Love, Church and Homosexuality

As MPs prepare to vote on The Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Bill later on today, I look around me with increasing bewilderment at the very fact that we are still debating this.

Yes, I understand religious folk who quote bits from the Bible about man not lying with man (is it OK if man bends man over, or if they do it standing up?), and who think that by allowing same-sex couples to marry in the name of the Lord, they are somehow devaluing the institution of their own religion. I understand them, but I don't agree with them. Is it not more devaluing to the institution of your own religion to condemn love? Are these not the same people who preach "love your neighbour as yourself"?

I was raised in the Catholic Church, but thankfully under the guidance of an open-minded mother and one godparent who was gay. As a child, I never saw my religion as being exclusive. I went to church and saw male, female, black, white, Asian, straight, gay, old, young, fat, thin, able-bodied, disabled - people of all walks of life. I sat, I listened; I knelt, I prayed; I stood, I sang. And the whole time I did, I did it with a kind of childlike innocence and naivety: There is a God, and He loves us, all of us.

But I stopped going to church at around the age of 12, when the naivety began to slip away, when what I heard stopped being the interpretations my mother gave me, but rather the interpretations I heard at school in the classroom and in the playground, on the streets and out of the mouths of people who didn't seem to understand God as I did. What I heard stopped being stories of love, but stories of judgement. God only loves those who follow these rules.

Well, why? Does God not love those who work on Sundays because if they don't, they won't be able to afford rent? Does God not love the mother who steals £20 from the rich man to feed her hungry child? Does God reserve His love solely for those who follow a book written by Man, originally written in Ancient Hebrew and Greek, most of it based on stories told by ordinary regular men, and then translated repeatedly from Latin to English? Does God only love those who tick boxes, walk out of church on Sunday and spend the rest of their week casting judgement upon others?

I have since made my peace with religion. It is not for me, at least not at this moment in time, but I respect those who use it to feel a closer connection to God, and not a closer connection to a set of rules which they seem to think will entitle them to a place in heaven. But the sad thing is that I feel I have been shoved out of the Church. It is no longer the inclusive, unconditional love I once thought it was - and until it learns how to be just that, it will continue to push out other people exactly like me.