Archive for Religion
Responding to Anti-LGBT Rhetoric in N.C.
Posted by: | CommentsNorth Carolina is in the news again, this time because of an anti-LGBT sermon preached by Pastor Charles Worley of Providence Road Baptist Church in Maiden, N.C. You can see footage of his sermon here.
Make no mistake: the violent theology animating Pastor Worley’s sermon is directly linked to the discriminatory animus at work in Amendment One or the North Carolina statutes that treat LGBT people as second-class citizens.
The violence of Pastor Worley’s message speaks to the evil at the heart of persecution, and it ensnares all of us, including him, including me. It is an evil that seeks to dehumanize people and that seeks to divide communities. It has long lurked in the shadows of religious and political discourse and, periodically, makes itself plainly visible and clearly heard.
What are we to do when such attacks occur? Each of us has an individual choice to make about how to respond.
I often need help cutting through the static of anger and sadness in moments like this. I need help getting to love and, in my own life, I turn to my faith for that help. My faith’s teachings on this point are clear and consistent: no matter how hard it is to do so, we are called to love those who oppose us. There are many reasons for this, not least of which is the fact that my existence is inextricably bound to my enemy’s, whether either one of us likes it or not.
The hard thing right now is to find a way to love Pastor Worley. To do so does not also imply condoning or supporting what he has said. But it does mean choosing to respond to spiritual violence with the only force that can overcome it: love. And it means seeing the violence of his words as an expression of how he too has been wounded by a persecuting system; his theology isn’t just plain wrong, it’s wounded.
But my faith also teaches me that the rhetoric of love is not enough. We must also act to directly resist unjust laws in public life and, as we take action, to express empathy and love towards all those we encounter. This is precisely why and how we take action with the WE DO Campaign and why this campaign will continue growing across the South until we achieve full equality under federal law.
Love has changed the world before and, we dare to believe, it can do so again.
Amendment 4
Posted by: | CommentsAll property shall be held in common; for as many as possess lands or houses shall sell them and bring the money to the the capitol; distribution shall be unto every person according as they have need.
I wonder how many Christian pastors would be out in front of the polls urging people to support passing that because it’s from the Bible. And not in an Old Testament book written half a millennium before Christ, but by people who knew the man and wrote the Gospels and the New Testament.
Act 4:32 ¶ And the multitude of them that believed were of one heart and of one soul: neither said any [of them] that ought of the things which he possessed was his own; but they had all things common.
Act 4:33 And with great power gave the apostles witness of the resurrection of the Lord Jesus: and great grace was upon them all.
Act 4:34 Neither was there any among them that lacked: for as many as were possessors of lands or houses sold them, and brought the prices of the things that were sold,
Act 4:35 And laid [them] down at the apostles’ feet: and distribution was made unto every man according as he had need.
Praise GOPsus!
Posted by: | CommentsOn NPR’s Morning Edition on Monday, Barbara Bradley Hagerty looked at the question of whether Jesus was in favor of small government, as some conservatives believe.
HAGERTY: For other religious conservatives, the Bible is a blueprint for robust capitalism. Recently, on his radio program, “Wallbuilders,” David Barton and a guest discussed Jesus’ parable of the vineyard owner.In it, the owner pays the worker he hires at the end of the day the same wage as he pays the one who begins work in the morning. Many theologians have long interpreted this as God’s grace being available right up to the last minute. But Barton sees the parable as a bar to collective bargaining.
DAVID BARTON: Where were unions in all this? The contract is between an employer and an employee. It’s not between a group. He went out and hired individually the guys he wanted to work.
David. Seriously. Can you hear yourself? You’re telling me that the wandering rabbi, Jesus, told his peasant disciples the parable of the vineyard two thousand years ago as a lesson in avoiding collective bargaining in negotiating employment contracts?
That’s not the Bible you’re reading from, pal. It’s Jesus Shrugged.
HAGERTY: Peter Montgomery at People for the American Way says conservative evangelicals have been arguing for years that the Bible favors a free market system. But since Barack Obama was elected, he says, they’ve shifted into high gear.PETER MONTGOMERY: They are finding biblical justification for opposition to progressive taxation, opposition to unions and collective bargaining, opposition to the minimum wage, opposition even to social welfare spending and Social Security.
Richard Land at the Southern Baptist Convention, for example:
RICHARD LAND: The Bible tells us that socialism and neo-socialism never worked. Confiscatory tax rates never work … People aren’t going to work very hard and very productively unless they get to keep a substantial portion of that which they make for them and for their families.
Right. Second Chronicles 17:35. Richard, can you hear yourself?
What’s next? Jesus died on the cross to make a case for capital punishment?
Praise GOPsus!
On Winning And Values
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No man can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other. Ye cannot serve God and mammon. – Matthew 6:24
President Richard Nixon once observed, “Flexibility is the first principle of politics.” But that brings up something I notice about some right-wing antagonists: how lithe they are in debate.
It is behavior progressive talk show hosts know well, particularly when it comes to hot-button social issues. Right-wing callers dial in hoping to score a few on-air points against the liberal. If one tack isn’t working, they quickly pivot and launch into another argument they hope will get more traction – the first was disposable. And then another, almost as if they are getting paid by the talking point. These exercises are not about the truth, or even about being right. This is about winning.
