A Baptist preacher gave parents in his church a “special dispensation” to beat their effeminate sons last Sunday.
Pastor Sean Harris of Berean Church, Fayetteville, NC, made the remarks in a sermon in favour of Amendment One, a proposed law to make marriage between one man and one woman “the only domestic legal union that shall be valid or recognized” in the state of North Carolina.
Harris’s audience laughed as he advised giving a four-year-old son a “good punch” if he “acts a little girlish.” Listen to the nauseating audio (courtesy of Jeremy at Good As You), or read the transcript below:
So your little son starts to act a little girlish when he is four years old, and instead of squashing that like a cockroach and saying, “Man up, son, get that dress off you and get outside and dig a ditch, because that is what boys do,” you get out the camera and you start taking pictures of Johnny acting like a female, and then you upload it to YouTube and everybody laughs about it, and the next thing you know, this dude, this kid is acting out childhood fantasies that should have been squashed.
Can I make it any clearer? Dads, the second you see your son dropping the limp wrist, you walk over there and crack that wrist. Man up. Give him a good punch. Okay? You are not going to act like that. You were made by God to be a male and you are going to be a male. And when your daughter starts acting to butch you reign her in. And you say: “Oh, no, sweetheart. You can play sports. Play them to the glory of God. But sometimes you are going to act like a girl and walk like a girl and talk like a girl and smell like a girl and that means you are going to be beautiful. You are going to be attractive. You are going to dress yourself up.”
You say, “Can I take charge like that as a parent?”
Yeah, you can. You are authorized. I just gave you a special dispensation this morning to do that.
The pastor has now apologized, saying he was joking about the physical violence. He reaffirmed his view that gender nonconformity is ungodly. Presumably emotional abuse and psychological bullying would be the more appropriate way for fathers to shame their gay sons into manning up.
Of course, he also had harsh words for butch daughters, but his advice on how to convert lesbian daughters seems merciful compared to that dished out by a Cleveland, Ohio, radio host last week. DJ Dominic Dieter had this to say to a father who suspected his daughter was gay after he caught her kissing a girl: “You should get one of your friends to screw your daughter straight.”
Dieter’s ugly advice is hardly original, and nor is Pastor Sean Harris’s. Girls as young as 13 have been subjected to “corrective rape” in South Africa, just as effeminate kids the world over know what it is to be physically punished by their parents and their peers. Neither approach is anything new — you just hope not to hear it from your pastors and radio personalities.
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Update: Listen to Pastor Sean Harris’s non-apology here. After psychologically bullying gays by suggesting they be physically beaten, he says he has never advocated psychological bullying or physical beating. Most of the “retraction and response” is taken up with complaining that his statements were taken out of context and misinterpreted. He’s sorry that some people were “unintentionally offended.” And don’t forget God really, really hates gender nonconformity and homosexuality. And that, not “beat your kids,” was what he meant when — after asking, “Can I make it any clearer?” — he recommended cracking wrists and giving out punches.
The apology (which is more an apology in the academic sense of a defence) means nothing. As someone Harris professes to follow once said, “Out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks.” You don’t say such things unless it comes from a deep place. And those ugly, ugly ways of thinking don’t disappear just because you were cornered into saying sorry.
As predictable as the sunrise, Dr. Michael Brown and Matt Barber BOTH have articles up at
http://www.townhall.com
Complaining about what an intolerant bully Dan Savage is for the way he spoke to high school journalism students.
If there were an accurate score keeper for all this, according to Brown and Barber, it’s gay kids who gang up on straight kids and torment them to the point of suicide. You’d think that it’s gays that ran churches that encouraged a child be violently punished for displaying any mannerisms that might be gay. You’d think that it’s gay people that had SO much political clout, that it’s het people that can’t marry or care for their loved ones.
Dan Savage is not polite all the time, he’s profane and not patient with what is going on, for real, with children harming each other the way they do.
His grief over the suicides of so many kids is genuine and their deaths utterly preventable tragedies.
Neither Brown nor Barber headed a campaign of compassion and encouragement for kids at risk.
But they have ALL the time in the world to play the VICTIM card as if those hs kids Savage scolded are in danger of a beat down, dropping out or having their clergy abandon them or parents kick them out of their homes.
Sometimes I don’t blame gay folks for losing patience with the constant, I mean CONSTANT bs they are confronted with.
Why be so nice and patient ALL THE TIME when it’s LIFE or DEATH for some kids?
It’s not like gay folks get their due credit for such NON VIOLENT responses to whatever outrage one of their number has suffered.
Even when it’s a child.
Savage didn’t encourage VIOLENCE against those kids, he scolded them for being cowardly and without a sense of duty to the reality at hand.
