Do Christians Owe Reparations to LGBT Americans?

As I have noted in various posts over time, homophobia ALWAYS traces back to Christianity and ignorant batshitery in the Old Testament written by Bronze Age herders who due to ignorance and a desire to be different from surrounding cultures that imposed a harsh condemnation of same sex sexual relations - the ignorant authors did not even have an understanding of homosexuality in its modern meaning.   This Old Testament poison was picked up and spread across the globe by Christian missionaries and by British imperialist as they conquered territories.  Even Islam became more homophobic and less tolerant of  sexual fluidity thanks to the prudish British.  Now, in the wake of the Orlando massacre, a few Christians are beginning to speak out about Christianity's responsibility for homophobia and the continued mistreatment of LGBT individuals.  A piece in Baptist News Global went so far as to make the case that Christians owe reparations, especially on the spiritual front, to the LGBT community.  Here are excerpts:

     One of the encouraging responses I have witnessed in the wake of the mass shooting at the gay nightclub Pulse in Orlando is the admission of guilt on behalf of some churches and religious leaders, recognizing that the perpetuation of our theological messages about LGBTQ people over the years has been death-dealing. Many have seen anew the connection between anti-LGBTQ theological narratives and the perpetuation of violence against LGBTQ people in society. Others now recognize that even our silent complicity in this spiritual violence has a high cost.

    [A]nti-LGBTQ violence is fueled by theological narratives. In sum, for generations, the denigration of LGBTQ people has appealed for validation to the most powerful language and symbols available to humanity, setting messages of scorn within an ultimate context by conscripting sacred text and even the mind of God in the justification of oppressive activity. The theological maligning of LGBTQ lives makes it easy to know who it is theologically appropriate to hate, whose bodies are fitting targets for violence, and whose souls even God couldn’t care less about. 

     For LGBTQ people, the mechanisms of oppression have nearly always been waged first against our souls. But it never ends there. This spiritual violence has led to innumerable suicides, hate crime violence beyond what we know through the collected statistics, and the marginalization of LGBTQ people in the very institutions they should feel most at home: their families, their churches, and their communities.

    Feeling remorseful for this history of theological violence against LGBTQ souls isn’t enough to cultivate spiritual and physical wellbeing for new generations of LGBTQ teens, or to make our churches more welcoming spaces for the fullness of LGBTQ lives, or to heal the deep wounds of our religious institutions wrought by severing parts of our collective body asunder through spiritual violence. Rooting our response in the gospel, our call is not simply to feel guilt over past harm or even to ameliorate of future harm, but to heal the wounded and bind up the broken and to become repairers of the breach we have created. In the case of battles waged against the souls of queer folk, our reparations for wrongdoing must address the ways we’ve spiritually and theologically structured our lives and institutions to marginalize, silence, and spiritually harm LGBTQ people for generations and to repair the damage wrought by this violence.

     These spiritual reparations might look something like:·        Supporting initiatives to help homeless LGBTQ youth in your city in response to the ways theological narratives about LGBTQ people have wreaked havoc on families that reject their queer children based on these narratives’ implicit and explicit messages.·        Supporting initiatives to address LGBTQ suicide in response to the ways theological narratives about LGBTQ people have wreaked havoc upon the psyches and souls of LGBTQ people, at times making life seem unlivable.
·        our church being the first to respond vocally and prophetically in public spaces to the attempt to pass laws that harm LGBTQ people in your community and building coalitions to eradicate those laws that already do, and risking something of your own institutional life to do so.
·        Standing up to sibling congregations and denominational bodies that perpetuate anti-LGBTQ theological messages, holding them accountable for the soul violence they are doing to LGBTQ people.

