The largest Protestant denomination in the United States, the Southern Baptist Convention was founded in 1845 in protest against growing anti-slavery sentiment in America. For most of the 20th century the SBC served as spiritual ground-zero for Christian white supremacists.
In 1995 the SBC finally apologized for its appalling past, and announced to the world that they were no longer racist.
Last month the SBC elected its first African-American president.
The next day the SBC overwhelmingly passed a resolution affirming the belief that marriage is “the exclusive union of one man and one woman” and that “all sexual behavior outside of marriage is sinful.” The resolution further asserted that “homosexuality does not qualify as a class meriting special protections, like race and gender.”
Once can’t help but wonder how long it will be before the SBC elects its first gay president. I’m going to guess fifty years (though it may not take that long). I’m further going to imagine that at that time we will see something like this release issued from SBC’s headquarters:
The Southern Baptist Convention
Heroicaly battling history since 1845
July 2, 2062
The Southern Baptist Convention herbey announces that just yesterday we elected a DEFINITE HOMOSEXUAL as the new President of us.
This move tells the world that the Southern Baptist Convention have now officially ended our perceeved discrimination against
darkiesbaby-makersjewsthe gays.“Despite all the hangings and bullying and all that, we never did feel nothing but love and respect for all the people outsiders was always accusing us of hating,” said Clerve Mintoon, our president before
the fagour new president. “And that’s why right now we are super excited about this historianic event. It’s gonna bring us a whole lot more members. Which is great, because we don’t really have all that many left anymore. So we’re sure hoping this helps with that.”Even though we are now officially okay with people being gay, the Southern Baptist Convention still wants all it’s members to know that we will valiently continue in our nobel and traditional quest to make all of humanity the same and good. That is why we are also announcing today that from now on we will be looking to in every way call into question the relationship between our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ and the following categories of peoples:
- Orientals
- Muslimites
- “Mentally handicaped” people
- People who limp
- Left-handeders
- Married people with no kids
- Vegetarians
You will get from us soon information and updates about these exiting new initiatives. We pray that you will help us help God realize His plan for all mankind by donating to us very generously.
May God bless you and keep you a strong and righteous defenderer of the Faith!
![John Shore on The Huffington Post](http://johnshore.files.wordpress.com/2010/03/huffpost.jpg?w=120 "John Shore on The Huffington Post\")
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A guy I went to high school with created a character named Pastor Deacon Fred who would fits right in with the SBC folk. Y’all might enjoy a visit to Landover Baptist Church at http://www.landoverbaptist.org .
I’ve been to that site. It was a few years ago and I was initially outraged until someone informed me that it was Christianity’s version of The Onion. Then I saw the hilarity in just the “what we believe” page. Your friend struck satirical gold with that website.
That website gets me laughing every time…until I realize how much it blends in with for-serious, for-reals Christians church websites.
But I would so get one of those “Heretic” t-shirts. Sinners identify yourselves proudly? Do I ever!
<3
Just visited the Landover Baptist Church website. Scary!
well as a member of their rejected, for some reason the Tina Turner song “Whats love got to do with it” came to mind…..
You’re off your rocker, John Shore. The SBC will elect a vegetarian president well *before* a gay one.
Jim, have you ever tried to come between a fat southerner and fried meat? I don’t know. I’d actually place bets on the gay guy.
I’m with Aliyah … when push comes to shove, Baptists will elect a gay before giving up Cracker Barrel.
Or the Fried Chicken, meatloaf or ham options at the church potluck. We won’t even mention the dessert table quandry.
Y’all are neglecting the obvious… 4th of July coming right up! I asked my dad’s nursing assistant what her family was having. The answer locally is almost always bbq or fried chicken, sometimes both in a big family. This lady started listing a bewildering array of food. I wish I had taken notes. BBQ pork shoulder, fried chicken, turkey legs, sausages, ribs, my goodness.
I’m not sure Southerners think vegetarians are sinners, though. It’s more of a studied disdain.
They just feel threatened by them, I think. They think if someone else is vegetarian will try to tell them not to eat any meat. Only problem is they’re confusing vegetarians with self-righteous animal-rights vegans, who still make up a minority of vegans. It’s their puffed up pride and fear of change that make conservative southerners so hostile toward anyone who doesn’t eat all kinds of meat.
Damn skippy. If we could get together a small army of big fat southern queers who could really throw down a bbq / southern spread, we might just bridge that divide. I can’t make biscuits like grandma, but I can hook up some chicken & grits.
Especially Southern (not just SBC) Baptists. Cain’t have them durn librulls tellin’ us we cain’t eat no meat. Them’s commie pinko sissies! (Having grown up in the South, I know of which I speak, sadly.)
We us Southerners do veggies…Grits…they’s made from corn…liberally salted or sweetened and drenched in butter. Cabbage…if its shredded and drenched in dressing. Potatoes, fried, mashed, or they can be cubed and added with eggs and drenched in dressing.
Well you get the drift.
Funny how we can’t find any common ground between religious groups, but I’ll bet money if we throw a few veggie burgers on the grill along with all the other great stuff mentioned, we could teach the world to sing in perfect harmony.
Praise the Lord and pass the potato salad.
With any good fortune, the Baptist cult will have vanished utterly within fifty years.
most likely
John, this is completely ridiculous. Next you’ll want us to think that there will be gay men in the Catholic priesthood someday.
LOL!
Also, to point out the obvious for any of you contemplating clicking the above link, it is most definitely not safe for work. Do not open godhatesfags.com or any of its sister sites at work – you will find yourself in a very stern meeting with IT and HR discussing company computer use policies.
