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I'll make you a wedding cake & charge you a reasonable price. I'll decorate it nicely & write Congratulations! on it.
I will NOT write Bob & Fred or Jill & Jane on it. I will NOT put two men or two women on the top of the wedding cake. If that's unacceptable, take your business elsewhere!
Never in my life have I seen a wedding cake with any writing on it whatsoever. And usually, the happy couple purchases their own cake topper.
How religious homophobes and religious racists resemble one another
I made a statement in my previous post that the same religious arguments are used today to disenfranchise homosexuals as were used to do the same with black people.
In any of the following situations, just put LGBT in place of "race" or "black." The picture is undeniable:
“Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents. And but for the interference with his arrangement there would be no cause for such marriages. The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix.”
— Judge Leon M. Bazile, January 6, 1959
----------------
Yet, while LGBT Americans are the current target of this effort to repackage prejudice as “religious liberty,” they are hardly the first. To the contrary, as Wake Forest law Professor Michael Kent Curtis explained in a 2012 law review article, many segregationists justified racial bigotry on the very same grounds that religious conservatives now hope to justify anti-gay animus. In the words of one professor at a prominent Mississippi Baptist institution, “our Southern segregation way is the Christian way . . . . [God] was the original segregationist.”
----------------
For Senator Bilbo (Mississippi), however, racism was more that just an ideology, it was a sincerely held religious belief. In a book entitled Take Your Choice: Separation or Mongrelization, Bilbo wrote that “[p]urity of race is a gift of God . . . . And God, in his infinite wisdom, has so ordained it that when man destroys his racial purity, it can never be redeemed.” Allowing “the blood of the races [to] mix,” according to Bilbo, was a direct attack on the “Divine plan of God.” There “is every reason to believe that miscengenation and amalgamation are sins of man in direct defiance to the will of God.”
-----------------------
In 1901, Georgia Gov. Allen Candler defended unequal public schooling for African Americans on the grounds that “God made them negroes and we cannot by education make them white folks.” After the Supreme Court ordered public schools integrated in Brown v. Board of Education, many segregationists cited their own faith as justification for official racism. Ross Barnett won Mississippi’s governorship in a landslide in 1960 after claiming that “the good Lord was the original segregationist.” Senator Harry Byrd of Virginia relied on passages from Genesis, Leviticus and Matthew when he spoke out against the civil rights law banning employment discrimination and whites-only lunch counters on the Senate floor.
-------------------
This decision, that the IRS would no longer give tax subsidies to racist schools even if they claimed that their racism was rooted in religious beliefs, quickly became a rallying point for the Christian Right. Indeed, according to Paul Weyrich, the seminal conservative activist who coined the term “moral majority,” the IRS’ move against schools like Bob Jones was the single most important issue driving the birth of modern day religious conservatism. According to Weyrich, “[i]t was not the school-prayer issue, and it was not the abortion issue,” that caused this “movement to surface.” Rather it was what Weyrich labeled the “federal government’s move against the Christian schools.”
When Bob Jones’ case reached the Supreme Court, the school argued that IRS’ regulations denying tax exemptions to racist institutions “cannot constitutionally be applied to schools that engage in racial discrimination on the basis of sincerely held religious beliefs.”
--------------------
One year before Bob Jones, the Court decided a case called United States v. Lee, which involved an Amish employer’s objection to paying Social Security taxes on religious grounds. As the Court explained in Lee, allowing people with religious objections to opt out of Social Security could undermine the viability of the entire program. “The design of the system requires support by mandatory contributions from covered employers and employees,” Burger wrote for the Court. “This mandatory participation is indispensable to the fiscal vitality of the social security system. . . . Moreover, a comprehensive national social security system providing for voluntary participation would be almost a contradiction in terms and difficult, if not impossible, to administer.”
--------------------
So don't let the "this is my religion" folks fool anyone. They consider religion an excuse to work against the common good of all people. Freedom loving people, including those who have found the grace of Christ, need to stand against this kind of bigotry and oppression. Because whether their beliefs are sincere like Senator Bilbo or not, it is still bigotry. When Jesus saw vipers raising their heads, He called them vipers.
