April 13

*Guest Blog* Equal Opportunity Haters: The Short List

Reprinted with permission from The Letter

by Rev. James W. Hensley

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“God Hates Fags”gets all the press but Westboro Baptist Church and Fred Phelps are not the only anti-gay hate groups out there. The Southern Poverty Law Center (http://www.splcenter.org/index.jsp) has compiled a list of eleven groups, including Westboro, who excel at slander, fabrication and hysterical homophobia. Here’s the list.

Traditional Values Coalition http://www.traditionalvalues.org/

Abiding Truth Ministries http://www.abidingtruth.com/

Chalcedon Foundation http://www.chalcedon.edu/

Family Research Institute http://www.familyresearchinst.org/

American Vision http://www.americanvision.org/

Illinois Family Institute http://www.illinoisfamily.org/

Heterosexuals Organized for a Moral Environment http://www.home60515.com/

Westboro Baptist Church http://www.godhatesfags.com/

The School of Christian Activism http://ngteam.org/index.htm (in Russian)

Mass Resistance http://www.massresistance.org/

Watchmen on the Walls http://www.watchmenonthewalls.com/

Why should you care? It’s not like venom, spleen and rumblings from bigots is new news. I’ll tell you. You should care because other groups, groups that don’t make the hate groups list, use publications and information from the Hateful 11.

Right here in Kentucky we have C.R.A.V.E. (Christians Reviving America’s Values http://www.christians4america.com/index.htm) and their Pastor Don Swarthout in Lexington. They work with Abiding Truth Ministries. And then there’s my personal favorite, Answers in Genesis (http://www.answersingenesis.org/), the creationism museum in Boone County. Evidently staff trades between Answers in Genesis and American Vision are routine.

You should also care because groups like the American Family Association of Kentucky, that’s the notorious Frank Simon MD’s group (http://www.afaky.com/ ) and the Family Foundation of Kentucky (Kent Ostrander, Martin Cothran, David Edmunds, et al. http://www.kentuckyfamily.org/ ) routinely spout the lies and distortions of the Hateful 11, often without attribution, in order to sell their bill of goods. It’s all snake oil mixed with a little bait and switch.

What can you do?

First, when you hear these groups cited point out that they’re extremist hate groups. No one considers the KKK “just another opinion” when issues of race, ethnicity or religion are being discussed. Yet lobbyists for anti-gay legislation such as the amendment to the Kentucky consitution defining marriage and the recently defeated No Gay Foster Parents bill will use Scott Lively (Watchmen on the Walls and the Center for Christian Activism) and his truly excrebable tome Seven Steps to Recruit-Proof Your Child: A Parent’s Guide to Protecting Children from Homosexuality and the “Gay” Movement as well as Paul Cameron’s (Family Research Institute) discredited and mostly fabricated “research” to give lobbyists and legislators cover when they spout hair-raising bigotry.

Second, don’t get trapped into trying to rebutt arguments rooted in hate. You can’t discuss creationism rationally with the Answers in Genesis or the Flat Earth Society (http://www.theflatearthsociety.org/). NARTH (National Association for Research & Therapy of Homosexuality, http://www.narth.com/index.html) doesn’t care that “gender disorientation pathology” is a fiction that has never appeared in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) of the American Psychiatric Association. It’s useful when there’s gay bashing to be done.

Third, if NAMBLA is mentioned it’s already to late. There is nothing that can be done or said that will derail a bigot once they land in pedophilia territory. The fact that the vast majority of abusers are heterosexual makes no difference. Smile stiffly and walk away.


Rev. James W. Hensley
Progressive Pathways Fellowship
http://www.progressivepathways.org/
http://clamourunderbridge.typepad.com/

Category: current events, Personal | Comments Off on *Guest Blog* Equal Opportunity Haters: The Short List
July 18

Guest Blog: Clamour Underbridge by Rev. Jim Hensley

Jim is a friend of mine who writes a column for The Letter, Louisville’s GLBT newspaper. I really enjoy his essay and asked if I could share. Below is the Clamour Underbridge for July. Past articles can be read at http://clamourunderbridge.typepad.com/clamour_underbridge/

~M

Without Further Ado…

CLAMOUR UNDERBRIDGE

What’s in a Name?