There is something else that enhances their flexibility: the unholy marriage of Christianity, libertarianism and Austrian economics. What the latter two have to do with Jesus is beyond me, but the order of argument depends on the particular bent of the person doing the arguing. It goes something like this:
The Left: What Needs to Change
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Among the things that need changing in American politics is for liberals to start playing offense instead of letting the right wing set the terms and conditions of debate in this country. Meanwhile, lacking sane candidates and sane policies to run with in 2012, the right wing is throwing every social issue in its arsenal against the wall to see what, if anything, might stick. Well, of course they insist that President Obama’s contraception policy is a liberal assault on religious freedom! If the debate is about contraception (or your personal right to privacy), they lose. If it is about shrinking government small enough to fit in a woman’s vagina, they lose even bigger. Ask Virginia Republican lawmaker Dave Albo, who told Statehouse colleagues how their bill mandating transvaginal ultrasounds for women seeking abortions kept him from getting laid.
Rick Perlstein of Rolling Stone dives into that topic in “Why Obama Needs to Change to Win.” While Andrew Sullivan and others thought the administration had “‘punked’ the GOP on contraception,” Perlstein believes that by being accommodating Obama legitimized his critics’ views when he should have repudiated them. He should have set boundaries, as I noted last week, and again failed to do so. House and Senate Republicans followed up by doubling down on efforts to further restrict access to contraception.
Contraception: It’s A Man Thing, Baby.
Posted by: | CommentsSara Robinson at AlterNet goes all Lysistrata over the contraception issue:
Listen up, guys. We need to talk. Because if you don’t think this is your problem, you are simply not paying attention.
Here’s how this goes down. If contraception goes away, your sex life as you have known it is OVER. (It’s impossible to overstate this.) Say goodbye to one-night-stands, third-date sleepovers, friends-with-benefits, debauched Spring Break memories, Hooters, lap dances, living together before marriage, sleeping in the same bed after marriage, and all those friendly girls whose memory still makes you smile years later.
More here.
We Do Campaign In South Carolina
Posted by: | CommentsThough all of the Republican Presidential candidates were invited to the Reconciliation Prayer Service held in Greenville, SC today, none attended. Three same-sex couples sought marriage licenses at the Greenville County Probate Court, and all three were denied pursuant to the laws of the state. Jasmine Beach-Ferrara, leader of the Campaign for Southern Equality, told participants today, “Your love is holy. Your love is true. We are here today to stand up to laws that are unjust and to call for full equality for all LGBT people.”
On Wednesday, two more couples will seek marriage licenses. Then Thursday a Charleston couples will do the same in that city. Watch for some surprises along the way.
David Forbes at Mountain Xpress wrote an excellent story about CSE and the We Do campaign.
And here’s one of the excellent videos released as part of the We Do campaign.
Bill McKibben at UNCA tonight
Posted by: | CommentsFrom Mountain Xpress:
Bill McKibben, author of The End of Nature, The Global Warming Reader, and other defining books on the environment has become a galvanizing force in American politics. On tour, he will be visiting
Asheville on Wednesday, November 30 to speak at Lipinsky Hall, on the campus of UNCA. The program begins at 7:00 PM.
While McKibben is best known for his environmental writing, there’s a non-environmental essay from 2005 I keep going back to: The Christian paradox: How a faithful nation gets Jesus wrong. McKibben examines that bizarre amalgam of Horatio Alger, Ayn Rand and Jesus Christ that for many Americans passes for Christianity, the same faith that informs McKibben’s environmentalism.
Only 40 percent of Americans can name more than four of the Ten Commandments, and a scant half can cite any of the four authors of the Gospels. Twelve percent believe Joan of Arc was Noah’s wife. This failure to recall the specifics of our Christian heritage may be further evidence of our nation’s educational decline, but it probably doesn’t matter all that much in spiritual or political terms. Here is a statistic that does matter: Three quarters of Americans believe the Bible teaches that “God helps those who help themselves.” That is, three out of four Americans believe that this uber-American idea, a notion at the core of our current individualist politics and culture, which was in fact uttered by Ben Franklin, actually appears in Holy Scripture. The thing is, not only is Franklin’s wisdom not biblical; it’s counter-biblical. Few ideas could be further from the gospel message, with its radical summons to love of neighbor. On this essential matter, most Americans—most American Christians—are simply wrong, as if 75 percent of American scientists believed that Newton proved gravity causes apples to fly up.
[...]
And on and on. The power of the Christian right rests largely in the fact that they boldly claim religious authority, and by their very boldness convince the rest of us that they must know what they’re talking about. They’re like the guy who gives you directions with such loud confidence that you drive on even though the road appears to be turning into a faint, rutted track. But their theology is appealing for another reason too: it coincides with what we want to believe. How nice it would be if Jesus had declared that our income was ours to keep, instead of insisting that we had to share. How satisfying it would be if we were supposed to hate our enemies. Religious conservatives will always have a comparatively easy sell.
Chad Nesbitt Calls For Support
Posted by: | Comments“Former Buncombe County Republican Party chair Chad Nesbitt announced today on WWNC radio’s “The Matt Mittan Show” that he’s planning an Aug. 28 rally in downtown Asheville to protest the Aug. 21 GoTopless rally. He said the rally will be held at 2 p.m. in Pack Square Park and invited the public to attend.”
UPDATE:
You are not going to believe this.
Mumpower and Nesbitt have a website for their Sunday event. The website and event are titled, “Sanity in the Public Square”. The website is adorned with an image of Uncle Sam being shot in the face by liberalism and Islam. To the left of this picture is the telling turn of phrase, “aberrant exhibitionist ideology”.
