Quote of the Day: The Hypocrisy of and Harm Caused By the Pulpit

Pastor Glenn Harvison

The falsely pious and always self-congratulatory homophobes that occupy far too many pulpits in this country and across the world never seem to tire of denigrating and endeavoring to stigmatize LGBT people.  Never mind the new knowledge about sexual orientation and never mind the fact that science increasingly demonstrates that the Bible (and the Koran in Muslin countries) that this self-righteous bigots cling to desperately as a prop to feel better about themselves is not based on fact or accurate history.  In their quest to feel justified and just as often in order to shake money from the purses and wallets of the ignorant and gullible, these foul individuals care nothing of the harm they do.  Jeremy Hooper sums it up well:

A congregant asked Pastor Glenn Harvison of Greenwich, Connecticut's Harvest Time Church whether or not he could, in good conscience, attend a gay friend's upcoming wedding. So naturally, this led the theologian to equate people like me with people who are addicted to drugs, slothful, perverted, violent, and generally Satan-lured, with my "rescuable" sexual orientation something that is both "a sign of societal decay" and a "sign of the end of the age." All this before he absolves himself (in his mind) of the considerable harms that his teachings are by telling a story about how he was nice to a lesbian at her deceased partner's funeral.

It must be freeing, in a way, to be able to end any conversation about a complex subject matter with a smug "Satan did that!" Freeing for everyone except the countless many tormented LGBT people that this reductive blame game has troubled, denied, and enslaved.

Harvison is pictured above and a video of his denigration of gays is here. Of course gays aren't the only ones that are disliked.  One generally needs to add in blacks, immigrants, non-Christians, etc.  These pious folk are truly horrible people and have hate and division as their principal stock in trade.  They deserve no respect and certainly no deference.  Thankfully, the younger generations seem to be recognizing this as they increasingly turn their backs on institutional Christianity.  Frankly, I increasingly see being a truly good and moral person and being a conservative Christian as being mutually exclusive.  Yes, people have the right to believe what they want, but that doesn't mean they deserve respect or deference whatsoever.