A 28-year-old Upper Darby man has been charged with murder after telling police that he stoned a 70-year-old man to death when the man made homosexual advances toward him, authorities say.
John Joe Thomas, 28, of Sunshine Road in Upper Darby, spent almost every day with 70-year-old Murray Seidman at Seidman’s Lansdowne home, police say. Days before Seidman’s body was found on Jan. 12, Thomas allegedly beat Seidman to death with a sock full of rocks.
Thomas told authorities that he read in the Old Testament that homosexuals should be stoned to death. When Seidman allegedly made homosexual advances toward him over a period of time, Thomas said he received a message in his prayers that he must end Seidman’s life, according to court documents.
Lovely. It’s always funny when we argue with Religious Right figures who claim to take the Bible literally, and consider it inerrant, because they will bark some Leviticus at you, but they know they can’t get away with what their Bible really says, in 21st century civilized society. So, obviously what happened in Pennsylvania is completely sick and disgusting, but I just want everybody to remember that the deranged killer wasn’t actually mistaken about what the Bible said.
Would it be a sin for me to hoist a counter-banner that reads, “Antigay tracts are a sin”? Or how about, “You’re a sinner for reading this. WATCH THE ROAD!”
Good morning! I am Father John — standing in for Father Clifford Banes who is in court on unspecified charges today.
Today we are blessed, dear Catholic brothers and sisters, with a reading from the Book of Wikipedia:
The parable of the Good Samaritan is a parable told by Jesus in the Gospel of Luke (10:25-37). In the parable, a Jewish traveler is beaten, robbed, and left half dead along the road. First a priest and then a Levite come by, but both avoid the man. Finally, a Samaritan comes by. Samaritans and Jews generally despised each other, but the Samaritan helps the injured Jew.
Jesus is described as telling the parable in response to a question regarding the identity of the “neighbor” which Leviticus 19:18 says should be loved.
This is the word of the Internet Lord.
(Thanks be to God.)
My dear Catholic brothers and sisters. Clearly Jesus was an idiot. We must take heed of the idiocy of today’s reading, and learn from our brothers in Britain who show us the way to true holiness.
Britain’s charity regulatory commission has ruled that the Catholic Care adoption agency must serve gay couples. The agency had demanded that it be exempt from the nation’s anti-discrimination laws. … “The charity is very disappointed with the outcome, Catholic Care will now consider whether there is any other way in which the charity can continue to support families seeking to adopt children in need,” the group said in a statement.
Dear brothers and sisters, the Romans are at our doorstep — threatening to force us to be like the wicked Samaritan who helps the unholy in times of need. We are being persecuted, my children. Stand alert!
Do you want to be holy like me, the priest of the parable, or do you want to be brought down to the level of a despicable Samaritan?
Let us now rise and sing righteous songs of self-praise. For we are God’s people — and they are not!
Over the past week or so, we’ve had more than our normal collection of fundamentalist, anti-gay commenters, who seem to think that they have something to add to the discussion. They quote their same six Bible verses, say the same words every Fundamentalist before them has said, and then, if they choose to stick around and argue, they become chew toys for our normal commenters. I’m fine with all of this. It’s part of having an open commenting system and stating your opinion on the internet. If you hold positions with holes big enough to drive several Mack trucks through, you open yourself up for that.
But I always notice that one of the primary reasons our Fundamentalist visitors become broken records so quickly is that their beliefsystem, i.e., that homosexuality is a sin (in whatever meaningless words they use to say so), is one of the quickest dead-end arguments around, as the commenters revert to the aforementioned clobber passages again and again, while different pro-equality commenters use one of several different strategies to take them to that quick dead-end. Those of us who are believers tend to try to explain that, when you look at said passages from a more educated point of view, taking into context culture, original languages, science and reality, that it’s hard to actually make the case that the Bible condemns loving same-sex relationships. Those of us who are atheists don’t tend to get into all of that, simply leading the commenters quickly to the dead-end of their arguments from authority, saying “prove that the authority in your book exists, and furthermore that your interpretation of that authority exists, and we’ll talk.”
Those who fight against the existence of LGBT people tend to have very little exposure to actual gay people. If they do, it’s often through their church, which might be affiliated with an “ex-gay” business, and as such, their exposure is to people who are broken (not that we all aren’t), and who have been swindled by “ex-gay” leaders into blaming their own poor choices or circumstances on their sexuality, rather than actually taking responsibility for their own lives. Rarely, if ever, do you hear a fundamentalist Christian testifying on gay people as we are. Rarely do you hear them railing against the lesbian couple who lives next door, who has been together for 30 years, or the gay guys down the street, together, for 15 years, raising children, driving Suburbans. These Fundamentalists do not understand or are unwilling to acknowledge that these LGBT people exist, and not only that, but that we’re common.