We have a choice to stand for what is right, or fall for the spiritual divisions of the Deceiver. I choose to stand with people who have suffered from the oppression and plain meanness that has come from the religious right not just today, but in the past two centuries. That includes, blacks, women, and members of the LGBT community. I hope all real "freedom" loving Americans will do the same.
Not really, Americans are cultural rather than practicing Christians for the most part. Just look at the irreligious attitude of most of them along with their actual Church attendance for proof of that. Most Americans also agree with anti discrimination laws and take no issue when they are applied.
You hit the nail on the head... And that is the problem. Most American 'Christians' are cultural rather than followers of Jesus... They pick a couple of Jesus words and cast out the rest of the truth, because they are lukewarm. He will reject that group irregardless of what they claim with their mouth. They are part of 'the falling away' and think a rapture is going to save them from any adversity... And they are wrong:
2Th 2:1 Now we beseech you, brethren,by the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, and by our gathering together unto him, 2Th 2:2 That ye be not soon shaken in mind, or be troubled, neither by spirit, nor by word, nor by letter as from us, as that the day of Christ is at hand.
2Th 2:3 Let no man deceive you by any means: for that day shall not come, except there come a falling away first,
and that man of sin be revealed, the son of perdition;
That time is here and American 'Christianity' is a sinking ship. People need to quit judging themselves as Christians according to Americas version of 'Christianity' and judge themselves by the Bible instead, or they are going to be found reprobate on the day of the Lord...
You hit the nail on the head... And that is the problem. Most American 'Christians' are cultural rather than followers of Jesus... They pick a couple of Jesus words and cast out the rest of the truth, because they are lukewarm. He will reject that group irregardless of what they claim with their mouth. They are part of 'the falling away' and think a rapture is going to save them from any adversity... And they are wrong:
2Th 2:1 Now we beseech you, brethren,by the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, and by our gathering together unto him, 2Th 2:2 That ye be not soon shaken in mind, or be troubled, neither by spirit, nor by word, nor by letter as from us, as that the day of Christ is at hand.
2Th 2:3 Let no man deceive you by any means: for that day shall not come, except there come a falling away first,
and that man of sin be revealed, the son of perdition;
That time is here and American 'Christianity' is a sinking ship. People need to quit judging themselves as Christians according to Americas version of 'Christianity' and judge themselves by the Bible instead, or they are going to be found reprobate on the day of the Lord...
TC
The fact that American orthodox christianity is a sinking ship is God's doing and a good thing in my opinion. It is the apostate church with a form of godliness that denies the power. What is that power that it lacks ? The spirit it should operate in .........The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he hath anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor; he hath sent me to heal the brokenhearted, to preach deliverance to the captives, and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised,
To preach the acceptable year of the Lord.
The one of the apostate church is of total intolerance.
I made a statement in my previous post that the same religious arguments are used today to disenfranchise homosexuals as were used to do the same with black people.
In any of the following situations, just put LGBT in place of "race" or "black." The picture is undeniable:
“Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents. And but for the interference with his arrangement there would be no cause for such marriages. The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix.”
— Judge Leon M. Bazile, January 6, 1959
----------------
Yet, while LGBT Americans are the current target of this effort to repackage prejudice as “religious liberty,” they are hardly the first. To the contrary, as Wake Forest law Professor Michael Kent Curtis explained in a 2012 law review article, many segregationists justified racial bigotry on the very same grounds that religious conservatives now hope to justify anti-gay animus. In the words of one professor at a prominent Mississippi Baptist institution, “our Southern segregation way is the Christian way . . . . [God] was the original segregationist.”
----------------
For Senator Bilbo (Mississippi), however, racism was more that just an ideology, it was a sincerely held religious belief. In a book entitled Take Your Choice: Separation or Mongrelization, Bilbo wrote that “[p]urity of race is a gift of God . . . . And God, in his infinite wisdom, has so ordained it that when man destroys his racial purity, it can never be redeemed.” Allowing “the blood of the races [to] mix,” according to Bilbo, was a direct attack on the “Divine plan of God.” There “is every reason to believe that miscengenation and amalgamation are sins of man in direct defiance to the will of God.”
