Why do some Christians hate LGBTQ people?

As the Cheyenne city council prepares to debate an ordinance prohibiting employers from discriminating against gays, lesbians, transgender, or bisexual people, some are making plans to stir Shakespeare’s cauldron.

“Double, double, toil and trouble.” Most of the trouble will come from self-identified Christians.

Why do some Christians hate LGBTQ people? Please don’t insult our intelligence with that disingenuous Christian ditty, “We hate the sin but love the sinner.”

Let’s be honest. You hate those you identify as “the sinner.” You reserve special hatred for same-sex love and gender identity you don’t understand. You weaponized God’s word for justification and claim your so-called “religious freedom” is at stake in whether they have equal rights under law. Some of you reject your own daughters and sons when they come out.

You encourage the passage of laws dictating which bathroom they can use and support banning otherwise patriotic Americans from serving our nation in the armed forces. And now, you advocate that they lose their jobs and livelihoods because of the way God made them.

I’m sorry, that’s hating the one you believe to be the “sinner” even more than it is hating the sin.

I’ve heard your justifications. You call it “tough love,” claiming “the Bible tells you so.” You argue that you have to be able to discriminate against them in order to exercise your religious freedom. You claim you worry about their relationship with your God.

I realize hate is a tough word to hang on anyone but “when the shoe fits.” Hate has only two components. Thought and action. Hate is characterized by extreme ill-will, intense dislike, and a passionate aversion to something or someone. But no one cares whether you have extreme ill-will for gays, lesbians, transgender or bisexual people. It’s what you do, not what you think, that makes you a hater.

When you attend a city council meeting and use your faux-Christian credibility to lobby against non-discrimination, you cross the line and become a hater. Then you’ve decided to use your beliefs to do damage to the lives of those you deny hating. When you act on your ill-will, you relinquish any plea of innocence to the sin of hating your neighbor.

Anyone of good moral deportment should agree that no one should lose their job unless the boss has a good reason. That job is all that stands between the worker and poverty and being able to put a roof over the heads of one’s family and food on their dinner table.

There are few legal doctrines in Wyoming so dishonorable as the “at-will” doctrine. Created by the Wyoming Supreme Court, not the legislature, the doctrine allows employers to discharge an employee for no good reason. Regardless of how many years you’ve contributed to the well-being of the employer and his or her business, without a union or personal contract that says otherwise, you can be sent packing with no recourse.

Employees can be fired for no cause but not an illegal cause. Under the law, illegal causes include discharges based on race, creed, religion, and gender. In past debates over non-discrimination laws, the haters have said no such law is necessary. They asserted that LGBTQ employees are protected under civil rights laws.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions pulled the rug out from under that argument. The case was brought by a gay man who was fired because of his sexual orientation. He told the court civil rights laws prohibit firing employees because of sexual orientation. Sessions says those laws provide no protection to LGBTQ workers.

Thus, Cheyenne city council’s debate comes down to love and hate. That is always the choice Christians have to make. None of that “we don’t need a new law” or “hate the sin but love the sinner” stuff. Peel back the veneer. See this for what it is.

“Double, double, toil and trouble.” You can either hate LGBTQ people enough to subject them to loss of their livelihoods because of how God created them or you can love your neighbor as yourself. You can’t do both.

When Barrasso photobombs Mitch McConnell...

The “repeal and replace” Obamacare fiasco is over for the moment. Now we need to talk about our Junior Senator. John Barrasso reminds me of Stephen Vincent Benet’s story “The Devil and Daniel Webster.”

“There was a man named Jabez Stone, lived at Cross Corners, New Hampshire. He wasn’t a bad man to start with, but he was an unlucky man. If he planted corn, he got borers; if he planted potatoes, he got blight. He had good enough land, but it didn’t prosper him.

“He’d been plowing that morning and he’d just broken the plowshare on a rock that he could have sworn wasn’t there yesterday.” His horse began coughing. At home his children and wife were ailing. It was the last straw.

“I vow it’s enough to make a man want to sell his soul to the Devil. And I would, too, for two cents.” The next day, the Devil arrived to cut the deal.

You’ve seen that ubiquitous photo of Senator Barrasso photo-bombing Mitch McConnell? It costs Wyoming more than you realize. Inclusion in that photo is not free. In order to be at the right hand of the Senate Leader, you must sell your soul to the Party leadership. Inclusion comes with more “Terms and Conditions” than benefits.

Wyoming pays a price. Being part of that photo means never questioning the Party regardless of what it costs your state. Don’t believe it? Ask yourself why independent Republicans like Maine Senator Susan Collins or Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski are never in the photo. They prefer representing constituents to photo-bombing Senator McConnell.

They are busy negotiating better deals with the Majority Leader rather than standing at his side. Not Wyoming’s junior Senator. Barrasso is so reliably in McConnell’s pocket that the GOP leadership never bothers to ask what Wyoming needs. Taken for granted, Barrasso goes along to get along. Wyoming pays a price.

Truthfully, Barrasso hasn’t received the credit he deserves for the failure of the Obamacare “repeal-and-replace” bills. He led the GOP chorus demanding the ACA’s repeal but produced nothing but bad ideas that would have damaged the lives of those he was elected to care about. Need proof that Wyoming voters don’t matter to Barrasso? Exhibit A was the bill he helped draft secretly, which would have taken healthcare from approximately 50,000 Wyoming citizens. He thought we wouldn’t notice his attempt to slash Medicaid. He’d have been gleeful to have destroyed people’s lives on a 51-50 vote.

