Bible-Thumping Global Charity 'World Vision' Has Brief Shining Moment Of Reasonableness On Gay Marriage, Is Sorry About That

Courage of convictions. This is one of the most important courages out there, cited more often than almost any other courage. So it came as quite a pleasant surprise when World Vision, one of the largest faith-based, pro-Jesus global charities on the planet, announced that they would hire legally married gay couples.

Kudos to World Vision! Proud that you are willing to stand up for what’s right, as you continue to spend about a billion dollars per year making the world a better place. Let’s get out the old checkbook and… wait, what? Say that louder, NPR:  

World Vision U.S. changed course on Wednesday, saying it would return to its policy of not hiring Christians in gay marriages.

The Washington-state-based charity caused an uproar among its supporters when it announced on Monday that based on the changes many churches were making, it would allow the hiring of avowed Christians who had been legally married to someone of the same sex.

Two days! The change lasted for an entire two days?!? To put that in perspective, it took World Vision less time to reverse its position on LGBT folks than it did for Jesus to rise from the grave. Let’s angersplore.

If you are not familiar with World Vision (no link, because angerbear), they are one of those global charities where you can sponsor a child in the developing world and provide them with education,   health care,   clean water and nourishing food. They are a faith-based nonprofit, and get lots of monies from believers and churches. Previously, they fought hard to be able to avoid hiring gay folks, even fighting in court. And even their change, surprising as it was, was still pretty strict:

"Changing the employee conduct policy to allow someone in a same-sex marriage who is a professed believer in Jesus Christ to work for us makes our policy more consistent with our practice on other divisive issues," [World Vistion U.S. President Richard Stearns] told Christianity Today. "It also allows us to treat all of our employees the same way: abstinence outside of marriage, and fidelity within marriage."

Right on. Well, maybe not completely. We can’t all agree about the whole abstinence outside of marriage (Spring Break, bitchez!), but at least this policy treated gay and straight people the same. No, it didn’t account for people who lived in states where marriage is not legal, but hey, baby steps and stuff. He went on to sound even more sane:

World Vision U.S. president Richard Stearns explained the organization was not endorsing gay marriage. Instead, gay marriage would join a series of issues — like divorce, remarriage, baptism, female priests — that many Christian churches disagree on.

See! No rainbow flags being handed out to orphans in Botswana. Just the recognition that maybe some gay Christians out there want to help little girls in the developing world learn math or something.

But once word got out, the bigots and haters had a field day, saying that World Vision hiring gays was, “a denial of how Jesus defined marriage as between a man and a woman when he was asked about divorce.” Ironically, there seems to be no backlash against World Vision hiring divorced people, something that Jesus actually preached against. However, Jesus himself preached that his followers would be attacked for doing the right thing. And since World Vision had thought and prayed over this for years, surely they knew in their souls that they were doing the right thing. And World Vision showed their courage of conviction:

Today, World Vision sent a message to its supporters asking "forgiveness."

"The board acknowledged they made a mistake and chose to revert to our longstanding conduct policy requiring sexual abstinence for all single employees and faithfulness within the Biblical covenant of marriage between a man and a woman," World Vision said in a letter.

Plus, World Vision knows that parents of uneducated, malnourished, HIV-positive children in remote regions of Zimbabwe care deeply about the sexual orientation of an office clerk half a world away. That issue is way more important than which two of their three children are able to eat today.

World Vision gave in to the peer pressure of the ruling religious class, which is exactly the lesson we take from Jesus who always agreed with the ruling religious class of his day, also, too. When Pharisees accused Jesus of healing people on the Sabbath, he immediately issued a public apology, just in case donations stopped pouring in, because money is the root of all good. Amen.

[ NPR ]