-----------------------
In 1901, Georgia Gov. Allen Candler defended unequal public schooling for African Americans on the grounds that “God made them negroes and we cannot by education make them white folks.” After the Supreme Court ordered public schools integrated in Brown v. Board of Education, many segregationists cited their own faith as justification for official racism. Ross Barnett won Mississippi’s governorship in a landslide in 1960 after claiming that “the good Lord was the original segregationist.” Senator Harry Byrd of Virginia relied on passages from Genesis, Leviticus and Matthew when he spoke out against the civil rights law banning employment discrimination and whites-only lunch counters on the Senate floor.
-------------------
This decision, that the IRS would no longer give tax subsidies to racist schools even if they claimed that their racism was rooted in religious beliefs, quickly became a rallying point for the Christian Right. Indeed, according to Paul Weyrich, the seminal conservative activist who coined the term “moral majority,” the IRS’ move against schools like Bob Jones was the single most important issue driving the birth of modern day religious conservatism. According to Weyrich, “[i]t was not the school-prayer issue, and it was not the abortion issue,” that caused this “movement to surface.” Rather it was what Weyrich labeled the “federal government’s move against the Christian schools.”
When Bob Jones’ case reached the Supreme Court, the school argued that IRS’ regulations denying tax exemptions to racist institutions “cannot constitutionally be applied to schools that engage in racial discrimination on the basis of sincerely held religious beliefs.”
--------------------
One year before Bob Jones, the Court decided a case called United States v. Lee, which involved an Amish employer’s objection to paying Social Security taxes on religious grounds. As the Court explained in Lee, allowing people with religious objections to opt out of Social Security could undermine the viability of the entire program. “The design of the system requires support by mandatory contributions from covered employers and employees,” Burger wrote for the Court. “This mandatory participation is indispensable to the fiscal vitality of the social security system. . . . Moreover, a comprehensive national social security system providing for voluntary participation would be almost a contradiction in terms and difficult, if not impossible, to administer.”
--------------------
So don't let the "this is my religion" folks fool anyone. They consider religion an excuse to work against the common good of all people. Freedom loving people, including those who have found the grace of Christ, need to stand against this kind of bigotry and oppression. Because whether their beliefs are sincere like Senator Bilbo or not, it is still bigotry. When Jesus saw vipers raising their heads, He called them vipers.
We have a choice to stand for what is right, or fall for the spiritual divisions of the Deceiver. I choose to stand with people who have suffered from the oppression and plain meanness that has come from the religious right not just today, but in the past two centuries. That includes, blacks, women, and members of the LGBT community. I hope all real "freedom" loving Americans will do the same.
There is just one problem with your attempted correlation;
The Bible clearly condemns Sodomy- whether it be two men, or a man and a woman; sodomy is sodomy and it is something God does not tolerate. Sodomy is a sign of spiritual oppression by the Devil. Likewise, so is a woman using a woman for sexual pleasure- it is wickedness according to the Bible and a sign that the Devil has spiritual control over them. We are to explain this to people and let them know that the power of God is able to set them free from the spiritual oppression that they are under-not to condone it and say God will not judge for it... The Bible plainly says He will. Don't shoot the messengers. If you don't like the message, take it up with God. Quit trying to make the Bible something we should conform to the world, and start telling people to repent and ask Jesus to set them free:
Luk 13:32 And he said unto them, Go ye, and tell that fox, Behold, I cast out devils, and I do cures to day and to morrow, and the third day I shall be perfected.
The power of Jesus Christ is able to get rid of the demonic forces that have people captive to their sodomy and sexual immorality.
TC
Last edited by The Town Crier; 03-31-2015 at 07:22 PM..
