush.\nIt is perfectly within an organization's rights to try and tell its members for whom to vote, but the logic certain groups are using to do it is astounding. Church-goers are being told to "vote their faith" because Bush supports banning gay marriage and almost all forms of abortion. But everyone in the country, Christians included, are suffering job losses, increasing health insurance rates and increasing school pressures due to the under-funded No Child Left Behind act. American soldiers, many of them Protestants themselves, are dying in an Iraq that increasingly looks like Vietnam (Newsweek recently called the insurgency "worse than you see on TV.")\nWould you vote for the guy sitting next to you at church even if you knew he would make you poor and send your son or daughter to a dusty death in Fallujah?\nBut Kerry's a Catholic, right? Why is he getting skewered by his own church? Why is it that Bush gets to have the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost waving pompoms for his re-election campaign while Kerry is demonized? Because he supports some abortions?\nIt's perfectly acceptable to belong to a one-issue church, but I don't want a one-issue president, especially if that issue is terror. Give me a break.\nEven the pot-smoking liberal nutjobs at MTVU recognize that the real terrorism in Darfur, Sudan deserves some attention.