Q Toon: The Things That Guide My Life

I've finally gotten around to my Jimmy Carter tribute cartoon this week. It quotes extensively from an interview the former president gave to Huffington Post in 2012:

Q: A lot of people point to the Bible for reasons why gay people should not be in the church, or accepted in any way.

A: Homosexuality was well known in the ancient world, well before Christ was born and Jesus never said a word about homosexuality. In all of his teachings about multiple things -– he never said that gay people should be condemned. I personally think it is very fine for gay people to be married in civil ceremonies.

I draw the line, maybe arbitrarily, in requiring by law that churches must marry people. I’m a Baptist, and I believe that each congregation is autonomous and can govern its own affairs. So if a local Baptist church wants to accept gay members on an equal basis, which my church does by the way, then that is fine. If a church decides not to, then government laws shouldn’t require them to.

As president, Carter didn't have a lot to say about homosexuality. Not because gay rights weren't an issue, mind you. Lesbian and gay activists were openly pushing for non-discrimination laws, and the other side had Anita Bryant crusading against us. Sgt. Leonard Matlovich was suing the Air Force to reinstate him after it had discharged him in 1975 for being gay (he won his suit in 1980, but accepted a monetary settlement instead). San Francisco's gays and lesbians rioted after the antigay assassin of Supervisor Harvey Milk and Mayor George Moscone was sentenced to only seven years in prison. The first homosexual rights march on Washington D.C. was in 1979.

On the other hand, the disease that would later be named HIV/AIDS was known only to a few and understood by even fewer. Even within the lesbian and gay community, there was little interest in marriage equality.

Carter's administration did, through Midge Costanza and her Office of Public Liaison, urge federal agencies to adopt and enforce antidiscrimination policies, however. And in 1978, when pressured at a pre-election rally by gubernatorial candidate Jerry Brown to endorse a "no" vote on Proposition 6, the antigay Briggs Amendment, (and promised that Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan had already done the same), Carter returned to the mic and added his support for California's lesbians and gays as a postscript to his appearance there.

Well, I suppose the 1970's were a different time. I don't remember Senator Joe Biden speaking up for us, either; yet that doesn't negate his endorsement of marriage equality in 2012. 

So I return here to the Huffington Post interview. Toward the end of the interview, Carter explains his Christian life philosophy more fully. It wouldn't all fit into my cartoon, but his answer to a question about people who cite selected biblical passages to defend their homophobia deserves to be included here in full.

A: The example that I set in my private life is to emulate what Christ did as he faced people who were despised like the lepers or the Samaritans. He reached out to them, he reached out to poor people, he reached out to people that were not Jews and treated them equally. The more despised and the more in need they were, the more he emphasized that we should go to and share with them our talent our ability, our wealth, our influence. Those are the things that guide my life and when I find a verse in the Bible that contradicts those things that I just described to you, I put into practice the things that I derive from my faith in Christ.

Amen, Mr. President. Amen.