There is just one problem with your attempted correlation;
The Bible clearly condemns Sodomy- whether it be two men, or a man and a woman; sodomy is sodomy and it is something God does not tolerate. Sodomy is a sign of spiritual oppression by the Devil. Likewise, so is a man or woman using the same sex for pleasure- it is wickedness according to the Bible and a sign that the Devil has spiritual control over them. We are to explain this to people and let them know that the power of God is able to set them free from the spiritual oppression that they are under-not to condone it and say God will not judge for it... The Bible plainly says it. Don't shoot the messengers. If you don't like the message, take it up with God. Quit trying to make the Bible something we should conform to the world, and start telling people to repent and conform to the Bible.
TC
And hence the reason that the Church is beginning to die in America.
There is just one problem with your attempted correlation;
The Bible clearly condemns Sodomy- whether it be two men, or a man and a woman; sodomy is sodomy and it is something God does not tolerate. Sodomy is a sign of spiritual oppression by the Devil. Likewise, so is a woman using a woman for sexual pleasure- it is wickedness according to the Bible and a sign that the Devil has spiritual control over them. We are to explain this to people and let them know that the power of God is able to set them free from the spiritual oppression that they are under-not to condone it and say God will not judge for it... The Bible plainly says it. Don't shoot the messengers. If you don't like the message, take it up with God. Quit trying to make the Bible something we should conform to the world, and start telling people to repent and ask Jesus to set them free:
Luk 13:32 And he said unto them, Go ye, and tell that fox, Behold, I cast out devils, and I do cures to day and to morrow, and the third day I shall be perfected.
The power of Jesus Christ is able to get rid of the demonic forces that have people captive to their sodomy and sexual immorality.
TC
Where does it (bible) condemn using the back door?
Ezekiel 16:48-51 said the ONLY problem with Sodom was--
As surely as I live, declares the Sovereign LORD, your sister Sodom and her daughters never did what you and your daughters have done.
"'Now this was the sin of your sister Sodom: She and her daughters were arrogant, overfed and unconcerned; they did not help the poor and needy.
They were haughty and did detestable things before me. Therefore I did away with them as you have seen. Samaria did not commit half the sins you did. You have done more detestable things than they, and have made your sisters seem righteous by all these things you have done.
Where Samaria had done LESS sinning than SODOM, they were FAR GREATER SINNERS and EVIL DOERS than SODOM could have ever thought to be.
Sodom was not condemned for Same SEX love, it was condemned for being SELFISH, GREEDY, and IGNORING THE POOR AND NEEDY--words straight from God's lips..
God has NEVER turned from SODOM for sexual immorality...
There is just one problem with your attempted correlation;
The Bible clearly condemns Sodomy- whether it be two men, or a man and a woman; sodomy is sodomy and it is something God does not tolerate. Sodomy is a sign of spiritual oppression by the Devil. Likewise, so is a man or woman using the same sex for pleasure- it is wickedness according to the Bible and a sign that the Devil has spiritual control over them. We are to explain this to people and let them know that the power of God is able to set them free from the spiritual oppression that they are under-not to condone it and say God will not judge for it... The Bible plainly says it. Don't shoot the messengers. If you don't like the message, take it up with God. Quit trying to make the Bible something we should conform to the world, and start telling people to repent and conform to the Bible.
TC
Actually I condemn any messenger who looks at the Bible first and Jesus second. The entire fifth through the seventh chapter of Matthew is filled with Jesus' first and arguably most important sermon. It is filled with "BUT I SAY UNTO YOUs." All the people were "bible" hearers (most couldn't read), and they had heard the Pharisees give them lots of biblical erudition---the same kind you are trying to share without ever having studied scripture using textual criticism. And He basically said, everything you've heard is WRONG. They "clearly" saw what the Bible says, too. And they were dead wrong.
And it was. He saw people as more important than scripture---and yes, He used scripture a lot, but not to tell people they couldn't be a part of God's kingdom---EXCEPT---when it came to those in society who thought they knew scripture better than anyone else. Those Pharisees, those fundamentalists, those who knew the law by heart but were unable to see the heart in the law because they read the law without the lens of Jesus Christ to filter out the mistakes of an older culture and another age.
