“Last March, three American evangelical Christians, whose teachings about ‘curing’ homosexuals have been widely discredited in the United States, arrived here in Uganda’s capital to give a series of talks. The theme of the event, according to Stephen Langa, its Ugandan organizer, was ‘the gay agenda — that whole hidden and dark agenda’ — and the threat homosexuals posed to Bible-based values and the traditional African family.
Demonstrators denouncing homosexuality in Kampala, Uganda.
“What does it say about a church that would condemn gays for coming out of their closet while hiding clergy pedophiles in their own?” ~a commenter at courier-journal.com
Achbishop's Queer Crusade by Marc Murphy of the Courier-Journal
Bishop Gene Robinson came to Portland, Maine on October 15 to advocate for marriage equality and lgbt people.
It appears hatred and the pulpit are long-time friends. Preachers, ministers, priests, bishops and the like aren’t enlightened folk simply because they have a title. They’re imperfect human beings just like the rest of us. Some may be wiser than others, but in general, I wouldn’t trust their leadership nor their proclamations regarding current events any more than I would the nonsensical ramblings of a mentally ill homeless person on the streets of NYC.
Catholic and white Protestant church leadership was conspicuously absent during most of the civil-rights struggle with its marches, bus boycotts, voter-registration drives, state-university enrollment, and housing protests.
The Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote his famous “Letter from Birmingham City Jail” in response to a public statement by eight prominent local church leaders (including the bishops of the Catholic, Episcopal, and Methodist churches), who had denounced him as an “extremist” and “outsider.”
In the letter, King expressed his deep disappointment with the white church and its leadership. He accused it of being content “to stand on the sideline and mouth pious irrelevancies and sanctimonious trivialities.”
During the weekend, Massachusetts’ four Catholic bishops condemned a ruling by the state high court in favor of gay marriage, calling it a “national tragedy” — language gay Catholics said amounts to “preaching hate” from the pulpit. The letter, read at liturgies this past weekend, said the court’s decision on gay civil marriage is a “sure formula for chaos” that could “erode even further the institution of marriage.”
Now consider the following passage…
…One wastes time and money in ministering to blacks … What reason can there be that you are so solicitous for the Negro? — a priest, cited in The Miserable Condition of Black Catholics in America, 1903…
As I said, hatred and the pulpit are long-time friends. For a closer look at the power of the pulpit, ignorance, fear, and the role church leaders played, see Racism and religion: partners in crime?
12
Nov 09
Religious Authority vs. LGBT People
The movement to throw off ancient barbaric views about LGBT people and to include LGBT people at society’s table is a change the conservative priests and religious fundamentalist preachers and institutions have decided to oppose at all costs.
Washington D.C. Catholic Diocese Threatens to Stop All Social Services if Marriage Equality Passes – washingtonpost.com
Why? They believe, and rightly so, that this LGBT Civil Rights Movement is a direct threat to their unquestioned authority and traditional power. How, they ask, can they admit their vilification and dehumanization of lgbt people has been in error all of these .. centuries? Yet that’s what more and more straight lay folk are coming to understand about anti-LGBT religious teachings as LGBT friends and family bear witness to prejudice and injustice. More and more straight lay folk are seeing the anti-gay teaching of their conservative fundamentalist church, priest or preacher as nothing more than ugly supremacist bigotry, fear and ignorance being passed down from generation to generation.