Marvin Olasky’s World Magazine has taken to attacking the United Methodist Church for simply allowing the gay-friendly Methodist group, Reconciling Congregations, to use its facilities.
Apparently because Reconciling Congregations holds a differing opinion on one spiritual matter WORLD Magazine deems it “highly inappropriate to rent those facilities.” Perhaps only those Methodists who agree with church policy on all issues and don’t see to create positive change should be allowed to use their own church’s facilities?
All I ask is that you take a moment and point out the spiritual hypocrisy, elitism and ugliness of this view to WORLD Magazine by posting a comment to their blog.
Update: To be clear, the purpose of this is not to get into arguments with the comment trolls on WORLD’s site but rather to stand up to the editor and let them know you don’t appreciate their publication’s espousal and defense of bigotry.
That blog really upset me.
I wonder how the Methodists folks posting there can have such a clear rule about gays “living in sin” and just ignore the fact that their church allows divorcees to remarry freely.
I was also shocked to hear Cameronesque stats quoted by supposed loving Christians.
DL Foster’s comments on that blog also saddened me. His over generalizations and completely unkind words don’t seem to me to be part of the loving ministry of God that he seems to be a part of. On his blog, Foster says that the gay movement does have some good qualities. I wonder if he would care to name just one good quality it has, just to show he is being honest.
I think Foster’s words there and on his own blog do more to turn me away from Christianity than they do to draw me towards it. Maybe Chad Thompson’s book could help him?
Looking at this, I realized again why I am not a Christian. The nasty back bitting. The overall attack method. The general lack of empathy. Let alone compassion.
So,having read the whole thread, I must congratulate those who went out to slay dragons. And ended up getting slimed.
A thought from my first spiritual teacher comes to mind. She always said: Christianity is an attempt to have religion without having ethics. Which I feel the linked to blog amply demonstrates.
Just to let you know, from what I have read elsewhere, I’m wondering who is sponsoring Olasky’s web site. I recognize that it costs pennies to mount sites like this
Do you think that Foster accuses me of Christian bashing or hating because I don’t WANT to be Christian?
Is this a crime or something to embrace another spiritual value that is caring of other’s protections and justice?
I saw a funny movie….”Diary of a Mad Black Woman’ featuring Tyler Perry as “Ma’dea” about the funniest drag persona I’ve seen on screen.
If Perry is straight, more power to him for defying stereotype in that way.
Anyway, Ma’dea explains to her sister and niece why the Bible is hard for her to sit with much..
“Jesus had just too much to say! I can’t remember all that!”.
Sometimes it doesn’t get more real than that.
I just want to add the the UM church is divided on this issue. There are very many open and affirming congregations. Those of us on the open side of things are trying to work out ways for all of us to commune together. The other side seems to want to lock out any dissent.
TA,
I sincerely doubt that Chad Thompson’s book will help at all.
Indeed, Chad validates what Foster claims in many ways.
Chad supports the ‘choice’ of leaving homosexuality and cites Joseph Nicolosi and Satinover as valid experts on homosexuality and it’s political impact.
Although Chad calls for compassion and care for gay people who don’t or can’t change, his words ring hollow as long as he supports repression of homosexuality and denies the attendant and destructiveness the legacy of repression represents.
There are degrees of support for repression.
Chad represents a lower level of it, and DL Foster is different and agrees with traditional repression, but it’s still bad.
Nuance is important, but easily lost in public discourse on the subject and Chad Thompson’s book fails to address nuance.
World magazine blog is, frankly, a hypocritical joke which continually posts gay-baiting topics that draw comments from a deeply intolerant, fundamentalist crowd, many of whom espouse characteristically Christian reconstructionist points of view on gays and gay issues. It is no secret that many Christian posters on World Mag Blog resort to pogrom-like hate language when making reference to gay people – language, in short, that differs little in style or content from the rhetoric used by Nazi propagandists to ultimately justify eliminating the jewish population and other “social undesirables.” Needless to say, reading this sort of language, coupled with the vacuously toxic Christian-style sentiments about “loving the sinner, hating the sin” so typical on the World Mag Blog site, only underscores the increasingly unsettling perception of how dangerously schizoid the “moral” rationale of hate has become among the Christian extremist population. But such is “love” when spoken with the forked tongue of snakes.
Not to put too fine a point on the practice of “moral profanity” over at World Mag Blog (for indeed, anti-gay hate language is their morally-endorsed standard of profanity there), I should also mention that Marvin Olasky, the editor-in-chief of World Magazine, is a jewish convert to Christianity. Amazing to think that Olasky, whose own family tree no doubt contained members who met their untimely ends in the gas chambers of 1940’s Europe, would allow the fascist language of pogrom to be used in so blunt and heavy-handed a fashion on his own website, but such is the perversely dim-sighted, distorted nature of cult-like religious righteousness in our times. Olasky, who purportedly coined the phrase “compassionate conservatism,” is a study in self-delusion, both morally misguided and blind to the history of hate politics, a history which both underpins his consciousness as a jew and which he now smugly, deceitfully simulates for his own crass, ideological ends in attacking gays.
Olasky is an ideological grotesque, though he is hardly unique, functioning much in the manner of a DL Foster, the black anti-gay religious bigot. Both have failed to absorb the true, broader lessons of the history of hate while simultaneously perpetuating its most vile abuses. Both are tragic examples of a profound moral failure of character; scoundrels who wrap their moral blindness in the false language of hypocritical righteousness.
Dano, Olasky (who, as you correctly point out, is an ex-Jew) has found himself a new gig. Nothing more, nothing less. He has merely found a new way to sell ads to the plebes.
I got a newsletter from Jewish pundit Rabbi Schmuely Boteach.
He’s going to be a speaker at “Justice Tuesday”
yes…the big blowout conference of every religious right org and representatives.
There have been times he’s defended certain issues around sexual repression.
For example, he’s written in support of marriage for priests and non violence against gay people.
But that’s shy of marriage equality-something that the FRC and FOTF clearly are against.
I wonder what face he will be showing this conference.
It’s all quite clear that so many people in leadership of this country can change faces, especially after they’ve taken campaign contributions and votes from gay supporters.
Bush in 2000 comes to mind, Kerry in 2004.
Who do we trust?