When I came out to my parents more than ten years ago, one of the first things my father said was, “You can still lead a chaste life.” I wanted to say something droll, like, “Oops, too late,” but it was a serious moment, and I understood the impetus of his comment. My father is a devout Catholic, and the official position of the Catholic church on homosexuality falls along the lines of it being a burden that the gay person must shoulder throughout his or her life, never giving in to the dastardly impulse to actually love someone. The gay person is not considered at fault for his or her “condition,” but neither is it allowed to be acted upon.

In other words, homosexuality is a special test of self-denial from god, for a select few to endure.

As this is slightly more enlightened than the Catholics’ previous policy of beating us to death with rocks, I suppose I must give them a modicum of credit, a few moments’ pause before declaring that this is the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard.

La la la.

A few more seconds.

Do de dooo.

Okay. Are we all ready?

That is the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard.

If there is a god, and if it is the white-beard, throne-sitting, cosmic yenta sort of god that gets its jollies devising catch-22 emotional traps for random humans, isn’t it equally—if not more—likely that the “test” of homosexuality is not on the homosexuals (who have already suffered trials of Jobian proportions at the hands of society), but on the so-called religious people who have to deal with the homosexuals in their midst?

Christians on the whole have never been masters of self-denial. This is true from the top of that religious food chain—from the pope with his trillion-dollar palace and fancy dresses, and the televangelists with their mansions and theme parks—all the way down the line to the priests who sexually molest young members of their congregations and the Puritans whose few generations of hardship spawned the fattest and greediest nation in the history of the world. This is how a religion designed to help raise people above their base animal nature quickly transformed into a vehicle for propagating and magnifying those very instincts.

So maybe homosexuality is a test from god for the people who purport to follow him, a test of self-denial of those primitive instincts. A test of love and compassion. A test of acceptance, appreciation, and celebration of the range of differences the god programmed into humanity. A test of getting past fear and anger and bigotry, of using logic and intelligence to question and transcend the outdated junior-high-school health textbook called Leviticus that somehow found its way into their bible. A test of creating a community and a society based upon mutual respect, rather than driving away people they disagree with.

A test of practicing what they preach, or used to preach before they assumed the role of thought police for the Republican Party.

Christians are fond of saying that they are made in god’s image, but it’s infinitely more likely that the reverse is true. If a god exists, it is by definition unknowable by our limited experience. In the face of this not-knowing, the god Christians imagine is not incomprehensibly loving, but rather the ultimate expression of their own selves, base instincts and all. Thus are their own tedious animal natures reinforced, mainstreamed, and glorified above the actual tenets of their own religion, which ask them merely to evolve.

I started out talking about my father. Ten years ago, he imagined I could be a chaste, miserable martyr to my sexuality. Two weeks ago, when I told him Rob and I were getting married, he advised me to follow my heart. If that’s not evolution, I don’t know what is.

(Of course, he’s still a Republican, so no ground is actually gained. But credit where it’s due.)