Wedding bells are ringing in California for same-sex and opposite-sex couples.  The clamour is deafening.  You would think it would all be anti-climactic since California already had statewide domestic partnerships.  You would be wrong.  It seems that the little song I learned from Sesame Street is correct.  “One of these things is not like the others.” The Supreme Court of the state of California did not find any logical reason to call “an officially recognized and protected family” one thing for same-sex couples and a different thing for opposite-sex couples.  It’s the name that matters.

The Supreme Court of California failed to address the entrenched and entangled relationship legal marriage has with religion and the churches.  We’ll come back to that.  It’s important.

Let’s hop in the way back machine for a moment and revisit the clamour from another Supreme Court decision.  That one was Loving v. Virginia.  Ring a bell?  It’s from the Supreme Court of the United States and was handed down in 1967.  That decision struck down the Commonwealth of Virginia’s marriage laws that were based on race.  Anti-miscegenation laws were all the rage back in the day.  It was ever so necessary to protect the sanctity of marriage from interracial couples.  Kentucky’s last bite of the miscegenation apple was in 1932 when our legislature, in its wisdom, forbade marriages between whites and “negroes or mulattoes.”  Co-habitation was also illegal.  The punishment was $1000 fine (big money for 1932) and 12 months imprisonment if done “knowingly.”

Here’s what the “activist” court of 1967 said when they overturned the bigoted marriage laws of Virginia, Kentucky and a number of other states:

Marriage is one of the “basic civil rights of man,” fundamental to our very existence and survival… To deny this fundamental freedom on so unsupportable a basis as the racial classifications embodied in these statues, classifications so directly subversive of the principle of equality at the heart of the Fourteenth Amendment, is surely to deprive all the State’s citizens of liberty without due process of law.  The Fourteenth Amendment requires that the freedom of choice to marry not be restricted by invidious racial discrimination.  Under our Constitution, the freedom to marry, or not marry, a person of another race resides with the individual and cannot be infringed by the State.

The outrage was tremendous.  Inter-racial marriage interfered with “God’s arrangement” of the races on separate continents.  God “separated the races” and “did not intend for them to mix.” It was all very predictable and very sad.  The great state of Alabama fought back by waiting until the year 2000 before taking their inter-racial marriage law off the books.

How very much like the denunciations and outrage over the California Supreme Court Decision?  “God made Adam and Eve not Adam and Steve.”  “Gay Marriage… The Final Abomination.” How predictable and very much beside the point.  Marriage is a civil contract enforced by the state and entered into between two parties.  “God” is rarely invoked to co-sign loans, liens and other contracts.  How odd that this one requires the Almighty’s seal of approval.

It’s all in the name.  Marriage is something that happens in church.  California and a few other states (Vermont, Connecticut, New Jersey, New Hampshire, Oregon, Hawaii, the District of Columbia, Maine, and Washington) tried to keep the church crowd happy by separating church marriage from state civil unions or domestic partnerships.  It’s not working.  Civil unions and domestic partnerships don’t convey the rights and responsibilities of marriage and are mostly ignored by Federal agencies, disapproving businesses and other groups that have a heterosexist agenda.  And in the state of California it was very clear to the Supreme Court that a domestic partnership was separate and unequal to marriage.

Let those wedding bells ring.  The clamour is music to my ears.

~~

While he is co-pastor of Progressive Pathways Fellowship in Louisville at www.progressivepathways.org, opinions expressed by Father Jim do not usually represent the official policy of the church.  Email for Father Jim or Clamour Underbridge may be directed to fatherjimppf@gmail.com. Visit http://clamourunderbridge.typepad.com to post your story about the Queandom or leave a comment.

Category: current events, Personal | Comments Off on Guest Blog: Clamour Underbridge by Rev. Jim Hensley