"Post-Gay, Post-Christian?" author out there in the middle

Somewhere in the wilderness between the Rev. Fred Phelps and the ghost of Liberace, you’ll find Debbie Thurman.

Not as a matter of lifestyle, or even belief. But Thurman, the Monroe-based author of the recently published book, “Post-Gay, Post-Christian?”

feels strongly that someone needs to risk wading into the middle of the current gay-Christian cultural battle in order to make some sense of it.

“I saw how polarizing it was,” she said, “and that doesn’t help anybody. All you’re doing is alienating people.”

The more strident anti-gay Christians, Thurman believes, “have been given a big hammer to wield by Scripture,” while the moderate wing of Christianity “just yells about love, love, love.” Neither, in her mind, are actually addressing the problem.

That’s why she wrote the book, which she wound up putting out through her own small publishing house, Cedar House Press.

“I had an agent for awhile,” she said, “but the book kept changing as I kept learning more. Finally, I just decided to do it myself.”

As I understand it, the philosophy expressed in “Post-Gay” can be summarized thusly: 1. Being gay is, biologically speaking, an anomaly.

2. Even though Jesus never specifically condemned it in the New Testament, Thurman feels homosexuality is a sin.

3. Having said that, she doesn’t necessarily see it as a sin worse than many others.

4. It is not the place of Christians to point fingers and judge.

5. She’s open to the idea that being gay is not a matter of choice.

6. The idea of societal institutions embracing gay marriage makes her uncomfortable, but she doesn’t feel personally threatened by it.

“We have done ourselves no favor by focusing on gay marriage,” Thurman said, “not when so many of our marriages are ending in divorce. I’d like to see us clean up our own house.”

She also acknowledges the dichotomy in what straight Christians are asking of the gay community — don’t be promiscuous, but don’t get married, either.

So what can this author bring to an old debate that’s new? An interesting background, for one thing. A former U.S. Marine and current member of Thomas Road Baptist Church, Thurman said she’s had her own struggles with sexual identity.

“I had grown up as a typical, pigtailed tomboy who enjoyed certain aspects of being a girl,” she writes. “Yet I remember deep longings to be a boy.

The girl part didn’t seem natural to me.”

Nevertheless, she married — twice — and had two daughters with her second husband. She also went through a rocky period in her current marriage where she felt physically and emotionally drawn to another woman.

It was hard, she admitted, to confess all that in a public forum like a book.

Moreover, Thurman had already felt the lash of public criticism when she took up the cause of Lisa Miller, a woman who lost custody of her daughter to a former partner in a gay relationship.

“The national media was literally knocking on my door,” she said.

In the end, though, Thurman decided that the only way to provide an honest commentary on the gay-Christian divide was to be honest about her own life.

“We have reached a point,” she writes, “where an emotional boil-over and the pursuit of social justice are supplanting Christian orthodoxy (faith, reason and doctrine), ushering in a philosophy based on Scriptural halftruths. Love must take all of truth into account in order to be authentic love.

Yet, truth must be tempered by compassion.”

The book came out only last month, and Thurman has yet to embark on a planned series of book signings, church talks and perhaps even TV appearances.

She’s looking forward to putting herself “out there.” And, part of her is dreading it.

That’s what it’s like in the middle.