Baptist Pastor Condemns Pastor Worley's Concentration Camp Sermon

Personally, I do not understand the mindset where one deliberately closes one's thoughts and intellect to anything that challenges the writings of ignorant and totally uneducated "Bronze Age nomadic herders" to quote my blogger friend Bob Felton at Civil Commotion.  Worse yet, these same ignorant by choice individuals lash out and attack those with differing beliefs and perspectives.  Gays, of course, receive their most hateful venom.  I increasingly view these individuals and their power and control maddened pastors and bishops as suffering from a form of mental illness - a form of pathological paranoia that makes them feel driven to destroy anything and anyone that jeopardizes their flimsy house of cards religious belief constructs.  Constructs that cannot withstand objective facts, scientific knowledge and logic and reason.   But once in a while it seems one of these "godly Christians" states what many believe but fear to speak out loud and it presses some to take a good look in the mirror and recognize hate and bigotry.  A column in the Associated Baptist Press by a Baptist pastor is once such example where the adulation of ignorance, bigotry and unconcealed hate results in the opening of eyes of others. The trigger for this epiphany?  Pastor Charles Worley's sermon seeking to imprison gays behind electrified fences and allow us to die.  Here are highlights from the column by Bill Leonard, Professor of Church History and Baptist Studies at the School of Divinity, Wake Forest University:

Tonight I am ashamed to be a Baptist. Born into Baptist “cradle role” in the First Baptist Church of Decatur, Texas, and baptized on profession of faith in that congregation when I was 8 years old, I’ve been a born-again Baptist for over five decades.

Tonight I watched excerpts from a sermon preached by Charles Worley, pastor of Providence Road Baptist Church, an Independent Baptist congregation in Maiden, N.C., the state where my family and I live.

Pastor Worley said things that are repugnant in any Christian pulpit, that shame the name Baptist and undercut the gospel itself. Although I’ve sometime been embarrassed to be a Baptist, until now I’ve never really been ashamed.

I remain haunted by the courage of those early Baptists who, for reasons I cannot fully comprehend, looked beyond their historical context to the vision of a believers’ church, uncoerced faith, freedom of conscience and transformation through Christ.

But tonight I am ashamed, because I heard a Baptist pastor say things so abhorrent to the gospel of Jesus that I could not keep conscience with my Baptist forebears and remain silent. In what appears to be a May 13 sermon, Charles Worley declared: "Build a great, big, large fence -- 150 or 100 mile long -- put all the lesbians in there," Then he continues: "Do the same thing for the queers and the homosexuals and have that fence electrified so they can't get out. Feed them, and you know what, in a few years, they'll die out. Do you know why? They can't reproduce!"

I’ve listened to those statements multiple times, each time hoping that I’m not hearing what I think I’m hearing. But I am.

That a person who serves a congregation calling itself Baptist would utilize such brutal words is not simply an affront to the men and women he wishes death upon, but to all who “name the name of Christ.” So dastardly are those words and the sentiment behind them that those of us who value the Baptist tradition must demand repentance of this fallen Christian brother.

Tonight I’m disgusted with and praying for Pastor Worley, clinging to Paul’s words to Corinth offered in contrast to “another gospel” he found rampant there: “We recommend ourselves by the innocence of our behavior, our grasp of truth, our patience and kindliness; by gifts of the Holy Spirit, by sincere love, by declaring the truth, by the power of God” (2 Cor. 6:6-7).  Tonight I am ashamed to be a Baptist.

What is unfortunate is that Leonard fails to see that throughout its history the message of the Christian Church - certainly that of the Roman Catholic Church - has been more in line with Worley's statements than a message of love, acceptance and compassion for all.  One need only think of the Crusades, the driving of the Moors from Spain, the Inquisition, the conquest of the Americas and the deliberate extermination of the "heathens" and even the "Christ killer" label applied to Jews that helped set the mindset for the Holocaust.  Blind allegiance to the writings of often ignorant authors and succumbing to a feeling of self-righteous and being better than others usually has had deadly consequences.  Worley is merely the latest incarnation of what Christians have done and said towards others for 2000 years.

