Abortion, suicide, homosexuality, addiction, child slavery…Christ is the only hope for this depravity.
Looking over the Exodus Freedom Conference website (archive), this quote really jumps out. It’s from a band called Take No Glory (the members call themselves musicianaries). Exodus lists them as special guests performing in the Wednesday evening general session.
I listened to one of their songs called “Straight.” From the scripture references (Romans 1:18-27) it appears the title does mean straight as in heterosexual. Subject matter aside, I can’t say much for the music or the lyrics. There must be better bands that Exodus could afford.
What really grabs me is that, here we are again, it’s 2010 and Exodus is still putting quotes like that on their literature, and still inviting groups that say this, without someone saying “hey, that’s really lame and offensive, let’s not do that.”
I hate to pile on, especially when it seems Alan made a decent policy statement just last week, but can Exodus be this dumb? Or am I missing the point entirely and this really is how they think and it’s just that they occasionally slip and let it show?
Your take?
Same old, same old. Lumping in homosexuality with all manner of exploitation, perversion and abuse is nothing new. I’m sure in general Exodus are trying to get away from that kind of rhetoric, but I fear the change is merely cosmetic.
“child slavery?” jeez, i thought by now inflammatory rhetoric like that was left to the fringes where Paul Cameron lives.
Of course, it doesn’t matter HOW “depraved” the sin is. Their policy of “sin is sin” will allow them to compare the rape of physically handicapped children to being attracted to the same sex romantically without a twinge of guilt or questioning. after all, sin is sin! no sin is any worse than any other! …they say.
I suspect that would be their defense as well. However, focusing on just a few “sins” is then contradictory. And depraved is a loaded word and they must know that — we reserve it for the worst offenders among us. An honest attempt to make the point might have been “Fallen humanity… Christ is the only hope…”
Instead you have a conference by an organization which focuses on homosexuality as a sin, tells people they are a safe place to come talk about it and they then compare it to abortion, suicide, addition and child slavery. And the message of that song is obviously that you can’t know God if you are gay.
So many contradictions.
My take?
As “one of world’s leading experts on homosexuality”, Chambers sure acts unqualified.
It takes all of 5 seconds to find the Exodus blabfest has the endorsement of Ken Hutcherson. Again.
(I guess his bff Scott Lively was too busy.)
Exodus got caught red-handed on Uganda, and widely condemned, in a storm of negative publicity. Despite 16 months of effort, they failed to lie their way out from under it all.
Exodus and Alan are unchanged, as the continued relationship with Hutcherson shows.
But what we know now is at what point they will crack.
David: Addtion really isn’t a sin, but fractions are dirty. So saith the Book of Numbers.
I’ve always liked English history and the dramatic adaptions around the period of The Tudors.
The saga of Henry the VIII and his daughter, Elizabeth I remind all over again, the abuses of Christian leadership, the split from the Catholic Church and establishment of the Anglican Church of England by Henry.
Even as the Americas were being established, European men brought vast ‘divine rule’ to the illiterate masses making steady progression here.
The determined way that Exodus lists their ‘concerns’ and what they define as sin or deviance, all over again…asserts male centric and divinely defined attributes in others they believe themselves the only people qualified to police and control.
Much of which is still very much and extension of misogyny, or misunderstanding of the nature of organic issues like substance addiction, or clinical mental illness.
These absolutely cannot be cured, controlled or addressed by religious belief and discipline. Indeed, such situations are exacerbated by it.
In much of human history, especially with regard to the power of the Catholic Church and it’s influence throughout Europe, women, the mentally ill, homosexuals and people who happened to be of higher intellectual thought processes and literacy…were punished, harshly, tortured and executed for it.
Those who encouraged the masses to ‘read for themselves’ and believe ‘as their hearts would tell them’, not the priests and controlling noblemen, were jailed and killed as heretics.
There is a lot that goes on that is so chillingly similar. At the extreme, you get situations like casual street violence from an ignorant thug.
But not long ago and still, peace officers, acting on behalf of the local government, can be very cruel towards the LGBT.
Women, making inroads into male dominated establishments, find themselves still talked down to and examined with excess scrutiny. Think Elena Kagan…who is simple a woman of exceptional intellect and accomplishment and who doesn’t look like Barbie.
The Supreme Court has had a dearth of women for so long as it is.
But I digress a bit.
Exodus represents the old guard of people who still thinks that Jesus and God…intangible compared to an established reality, deserves to define the lives of those who are kept at a distance from the very things that WOULD help them most in their own lives.
SELF DETERMINATION, protected by the standards of equality that the Constitution and Bill of Rights well established.
Besides, those documents were written in a language and virtually on a single sheet of parchment, that most people can read for themselves and are free to on their own.
Reading the Bible, it’s meaning and interpretation has been the domain almost exclusively of men. It’s enforcement by men….and it’s very creation, by men.
Establishing themselves as the officers of it’s implementation and restricting it’s reading to themselves as well for a very long time.
I don’t think it’s healthy, and hasn’t been, to put so much trust in someone, and something that’s given so much power to only one half of humanity, and put the other half of humanity in inferior socio/political hierarchies.
The people in Exodus would prefer we forget all that. Would prefer that this trust still be maintained at the expense of people actually knowing what the lives of gay people are really like.
What the lives of women and what gender really is among humankind requires or defines within individuals.
Exodus is notorious for defining gender so narrowly, and unrealistically, their definition of what heterosexuality or homosexuality is, lacks intellectual strength.
The long, strange, sad trip of religious abuse is something they’d like to forget. And how that abuse is a tradition against only a certain group of people.
There is no caution on their part to reject repetition of this abuse. Not even any examination of how religion damages gay lives most of all, because how they define it is incorrect.
So therefore won’t be addressed correctly.
One has to apply a degree of independence, equal treatment and consciousness to allowing individual SELF RELIANCE.
The addicted, the mentally ill, or those with obsessive paraphillias…after a fashion will lose that self reliance.
The abuse of another human being to the extent that can’t have that self reliance is the difference and what defines what Exodus does AS abuse.
It’s plain that those who establish religious based political action, worry they can’t have power or financial benefit if they don’t.
Which, should be anathema to a decent religious person in the first place. Having personal interest, and those who share it communally, should be enough.
Forcing the government to determine whether or not someone believes and ingratiating during a time of vulnerability, is opportunism at it’s worst.
It’s hard to respect anyone who uses their religious belief as a virus, instead of a personal balm, is suspect to me.
Always will be.
And the damage done to the self reliance of gay people, and the lack of change in the lives of women everywhere…is a case in point of why this isn’t about charity at all, but power.