BIG difference.
Again, a difference that Barber and Brown care nothing about in order to smear every gay person possible.
As sad as this is, it helps me be realistic about people who don’t put much thought into what they advise others. It gives me fuel to think about ways to reach that “deep” part in people. I agree that confrontation does not always yield sincere fruits of apology. Gender stereotype conformity isn’t something the Gospel is concerned with. Though I’m willing to be wrong.
This is the 21st century. Our species has moved, evolved and been able to progress and understand a great deal more about ourselves and each other than those primitive, barbaric Biblical era cultures EVER dreamed of!
C’ MON!
Even the religious are benefiting more from the Constitution and Bill of Rights (they certainly fall back on that legal definition when convenient), more than what any interpretation of religious texts has.
Gender, the physical and expressive has ALWAYS been fluid! One thing that a great deal of all of this insanity has come from, is the exceptional need of IDENTITY.
Know who one is, is a powerful and sometimes all consuming aspect of cultures and individuals.
And primitive cultures had to arrange their social networks according to it, and how to strengthen their wealth and survival of their own clans and tribes.
Women and men were forced, by ARTIFICIAL standards of gender, to conform in order to be IDENTIFIED.
And in some ways, the stricter the enforcement, the less individuality was and still is possible.
In fundamental communities, there is very little uniqueness in dress. And in the case of all covering burquas, for example, completely erase identity or make it impossible on a casual basis.
This kind of extreme control over one’s individual family or tribal members is utterly unnecessary.
Same for virgin female marriages (in order to assure the identity of the baby as the father’s) and so on.
Another example is abandonment of orphans and widows or outright killing them. These were vulnerable members of a tribe with no family, or means of identifying them.
So idealizing what are primitive practices in identity and familial connection is less and less the mark of a civilized, progressed and compassionate society.
Members of NOM, for example, make much of the biological nuclear family as deserving of all the legal and governmental deference because to them, adopted children, the children of gay parents or those who are kept from marrying, are left in the very social limbo through which more primitive cultures abused others.
And this in fact, is what happens to gay couples and parents.
Left without legal protections, gay adults, and/or their children are de facto wards of the state.
Why anyone keeps treating Biblical cultures as if THE most, enlightened and morally gifted is not only strange, but stupid and dangerous.
It’s OUR faith in equal justice, the rights of the individual and their potential that’s made the difference.
And any religious people who selectively refuse to acknowledge that, are trying to relegate distinct, harmless members of the human race to an archaic standard of living they themselves never had to, nor would.
No, people DON’T THINK. And there is NO EXCUSE for it. Gays and lesbians have lived in all of human life and history, progressing right along with everyone else.
They didn’t just recently show up to challenge the moral values of their fellow human beings, they’ve ALWAYS participated in what time has required us to.
If men and women were SO compatible, then why so much brutality against females through the ages and now?
I firmly see and can make a case for homosexuality and transgenderism as precisely the tempering, equalizing factor between genders. Because at their extremes, women especially are violated, their children and their stability threatened all the time.
How is THAT supposed to advance the better angels of the human race?
It goes back to tribalism and clannishness and primitive determination to destroy who is considered without one.
Requiring gays and lesbians to participate in all the responsibility of being a citizen, with NONE of the same rights and protections, IS a form of slavery. It’s not that much of a stretch to see it that way.
Shame on any clergy or our modern age demanding primitive and barbaric treatment of ANY members of the human family.
And ultimately, we ARE all family. Our DNA says so.
Most homophobic ‘straight’ men are just weak minded repressed gays. They allow other people to dictate to them how they should live their lives. They are angry that gays step up and dare to be themselves; that gays have the courage to withstand all the psychological and physical abuse the weak chicken hearted ‘straight’ (the repressed gay) people hurl against them.
The proof that they are weak chicken hearted people is this. Multiple ‘straight’ people will gang up on one gay person to beat him down. The proof that they are repressed gays is the fact that they are interested in what another man’s penis is doing. The greatest proof is when these ‘straight’ men force a gay person to give them oral and/or anal sex to teach the gay person a lesson. A ‘real’ straight man would be thinking about all the extra women that need to be satisfied and not another man’s penis.
Psychology says a person focuses on that which interests him. Homophobes focus on penises. I was at the spa and this guy said “I can’t stand those f—king fags.” In the locker room, he stared at every penis that swung by. For the dudes that hang around in a group, if one of you wants the group to beat up a gay, he’s the hidden gay in your group. If you’re also a hidden gay, get some beer and you can use that as an excuse the next morning until you are ready to be honest with yourselves. Women, if your man focuses on gays when he should be focusing on you, well…, I’m just saying.