Faith Baptist Church - Another Member of the Hate Group Roster

I noted yesterday that Southern Poverty Law Center had inducted ten additional organizations to its roster of anti-gay hate groups. I also noted that merely stating "deeply felt religious belief" wasn't what landed an organization in the hate group category. A good example of the deliberate lies and falsehoods that a group must be peddling comes from Faith Baptist in Primrose, Georgia, which also describes itself as "Sons of Thundr." Yes, that IS how they spell the word "thunder" which probably tells us a lot about the intellectual level of church adherents. Adding to the batshitery is this statement on their hate-filled website: "Preaching the Book that changed the world ! 1611 KJB." As many regular readers know, the King James Bible was organized under the direction of King James I of England (a/k/a James VI of Scotland) who was gay as a goose. Yes, he did his duty and fathered children but he's buried in Westminster Abbey with one of his male lovers - and there were quite a few of them - buried nearby. The image above is from the hate group's webpage. Here's some of the "loving" statements about LGBT individuals disseminated by "Sons of Thundr":

Effects on the Lifespan

Smokers and drug addicts don't live as long as non-smokers or non-addicts, so we consider smoking and narcotics abuse harmful. The typical life-span of homosexuals suggests that their activities are more destructive than smoking and as dangerous as drugs.Two and eight-tenths percent (2.8%) of gays died violently. They were 116 times more apt to be murdered; 24 times more apt to commit suicide; and had a traffic-accident death-rate 18 times the rate of comparably-aged white males. Heart attacks, cancer and liver failure were exceptionally common. Twenty percent of lesbians died of murder, suicide, or accident--a rate 487 times higher than that of white females aged 25-44. The age distribution of samples of homosexuals in the scientific literature from 1989 to 1992 suggests a similarly shortened life-span.

The Biological Swapmeet

The typical sexual practices of homosexuals are a medical horror story --imagine exchanging saliva, feces, semen and/or blood with dozens of different men each year. Imagine drinking urine, ingesting feces and experiencing rectal trauma on a regular basis. Often these encounters occur while the participants are drunk, high, and/or in an orgy setting. Further, many of them occur in extremely unsanitary places (bathrooms, dirty peep shows), or, because homosexuals travel so frequently, in other parts of the world.

Can you feel the "Christian love" yet? Obviously, the "facts" published are either directly from Paul Cameron's thoroughly discredited "research" or simply made up and pulled out of the pastor's ass. As I have noted before, NO ONE lies like "godly Christians" who apparently believe that there are only nine Commandments and have the same level of truth and veracity as did the Nazi propagandists when disseminating "facts" against Jews.

Minister Found Dead in Montgomery Home - Now the Rest of The Story

I swear that I just cannot figure out these Christianists who whine about sex and gays as being nasty sinners, but then are discovered to have really been into kinky shit themselves. This new story on a former Jerry Falwell protege is just CRAZY. Is it just me, or are most of these guys Baptists? I cannot do a better job than Pam Spaulding has done on her blog and recommend that you get all the details at the Blend: http://www.pamshouseblend.com/showDiary.do?diaryId=3226

This will get you an idea of how wildly bizarre this case is:

I think it's safe to assume this guy was a Republican: An Alabama minister who died in June of ‘accidental mechanical asphyxia’ was found hogtied and wearing two complete wet suits, including a face mask, diving gloves and slippers, rubberized underwear, and a head mask, according to an autopsy report.” He also had a dildo up his ass, but it was wearing a condom.

How these people have the nerve to tell LGBT individuals how to live is mind boggling.

Another One of Virginia's Finest Fundies - Minister In Skirt Charged With Indecent Exposure

Once again, Virginia is proving itself to be the home of far-right fundie sex perverts. This story (http://www.wgal.com/news/13796466/detail.html) comes from Bristol in the far southwest of the state (about 400 miles directly to the west) and involves yet another preacher man. It's interesting that he apparently likes the same pills the Rush Limbaugh likes so much. Here are highlights:

JOHNSON CITY, Tenn. -- A Baptist minister has been charged in Tennessee with indecent exposure and driving under the influence. Police said 58-year-old Tommy Tester of Bristol, Va., was wearing a skirt when he was arrested last week after allegedly relieving himself in front of children at a car wash.

A report also accuses Tester of offering police officers oral sex and says an open bottle of vodka and empty oxycodone prescription bottle was found in his car when Tester was arrested Friday.

Authorities identified Tester as the minister of Gospel Baptist Church in Bristol and an employee of Christian radio station WZAP-AM, also in Bristol. WZAP issued a statement asking for prayers and saying Tester has been suspended during an investigation.

I wonder what Pastor Tester taught his congregation about homosexuality?