There’s a direct link between this kind of hypocritical, smiley-faced, bibled-based homophobia…
…and incidents like this:
Carroll County Sheriff’s Office Capt. Shane Taylor said investigators were called to the house at about 8:30 p.m. Saturday night. There they found Staples, who lived in his parent’s converted pool house at the address. He said he had heard a loud noise and then found the rock and note.
“Our investigators recovered the evidence and began the process of developing suspects,” Taylor said. However, because of the nature of the investigation, Taylor said it wouldn’t be appropriate to talk about the specifics of the note. “Then at 5:50 a.m. Sunday, we were called again with the residence on fire,” Taylor said. “In my time here, I’ve never seen anything quite like this.”
Staples’ mother, Wanda Morris, said the note read “we know you are gay,” and was laced with anti-gay slurs too graphic for print and made the threat that Staples would “burn in hell.”
Staples is disabled and, according to his mother, hardly ever leaves his house. He’s now gone into hiding.
And for the millionth time: We’ve learned to ignore what the bible says about women, virginity, masturbation, slavery, pork, lobster, beards, etc., etc., etc. We going to have to learn to ignore what the bible says about homosexuality.
This kind of discrimination does not even exist on Tatooine!
I have to say that of all of the possible ways he could have approached this, aside from saying certain passages in the bible should be ignored and that homosexuality is ok, he did a pretty good job. He criticized churches for focusing on one or two sins (abortion?) and questioned whether god considers one sin worse than another.
I think it’s a stretch to criticize this guy for inciting, causing, or even creating a climate that allows gay-bashing. He’s a preacher who never says anything negative. I do question his motives and sincerity; one doesn’t win a tv audience and their money based on preaching negativity. But the guy is about as positive as a conservative Christian can be.
There will always be people who shove logic and rationality aside in order to “believe” in god and the bible. Of those, a number are going to believe a literal or classic interpretation of the bible. The best we can expect of those people is to embrace Joel’s approach.
The bible was written by men, rewritten by men and will be rewritten by men again. Since people have shown that they are willing to believe in every form, version, edition, rewrite, translation and reprinting of that ancient piece of prose, I see no reason why they will quit any time soon. So isn’t better if someone with 8 million viewers tells his flock to stop picking on gay people alone and treat gay folk the same as folks who eat shrimp, married people who divorce and people who speak poorly of their parents. That is, that all people have sin, some sins may be worse than others, but don’t fixate on one sin in someone else while ignoring 900 other sins of your own.