What do we do with pastors and gay marriage? According to the Christian faith, gay marriage is not recognized as acceptable by God. Pastors, then, cannot officiate weddings for gay couples without going against their God—and if they do, they sacrifice their purity in leadership, and their religious beliefs, which means that their salvation is on the line.

Yikes.

With gay marriage legalized in the U.S., same-sex couples are free to marry anyone they choose. Freedom is excellent—that’s our country’s thing. Part of freedom, however, is not being forced by someone to do what you don’t want to do. But pastors are now facing the possibility of having to officiate weddings for gay couples—not by choice, but forcibly by the government.

Picturesque Christian schools are facing the choice of letting gay couples get married on campus or having the government pull their students’ funding. This means that some students might not receive the same government financial aid for their college tuition as their neighbor does just because they’re Christian. Same with churches—not that they get much anyway, but government help for the servants of God is dwindling and will most likely disappear altogether with the bias against Christians for their personal beliefs.

My family lives in a parsonage (a home owned by the church) which we get to live in only because my mom is the Children’s Pastor. She takes no salary, works full-time at the church, and we live there for free. If my church receives any less funding, we might have to sell the parsonage. My mom would have to find a new job, and we’d lose our house.

There is an unpractical side to legalizing gay marriage, and it’s not stuffy old men blinded by the rainbow. It's threatening my family’s foundation and my mother’s salvation. It’s the freedom on which our country was founded—the very same freedom that allows you to marry whichever gender you want, and that allows me to write this—which might take away someone’s eternity.

This isn’t a gay-hate article. Please, gay on. I will love the heck out of you no matter who you are. Just don’t force pastors to perform wedding ceremonies for gay couples if they don’t want to. Find other officials to marry you and select venues that won’t result in Christian students having to take out $20,000 loans each semester. I implore you, let’s work together on this one. Don’t ask us to step back from our beliefs or our God.

And let me be clear: if that is what it comes to, Christian lives are not bent on the things of this world. If we lose our churches, we'll worship in homes. If we lose our homes, we'll have service in the parks. But if our marriages aren't recognized by the state anymore because a pastor has lost his license to marry, owing to his refusal to marry gay couples, then the tables will be completely turned. Our marriages will be illegal. That's pretty extreme, yes—and I don't think it will come to that for two reasons. One, I don't think that's what anyone wants, so no one would move toward that as a goal. Two, we could also marry outside of the church—though the binding might not be recognized by God.

I never vocalize these sorts of opinions, because they tend to get a lot of flak and to the world, it seems silly to cling to religious beliefs if they don't fit in with what society accepts to be good and true. Also, I rarely find myself with the confidence to share these thoughts. A big part of me hopes that this will never be found, that it will drift off into cyberspace and float like a message in a bottle for centuries until some great grandchild of mine does some digging into her millennial grandma's history. But then, a part of me doesn't—that part wants you to not step on pastors' toes. That part wants to be a little ferocious in defending the church that I love. That part is also deathly afraid of how much the church is seen as an enemy instead of a life raft.

Believe what you will. Do as you will. These are merely my own unpopular opinions.