@Thynkie, a friend once posted on her wall that she wanted to live her life so that Fred Phelps would want to picket her funeral. She considered that to mean that she would live a life in pursuit of justice, but in reality to get FP at your funeral, you pretty much have to be famous in some way. I think Westboro will be picketing Snooki when she finally croaks. As vile as they are, I think the folks at Westboro are the most effective GLBT activists of the era. They don’t dress up hate as something else to make it more palatable. They call a spade a spade and parade it around in all its spade-ness for the world to see.
Also, to point out the obvious for any of you contemplating clicking the above link, it is most definitely not safe for work. Do not open godhatesfags.com or any of its sister sites at work – you will find yourself in a very stern meeting with IT and HR discussing company computer use policie
To be honest, my fear isn’t that GLBT people will never be accepted into the church. That’s already happening. My fear is what will happen over the long run when we are.
I’ve heard so often that GLBT people are the last scapegoat of Christianity – the very last hurdle before perfect love and perfect peace. I’m not so optimistic. I don’t see this long list of scapegoats as gradually being checked off – but as constantly being updated. By the time GLBT people get close enough to equality/acceptance, there will be another witch to hunt – and GLBT people will be grabbing the torches and pitchforks right along with the Southern Baptists. And when someone points out to them that the church did this to them and they should show more compassion – they will respond exactly as Bernice King, Eddie Long, etc. did. They will say that that’s a false comparison – this hate is not hate and this blind prejudice is totally unlike every single other blind prejudice in the long, long, LONG, list of blind prejudices perpetuated by the church – and that this group that they’re singling out is uniquely deserving of abuse and hated by God.
Oh, but they’ll be doing it all in the name of love.
I should add that I’m not attributing the tendencies toward scapegoating or blind hate entirely to Christianity – they’re actually bugs in human nature. But those bugs seem to be exacerbated and preserved by Christianity (religion in general, actually).
If we think of religion as software, it has a major flaw. It tends to be run as a trusted program with full admin rights. So when a malicious script is added to it (blind hate, for example), the script is allowed to execute without any prompts. While a person might question the idea that “{x} are evil” given the condition that the idea is not introduced at a very young age or when the person is in some other compromised state, when “{x} are evil” is added under religion, it doesn’t encounter those same objections – it’s generally treated as… well, gospel truth.
Agreed.
In one way, I don’t think you’re wrong. There are currently, unfortunately, plenty of racist gay people. And sexism is rampant among both gay men and lesbians.
But the thing to remember is that for every Bernice King, there is a Coretta Scott King, who was a vocal and tireless ally of the LGBT community.
What will happen when being LGB, and long after that, T are non-issues, is that SOME gay people will forget what discrimination felt like and join the hate parade, while others will continue to work for freedom and equality.
What will happen is that, when we don’t have being oppressed to loosely clump us together in other people’s eyes as a single cohesive group, we’ll turn into what we already really are – a group of individual people with individual backgrounds who simply share a single characteristic in common.
Being oppressed and harassed doesn’t automatically make us noble people. Some rise above it, some break under it, and some muddle through. It would be wonderful if the experience of being discriminated made us all more sensitive to discrimination against others, but it sadly doesn’t always work that way.
It’s that pesky being human thing.
Once again, your wisdom shines through. Thank you Lymis!
“Religion as software” –
Have you, pray tell, read the novel “Snow Crash?” Religion was characterized as a “virus” in it, but so was most human endeavor – agriculture, the building of cities… and language, *especially* language. Religions, in particular, were portryaed as viruses and counter-viruses – bad bugs/good bugs that all tied together with the “free will software” that was introduced into the human mind at a “Babel” event.
Also, the United States is a now a bunch of tiny countries run by corporate franchises and you get your pizza delivered by the Italian-American Mafia.
It’s a smart book, and also wickedly funny.
@Shadsie: I’ve heard of it, but haven’t checked it out. I’ll have to put it on the reading list.
I’d hesitate to describe religion as malware, though the comparison to a rootkit has at times been tempting. I can’t think of any existing software that would be analogous in its scope to religion, though it would be fascinating to write a “religion” for a PC. It would be especially interesting to write conflicting “religions” for PCs on a network and watch the fireworks.
I bet the pizza is better.
Don’t worry, they may have elected a black president but they still hate black people plenty. Just read the comments section in my local (Memphis) paper any time there is a crime involving anyone either black or white. Black person commits a crime against black person: “So typical, send them all back to Africa.” Black person commits a crime against white person: “They need to bring back lynching.” White person commits crime against black person: “Well, can you blame him?” White person commits crime against white person: the three beleaguered black subscribers plus the token liberal all comment “SEE? Sometimes white people commit crimes!” and the comments section instantly devolves into people quoting statistics at each other about crime rates.
On the other hand, I guess it’s progress that most people feel the need to pretend not to be racist in public now. I guess the SBC figured out black people earn tithe money too.
So the fear and loathing is slightly
more covert now? Yeah, in my neck of the woods, it would be true as well.
Aliyah you just kinda blew my mind with your religion as software analogy. That was brilliant.
You can also look him up on wikipedia.
I have no idea what you’re talking about.
Thanks John! That is a great story.
Quite belevable, and quite sane. A rarity.
I strongly believe they’ve have already elected a queer or two. However, they met their other main criteria–hypocrisy–and so they looked the other way (especially in the men’s room). They feel, I’m sure, that God sent them that “look the other way” system as an approved way of accomplishing Jesus’ instruction to turn the other cheek. (Yes, they still think cheeks only exist on their faces…) But seriously, folks: These people annoy me no end. They’ve always got to have someone to hate. How sad.
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