I somehow or other got on the Midwestern Seminary e-mailing list a few years ago, and now I can’t get off. I click here, I click there, it doesn’t help; the stuff just keeps showing-up.
Yesterday I received this important bit of news:
In a few short weeks thousands of Southern Baptists will gather in St. Louis for the annual Southern Baptist Convention. We will be gathering during a trying time in our country’s history. Recent Supreme Court rulings and directives from the White House continue to challenge our religious liberties and distort the very moral fabric of our country. These recent developments have left many wondering how they should think about same-sex marriage, transgenderism, and other cultural developments.
With this in mind, I want to invite you to join us for a special panel and luncheon we are hosting at the SBC entitled:
“God, Gender, And The Gospel: True Answers to Tough Questions”
We have partnered with the Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood to bring what we pray is an incredibly helpful and timely conversation for the church. Join Jason Allen, Owen Strachan, and others as we discuss how churches and individuals should think about this important topic.
The nonsensical premises built into that e-mail are so numerous and casual that the irritation mounts with every sentence.
Let us inventory just a few of the offenses against ordinary intelligence and common decency.
“In a few short weeks thousands of Southern Baptists will gather in St. Louis for the annual Southern Baptist Convention.”
Yes. They will travel from every point of the compass, by every means; some will arrive by plane, some others will arrive by train, still others will drive. Not one time will a single one of them be accosted with a demand for their religious identification. Not one, not once.
The gay people piloting their plane, maintaining their train, patrolling their highways, will do everything possible to ensure they arrive safely. As they travel, their country will be guarded by gays at sea and at remote outposts all around the world; it is not unimaginable that some will die even as the Baptists piss and moan about supposed affronts to their religious liberty.
And what does that affront to their religious liberty consist of? Why, in public spaces they have to treat gays with ordinary decency. They can keep gays out of their home, they can keep gays out of their ridiculous clubs — but in public spaces they have to treat gays just as they would treat anybody else. As they would treat a black person, say.
Do these ignoramuses honestly not know that they are reprising the lunch-counter wars?
“Recent Supreme Court rulings and directives from the White House continue to challenge our religious liberties and distort the very moral fabric of our country.”
Notice how casually the Obergefell decision and transgender guidance from the Departments of Education and Justice are said to touch upon morality.
Oh? How? The only affront to morality that I can see is on the part of those who would presume to constrict their neighbor’s Life, Liberty, and Pursuit of Happiness in the name of old texts written by Bronze Age anonymities. They certainly find no sanction for their indignation in science, which finds that human sexuality is not binary, but is encountered as a continuum of orientations and activity.
“God, Gender, And The Gospel: True Answers to Tough Questions”
We have partnered with the Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood …
Please. We know where this is going: Lots of Leviticus, lots of Me-Tarzan-You-Jane, et cetera, et cetera. This is not a seminar or even a discussion; it’s a pep rally. Gimme an S, gimme a T, gimme an R, gimme an A, gimme an I, gimme a G, gimme an H, gimme a T. What’s that spell? STRAIGHT! YAAAY!
And, if some protesters show-up to complain that C.J. Mahaney and Albert the Odious Pious really shouldn’t be protecting child molesters, it may well be a gay cop who shows-up to stand between them and the poor beleaguered Baptists.
What a smug pack of unaware buffoons. As my mother used to say, these people make me so mad I could spit.