Three courageous Republicans saved us from Barrasso’s folly. Independent GOP Senators, worried more about constituents than themselves, saved millions of Americans from losing health insurance while the Devil collected his due from John Barrasso.

In Benet’s story, Farmer Stone lived at “Cross Corners.” It’s the place Members of Congress make choices. It’s where lawmakers with empathy choose to help their hurting constituents and those with political ambition don’t. Stone, like Barrasso, made the wrong choice. He sold his soul for seven years. Barrasso sells his six years at a time.

Unlike Wyoming folks, Stone had an empathetic advocate. Daniel Webster represented his constituent with passion. Webster argued that Stone was the victim. He’s no Barrasso. He’s Barrasso’s constituents. Webster told the jury of “the early days of America and the men who had made those days.”

Jabez Stone was, according to his advocate, “an ordinary man who’d had hard luck and wanted to change it.” Webster argued his client represented those who “got tricked and trapped and bamboozled.” The jury agreed. Stone won. The Devil lost.

Applying Benet’s story to Barrasso’s sold soul, doesn’t allow John to be “an ordinary man who’d had hard luck and wanted to change it.” John is a politician, who could have offered his soul to his constituents. They are Jabez Stone. They’ve been “tricked and trapped and bamboozled” into voting for people like Barrasso.

Jesus warned we cannot serve two masters. John agrees. He chose to serve the powerful over the powerless. Great photo John, but Wyoming deserves better.

Our Congressional delegation ignores Trump-Kremlin collusion

You might have thought the only connection between Wyoming and Putin is our Congressional delegation’s willingness to ignore the Trump-Kremlin collusion. There is another and it is the connection that allows you to understand that when either Trump or Trump, Jr., says they were only discussing “adoptions” with the Russian president, something more sinister was afoot.

When Trump says they were only talking about adoptions, he is covering up the real purpose of their collusion.

The connection between Wyoming and the Trump-Russia scandal demonstrates what has been called “the butterfly effect.” The term comes from chaos theory, a mathematical interpretation of the underlying causes of patterns that appear random. The butterfly effect describes the impact minor disturbances can have on future events.

Chaos theory can be used to understand the current occupants of the White House. The butterfly effect helps us understand the impact of international politics on unsuspecting Wyoming families.

Its basics are explained metaphorically by Karen Marie Moning, author of “Darkfever.”

“A butterfly flaps its wings somewhere and the wind changes, and a warm front hits a cold front, off the coast of Africa and before you know it, you’ve got a hurricane closing in.”

In the context of current events, it goes like this. It all begins when someone steals hundreds of millions of dollars from the Russian treasury. An American-born British hedge-fund manager named William Browder lives in Moscow exposes the theft and the thieves.

The Russian government, whom you might expect to be pleased to learn of the corruption, is not. The Russians retaliate by confiscating much of Mr. Browder’s vast holdings and by deporting him. A butterfly has flapped its wings.

Mr. Browder hires a Moscow attorney named Sergei Magnitsky. Together they expose the extent of the government’s corruption. The winds have changed.

Mr. Magnitsky is arrested, thrown into prison, and is subsequently beaten to death by his captors. Browder makes the case a cause célèbre. A warm front then collides with a cold front somewhere over Russia.

The U.S. Congress passes the “Sergei Magnitsky Rule of Law Accountability Act,” the Magnitsky Act for short. The 2012 law identifies specific Russians as human rights abusers and punishes those responsible for Magnitsky’s death by banning them from the USA and its banking system while imposing additional sanctions on Russia.

Vladimir Putin is furious. A hurricane closes in.

There isn’t much he can do to punish American lawmakers for passing the Magnitsky Act so he looks for far more vulnerable targets. Now, the flapping of the butterfly wings that caused the winds to change, and a warm front to hit a cold front off the coast of Africa, causes a hurricane. It hits Wyoming and, more specifically, the Wyoming Children’s Society, which operated a highly successful program helping families adopt Russian orphans. Putin retaliates against the lawmakers who passed the Magnitsky Act by banning the adoption of Russian orphans by Americans.

The Russian adoption program abruptly ends while Wyoming citizens along with some 200 other American families are awaiting Russian children to join their homes. One Wyoming family was actually in Moscow expecting to bring two children home with them as Putin crushes dreams and hopes at Christmastime 2012.

When you hear Trump and his son met with Russians to talk about “adoptions,” they are admitting to something far less benign. Their discussions with Putin and others were about a much more complicated series of events that started much earlier with the flapping of butterfly wings and extended to Putin’s cruel decision to end American adoptions of institutionalized Russian children Putin’s government neglects.

The discussion of adoptions isn’t about these children but whether Putin will get what he wants, an end to U.S. sanctions and a repeal of the Magnitsky Act.

In the obscure and often unsavory world of international politics, butterflies are always flapping their wings. The hurricanes that generates generally have unintended consequences that harm those for whom the instigators have little regard. Such was the case when the Russian dictator’s decision brought hurt to Wyoming families who were only trying to create a better life for Russian orphans.