by yoursl | Sep 10, 2015 | LGBT, Sex and Religion, Sex in the News |
I know firsthand what religious intolerance and hate in the name of God feels like. I grew up in their shadows, but I grew OUT of those shadows as well. I used the religious intolerance and hatred I experienced in my childhood and adolescence as a jumping off point in my quest for knowledge. At the time, I simply wanted to know as much as I could about the world around me in the hopes I would eventually find other people like me. The purpose of my blog is to give readers knowledge and information. As tempting as it is to use my blog as a platform to give my own opinion of the situation involving Kim Davis, the Rowan County, Ky., clerk who was jailed for refusing to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples, I am instead going to follow my blog’s mission of “Knowledge should not be forbidden” and provide my readers with pertinent information. Since faith is at the heart of the Davis issue, let’s look at some religions and their views on the subject of same-sex marriages. Davis’ faith is Apostolic Christian, which means she is a member of the Pentecost branch of Christianity. In 2011, the Pew Research Center estimated that there were 279 million Pentecostal Christians in the world. This figure equates to 4 percent of the world’s 2011 population and to 12.8 percent of the world’s Christian population in 2011. In an article published this week in USA Today, Vinson Synan, a professor of church history at Regent University in Virginia and an expert on the Pentecostal faith, stated, “There are an estimated 15...
