{"id":6079,"date":"2012-06-01T08:28:26","date_gmt":"2012-06-01T12:28:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/?p=6079"},"modified":"2012-06-01T10:07:52","modified_gmt":"2012-06-01T14:07:52","slug":"homosexuality-hatred","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/2012\/06\/01\/homosexuality-hatred\/","title":{"rendered":"Homosexuality, hatred"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" frameborder=\"0\" height=\"115\" src=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/d2n7vSPwhSU\" width=\"260\"><\/iframe> For a long time, opponents of same-sex marriage &#8212; and gay rights in general &#8212; have managed to put a friendly face on their efforts.<\/p>\n<p>With the exception of a few zany\u00a0 whackos, like the Westboro Baptist Church in Kansas, the message has been &#8220;hate the sin, love the sinner.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>The public image has been one of healing, of redemption, and of dialogue.\u00a0 And for many conservative Christians, that&#8217;s an accurate and fair portrait.<\/p>\n<p>A lot of people who struggle with the idea of gay marriage aren&#8217;t bigots.\u00a0 They&#8217;re grappling reasonably and earnestly with a major societal shift.<\/p>\n<p>But privately, away from the mainstream conversation, the tone of the anti-homosexual movement has been far more toxic, often straying from the territory of legitimate culture war difference into the realm of pure bigotry.<\/p>\n<p>That darker vein been exposed recently, due to an effort by gay and progressive advocates to &#8220;out&#8221; conservative religious leaders who advocate violence, hatred and repression of gays and lesbians in their communities.<\/p>\n<p>The latest painful episode is a recording made of a sermon at the Independent Baptist Church in Oakland, Maryland, where Pastor Dennis Leatherman acknowledged to his congregation a desire to eradicate gays.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;First of all, there is a danger of reacting in the flesh, of responding  not in a scriptural, spiritual way, but in a fleshly way,&#8221; Leatherman preached.<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>&#8220;Kill them all.  Right? I will be very honest with you. My flesh kind of likes that  idea, but it grieves the Holy Spirit. It violates Scripture. It is  wrong.&#8221;<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>This follows on the release of audio of a sermon delivered by Curtis Knapp, pastor of the New Hope Baptist Church in Seneca, Kansas, who goes a step further, defending the idea of killing gays.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;They should be put to death &#8212; that&#8217;s what happened in Israel.\u00a0 That&#8217;s why homosexuality wouldn&#8217;t have grown in Israel.\u00a0 It tends to limit conversions.\u00a0 It tends to limit people coming out of the closet,&#8221;  Knapp argued.<\/p>\n<p>He goes on to insist that scripture actually supports the idea of government-backed extermination of gays and lesbians.<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>&#8220;Oh, so you&#8217;re saying we should go out and start killing them? No, I&#8217;m  saying the government should. They won&#8217;t, but they should.&#8221;<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>These aren&#8217;t isolated incidents, nor are they limited to tiny, fringe churches.\u00a0 North Carolina pastor Charles L. Worley of the Providence Road Baptist Church, responding to President Barack Obama&#8217;s support of gay\u00a0 marriage, offered his view last month that gays should be quarantined in special ghettos.<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>&#8220;I figured out a way to get rid of all the lesbians and queers but I couldn&#8217;t get it passed the Congress.\u00a0 Build a great, big, large fence &#8212; 150 or 100 mile long &#8212; put all  the lesbians in there,&#8221; Worley suggests.\u00a0 &#8220;Fly over and drop some food.\u00a0 Do the same thing for the queers and the homosexuals  and have that fence electrified so they can&#8217;t get out&#8230;and you know  what, in a few years, they&#8217;ll die out.\u00a0 Do you know why? They can&#8217;t  reproduce!&#8221;<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>His congregation responds with a hearty Amen, particularly when Pastor Worley describes Mr. Obama as &#8220;a babykiller and a homosexual lover.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>This is ugly stuff.\u00a0 And it&#8217;s healthy that the scab is being pulled off so that conservative and traditionalist Americans, in particular, can grapple with the vein of hatred, fear and ignorance that shapes this debate.<\/p>\n<p>Perhaps the most disturbing image in this new series of &#8220;outings&#8221; is video of a little boy in the Apostolic Truth Tabernacle Church in Indiana.\u00a0 In a sweet, innocent voice, he sings &#8220;ain&#8217;t no homos gonna make it to heaven.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>The congregation stands, applauds and cheers wildly.\u00a0 It&#8217;s fair to debate what this kind of thing represents, but it sure isn&#8217;t Christian love.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>For a long time, opponents of same-sex marriage &#8212; and gay rights in general &#8212; [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[6548,4861,4790],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6079"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6079"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6079\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6079"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6079"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6079"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}