More from Harry Potter

This article just made the presses within the last couple of days

Albus Dumbledore is gay

And this is directly from the lips of the author.

A while ago, I wrote a post expressing my concern about the ending of the last Harry Potter book, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. **SPOILER ALERT** It is clear in her stories that Harry Potter is a Christ figure. He is meant to save everyone from the evil Voldemort by sacrificing himself. It is made clear in the last book that Harry must die in order to defeat Voldemort. Yet Harry does not die. In the end, it is stated by Dumbledore that it was only important that Harry was willing to die in order to defeat Voldemort. He passed out when Voldemort attacked him, and then regained consciousness. A veritable *swoon theory* in action.

When I posted my concerns, I was reassured by my Lutheran theolgian friends that Rowling clearly is a Christian, and the sacramentology that is throughout the books clearly show that. She is writing more in a Tolkien sense rather than a C.S. Lewis sense - less literal, less willing to make the story a tight allegory, even though Harry's walking into Voldemort's camp was so clearly parallel to Aslan walking into the White Witch's clutches.

Okay, I could see that as a possibility. She didn't want to make Harry into Christ. But it still troubled me. There are too many people who wear the label Christian who don't believe that Christ died and rose again. I expressed that I wished I knew where her beliefs were. The only thing I could find was that she was Church of Scotland, which is a liturgical, sacramental church that also is known for its all-inclusiveness of beliefs and its encouragement that everyone "work it all out for themselves and decide where they stand on Scripture, etc.."

When Rowling issued that pronouncement, those possibilities became much less possible to me. If she is willing to make an admirable father figure - a Merlin or a Gandalf - and make his sexuality an issue when it NEVER had to be, she was showing her true colors. Yes, I know that it doesn't specifically state that she doesn't believe that Jesus died and rose again, but it does show that she is willing to snip God's Word into the bits and pieces that she wants to take and create her own gospel, her own God.

And that destroys other people's faith. We live in a world where it is hard to take God's word at face value. When we hear that someone may go to Hell because of the sins that they are embracing and placing above God's Word, it is hard for us. But we know perfectly wonderful people who live with each other in a non-marital sexual relationship. We know really great gay people. etc. How could God want to damn them. Truly wonderful characters in literature do that for us as well. Albus Dumbledore is a wise, loving man who fought for the good of all and sacrificed himself to the utmost. Yet he was gay...so being gay can't be all that bad, right? So our flawed human reason goes, if it is not trusting in God's Word.

Not only that, but she did something that is despicable in literary criticism. Many times anymore, when you look at strong friendships between two people of the same sex in classic works of literature (or in the Bible, or in history), the literary critic, the academic rushes to say that they are a clear indication that it was a gay relationship. Rowling intentionally set up a relationship that showed nothing more than a friendship between two young men with similar dreams - and then later, looking back at her own work, she points out that she intended this to show forth as a homosexual relationship.

I am not a Harry Potter attacker. I have read every book and eagerly awaited each one as it came out. My son is reading Sorcerers Stone now. I see a lot that is worthwhile in these books. However, truly good children's fiction often has two messages - one that the children enjoy, and one that is meant to be picked up later. It has become clear that Rowling fully intended to propogate a liberal agenda at the same time that she is telling us a wonderfully imaginative yarn full of social morality and good and evil. Yet in that good vs. evil, she is constantly using things that sets us off balance - things that we typically associate with evil -- and she makes them good. And in some ways -- she is taking things that have been typically associated with good -- the wise, fatherly wizard that keeps us safe by his power and presence (Merlin, Gandalf - who both did have to go away and let the battles be fought) -- and associating them with things that have through time been considered evil -- and then she took the most important thing of all -- and portrayed it as paltry compared to what it really and truly was.