Wallis: Focus Admits Gays Not the Problem with American Families — Just a Fundraising Canard

In an interview with Powell’s book store, Sojourners founder and liberal Evangelical activist Jim Wallis spoke of trying to find a common ground with Focus on the Family on whether gays are really behind the breakdown of families:

[Powell’s]: The religious right, though, regularly claims that the “gay agenda” wants to destroy the family. That’s where the hysteria comes in.

Wallis: But I’ve not found that. My gay friends are also friends with my family. And they’re glad that we have a healthy heterosexual relationship and a healthy relationship with our kids. But they want to be respected too—their rights, their relationships—and not be scapegoated for things that have nothing to do with them.

I had this conversation with Focus on the Family, and I said I agree with you that family breakdown is a huge crisis, a serious crisis. And I don’t think the Left talks about that enough. My neighborhood is eighty percent single parent families. You can’t overcome poverty with that, with eighty percent single parent families. But how do we reweave the bonds of marriage, family, extended family, and community, to put our arms around the kids? And it’s not just in poor neighborhoods. Kids are falling through the cracks of fractured family in all classes and neighborhoods. So I said to them, I want to rebuild family life and relationships, but explain to me how gay and lesbian people are the ones responsible for all that? which is what their fund-raising strategy suggests. And after about an hour and a half they conceded the point. They said, Okay Jim, we concede that family breakdown is caused much more by heterosexual dysfunction than by homosexuals. But then they said, We can’t vouch for our fundraising department, which says a lot, I think.

Via Andrew Sullivan.