You are doing the same thing today. You judge Jesus' proclamations on the basis of the rest of the Bible instead of the other way around. And here is how you strain at a gnat and swallow a camel.
New Testament scholar Richard Hays of Duke University Divinity School writes,
Quote:
The bible hardly ever discusses homosexual behavior. There are perhaps half a dozen references to it in all of scripture. In terms of emphasis, it is a minor concern, in contrast, for example to economic justice.
Richard B Hays, Awaiting Redemption of Our Bodies: The Witness of Scripture Concerning Homosexuality, an essay in Homosexuality in the Church: both Sides of the Debate, ed. Jeffrey S Siker (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press) p. 5
So why is it you spend more time on homosexuality than in trying to get the legislatures, both federal and state, to do something about economic justice? I can tell you why. You love the bible dearly when it condemns, it's Jesus and mercy, grace, and forgiveness that sticks in your craw.
Where Jesus Christ is at the center of Scripture and redemptive activity takes precedence over judgment, the OT cultural differences can be seen for what they are. But the segregationists didn't see it that way. I sat in a Baptist Church in Mississippi in 1963 and listened to how they interpreted God then.
Without Christ in your heart you will always need to find one group or another who are bigger sinners than you. Without Christ in your heart you can't give grace and mercy to those who are different because you haven't experienced it yourself.
Epic poetry is not historical chronicle, symbolic stories are not science, and admonition to a particular person or community is not general law.
One of the Guidelines in the Presbyterian church (my background is Southern Baptist) is an excellent way to use scripture.
-----In the center of the New Testament is Jesus Christ: the Word made flesh, the fulfillment of Israel's messianic hompe, and the promise of the Kingdom. It is to Christ that the church witnesses. When interpreting Scripture, keeping Christ in the center aids in evaluating the significance of the problems and controversies that always persist in the vigourous, historical life of the church. Reading the Bible and the Confessions: The Presbyterian Way (Louisville, KY: Geneva Press, 1999)
Find Christ. Look on others as Christ looks on you. Judge others as you wish God to judge you (hopefully with mercy and grace). Then you are able to read the Bible with Jesus at the center.
Where does it (bible) condemn using the back door?
Ezekiel 16:48-51 said the ONLY problem with Sodom was--
As surely as I live, declares the Sovereign LORD, your sister Sodom and her daughters never did what you and your daughters have done.
"'Now this was the sin of your sister Sodom: She and her daughters were arrogant, overfed and unconcerned; they did not help the poor and needy.
They were haughty and did detestable things before me. Therefore I did away with them as you have seen. Samaria did not commit half the sins you did. You have done more detestable things than they, and have made your sisters seem righteous by all these things you have done.
Where Samaria had done LESS sinning than SODOM, they were FAR GREATER SINNERS and EVIL DOERS than SODOM could have ever thought to be.
Sodom was not condemned for Same SEX love, it was condemned for being SELFISH, GREEDY, and IGNORING THE POOR AND NEEDY--words straight from God's lips..
God has NEVER turned from SODOM for sexual immorality...
You need to read the Bible more often...
1Co 6:9 Know ye not that the unrighteous shall not inherit the kingdom of God? Be not deceived: neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor effeminate, nor abusers of themselves with mankind,
That phrase in Greek is one word:
arsenokoitēs
ar-sen-ok-oy'-tace
From G730 and G2845; a sodomite: - abuser of (that defile) self with mankind.
taken from:
G2845
κοίτη
koitē
koy'-tay
From G2749; a couch; by extension cohabitation; by implication the male sperm: - bed, chambering, X conceive.
Or if you prefer the English description from dictionary:
noun 1. anal or oral copulation with a member of the opposite sex.
2. copulation with a member of the same sex.
Here is another:
anal or oral copulation with a member of the same or opposite sex;
What do you think the men of Sodom meant by saying they wanted to 'know them'?
It wasn't to have coffee... Sodomy is anal penetration period... Irregardless of the gender- it can even be with an animal.
Sorry to some of you for the explicit description, but this guy needed to be educated...
TC
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How religious homophobes and religious racists resemble one another
