Self-appointed youth “minister” G. Craige Lewis has found the cause of homosexuality: Hip-hop music.
Lewis operates a profitable livelihood under the alias EX Ministries. His web site claims that Lewis is one of God’s authorized spokesmen, and Lewis accuses those who disagree with him of being inspired by the devil.
The devil is trying to convince you to change your moral values and push your boundaries back by causing you to see the “popular” ministers, singers, etc. do it. When you see them doing it, it makes it look like EVERYONE is doing it because TV and radio has such a powerful voice. But God has assured me that it’s all deception.
Lewis suffers from a mix of envy and self-martyrdom: “Singers and movie stars that are homosexual” achieve celebrity because of Satan, Lewis says. Meanwhile, Lewis wallows in the obscurity that comes from being one of the very few people on the planet who is right about everything.
UPI notes that other ministers object to Lewis’ egotism and bigotry.
Haman Cross, senior pastor at Rosedale Park Baptist Church in Detroit, thinks Lewis’ message is far off.
He acknowledges that some hip-hop gives a negative message, but says there is no biblical proof that it is the work of the devil.
Cross challenged Lewis to a debate on the topic but Lewis refused.
Hat tip: UPI via Daily Dose of Queer)
United Church of Christ seminarian Chuck Currie follows the mammon money underwriting Republican activists’ two-pronged effort to divide mainstream churches with partisan misinformation over hot-button issues, and then to convert the wreckage into taxpayer-subsidized Republican front groups with religious-sounding names.
A recent case in point, Currie says, is the battle against United Methodist minister Beth Stroud, who is lesbian and whose sermons sometimes read like the words of Biblical prophets.
The warfare waged by the “Institute for Religion and Democracy” and other Republican religious front groups against liberal churches may seem recent. But these same groups have been smearing and dividing U.S. and Latin American churches ever since the contra and death-squad wars against liberal Latin American Christians and native populations in the 1980s.
While guest-blogging at the conservative Volokh Conspiracy, anti-marriage activist Maggie Gallagher’s intellectual and moral shallowness were laid bare as she persistently declined to offer coherent responses to reasoned criticisms, and resorted to scare tactics and a quack history lesson instead of legitimate debate with her critics.
Alas, A Blog traces the process by which Gallagher’s evasiveness and lousy grasp of history upset even fellow opponents of marriage for same-sex-attracted couples.
The last three days of Focus On The Family broadcasts have been an panel of apologetics experts (apologeticists?) lamenting how few Evangelicals share their particular correct “biblical worldview.” Since my Friday afternoon was filled with mindless AUTOCAD work I had plenty of time to listen to all three broadcasts for yet more gems from Focus.
So what’s the newest scourge for which we can blame absent/distant fathers?
No, not homosexuality. Oh please, that’s so passé.
Atheism. That’s right, Wednesday’s Focus broadcast (10/19/05) blames distant fathers for causing some of history’s greatest athiests.
Panelist Lee Strobel:
There’s other kinds of barriers that people have, umm… psychological barriers and they may not even be aware of that. Umm… Paul Vitts who’s a psychologist at New York university has done a book in which he studies the famous atheists thru history and he found that every single one of them either had a father who abandoned them when they were young or died when they were young or they had a terrible relationship with their father. So you back to Camus and Sartre and Marx and Freud and you go right down the line you’re up to Madeline Murray O’Hare and you see this pattern and the inability to trust and seek after a heavenly father if your early father has, you’re holding him responsible for abandoning you or you have a terrible relationship. Sometimes it’s something as subtle as that that deters people from seeking the truth about Jesus. (+11:58, audio link)
P.S. Fun new infographic Monday!
Today at Ex-Gay Watch, Exodus President Alan Chambers agreed with me that homosexual and heterosexual sex crimes deserve equal punishment, and that the Kansas Supreme Court was right to overturn laws to the contrary.
As it happens, that position is shared by the American Civil Liberties Union, which has a long history of upholding both religious and personal freedom.
My compliments to Chambers on his support for some degree of equality under the law.
Whether we agree on a reasonable prison sentence for teen-age sex in general remains to be seen….
At age 18, Matthew Limon — a developmentally disabled young man — engaged in voluntary sexual activity with a 14-year-old male. This followed two prior cases where Limon was prosecuted as a juvenile for having sex with someone younger than 16.
A heterosexual Kansan of his age would have been sentenced — at most — to just 15 months for crossing the line of age of consent with a fellow post-pubescent teen-ager. But because the sex was same-gender, Limon was sentenced in 2000 to more than 17 years in prison.
Focus on the Family reacted with glee last year when the 17-year sentence was upheld. In doing so, Focus withheld from its readers key facts: that Limon was just four years older than his counterpart; that Limon was developmentally disabled and functioning as someone younger than 18; that the sex was voluntary; and that heterosexuals would have faced little or no punishment for the same offense.
Today, the Kansas Supreme Court ruled that the state may not punish homosexual conduct more harshly than heterosexual conduct. “The statute inflicts immediate, continuing and real injuries that outrun and belie any legitimate justification that may be claimed for it,” Justice Marla Luckert wrote. “Moral disapproval of a group cannot be a legitimate state interest.”
After at least three and a half years of unjust imprisonment, Limon may finally have his sentence reduced.
XGW would be pleasantly surprised if Exodus and Focus experience a change of heart, and join civilized society in treating gay offenses as equal to heterosexual offenses.
(Previous XGW coverage.)
Last week the far right news sources were exulting that their predictions had come true. They claimed that gay civil unions had led to a polygamous civil union in the Netherlands. This, they said, is proof that if we allow gay people to have any rights as a couple we’ll have polygamy here as well.
Even Bill O’Reilly, who – though opposed to gay marriage – has taken on Steven Bennett and others about their ex-gay claims and extreme anti-gay tactics, took the story further and claimed the three had gotten married.
Now it turns out they were wrong after all.
The “civil union” did not exist. Rather, the three people signed an agreement to live together and had it notarized. This is something you could do today, if you so wish, and it would have no more or less standing than it would in the Netherlands.
Don’t expect a retraction from WorldNetDaily or Baptist Press. Truth isn’t their forte.
Read more…
Much of the brouhaha surrounding the nomination of Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court has centered on her attitudes about homosexuality. The extremist on the right find her unacceptable partially because she has not made it her mission to deny rights to gay people. Gay groups have taken a wait-and-see approach and certainly do not consider her an ally in the fight for equality.
Much has been made of her attendance at an evangelical church in Dallas (or actually a splinter group of that church that is less modern in worship style). However, today I learned that Miers attends St. John’s Episcopal Church while in Washington, D.C.
(thanks GoodAsYou)
Read more…
According to Wayne Besen the recently taped Dr. Phil episode on gay teens will air Wednesday (tomorrow).
Queer cartoonist Bruce Garrett takes on Love In Action. Click on image to view Garrett’s page and scroll down for full size cartoon. Via Peterson Toscano.
Recent Comments