I understand why it’s important for their handlers (clergy, anti-gay Religious Right leaders, etc.) to shield them from the reality of the fabric of LGBT existence. I often quote the statistic that when someone knows a gay person, they tend to vote 3 to 1 in our favor when the opportunity comes up. If what Religious Right leaders said about gay people held even a shred of truth, you wouldn’t expect this to be the case. One of the favorite clobber passages of Christian Fundamentalists is, of course, 1 Corinthians 6:9-11, which says:
9 Know you 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, 10 Nor thieves, nor covetous, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor extortionists, shall inherit the kingdom of God. 11 And such were some of you: but you are washed, but you are sanctified, but you are justified in the name of the Lord Jesus, and by the Spirit of our God.
Because these verses are often poorly translated to include the word “homosexual,” our Fundamentalist chew toys feel that this verse is “proof” that gays can change our sexual orientation. (Again: Poor translation. Argument from authority, prove it, prove it, prove it.) What often goes overlooked, though, is that one of the gaping holes in the Fundamentalist argument is contained in this very passage, staring them in the face. Let’s pretend for a second that “homosexual” was a decent translation for the Greek words arsenokoitai and malakoi. (As with all games of “make-believe,” it’s important that only those with a firm grasp on reality play. Sorry, Fundamentalists.) Remember what I was saying about how knowing a gay person makes a person much more likely to support us? Tell me which other sins in that vice list above work the same way. Do you support thieves more by understanding thieves? Are you more likely to support an alcoholic’s drunkenness by getting to know them better? Do you tend to feel better about extortionists once you bond with the couple down the street that, you know, happens to be a little bit Mafia?
But yet, people tend to like LGBT people a lot more when they know us personally. When the nice couple with three kids, or the couple with no kids but who throw fantastic dinner parties for the neighbors (because come on, some stereotypes are true) moves in, people become more likely to love and support us.
That implies that there is something seriously off with the Fundamentalist interpretation of that passage, now doesn’t it?
No, the reason it’s important for Religious Right leaders and ex-gay entrepreneurs to shield their minions followers from the reality of LGBT people is because to be honest with them, to encourage them to actually know us, brings them into a head-on collision with another passage in their Bible, and it’s a fairly popular, well-known passage. Matthew 7:17-20:
17Likewise every good tree bears good fruit, but a bad tree bears bad fruit. 18A good tree cannot bear bad fruit, and a bad tree cannot bear good fruit. 19Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. 20Thus, by their fruit you will recognize them.
This passage, of course, bears the heavier weight of having been spoken by Jesus, after whom Christianity was named. It’s a very, very simple parable. Good people, good relationships, and good practices bear good fruit. Bad people, bad relationships, and bad practices, bear bad fruit. Indeed, Jesus here is engaging in one of his famous smackdowns of fundamentalist religious leaders, using the concept of the law of nature, that every tree bears fruit of its own kind, to illustrate the idea that religious leaders who leave a wake of pain and misery are, you know, probably not good. The stories and interactions shared by Fundamentalist Christians and ex-gay entrepreneurs, about gay people, tend to follow a similar outline:
1. I hated myself.
2. I “entered the homosexual lifestyle,” and became addicted to drugs/tried to kill myself/acquired HIV, etc.
3. I was rescued from “the homosexual lifestyle” by Jesus.
4. All of this was the fault of “the homosexual lifestyle.” Now if you’ll just sign here, and recruit five more people to be ex-gays, you’re done, and you’ll make residual income on everybody they recruit too!*
Standing as the negation to this narrative are millions of happy, well-adjusted gay people, who make things better for society, many of whom are in beautiful, quite normal marriages, some raising children, etc. They are bearing good fruit, just like good heterosexual relationships bear good fruit. Likewise, there are straight people and relationships which bear extremely bad fruit. Those which are abusive (whether physically or emotionally), those in which the husband treats his wife like property, those which are full of deceit and malice, etc. But we would never think to condemn heterosexuals as a whole for the worst examples of heterosexual relationships, because that would be insane. But yet our Fundamentalist chew toys don’t see the intellectual incoherence of doing that very thing as regards LGBT people.
The simple point is this: If you believe in the Bible, then you have to be willing to embrace the spirit of the text, and the words and stories of Jesus are kind of a trump card. If you analyze them in light of reality, in light of what we understand about people, then you have to deal with Matthew 7 as regards gay people. Because just as in the straight world, the best of gay relationships indeed bear much good fruit, bringing happiness, emotional fulfillment, stable family structures, and community support (and a million other things) to those in the relationships and the people around them.
And bad trees cannot bear good fruit.
Thus concludes your latest installment of “Bible Lessons with an Atheist.”
*Oh, you know one ex-gay business or another will discover network marketing before too long.
“I’m not surprised that Miss Beverly Hills, Lauren Ashley, opposes gay marriage — after all 45 percent of young Californians voted for Prop 8, as did 7 million Californians generally,” the organization’s president, Maggie Gallagher, told us. “But I have to say, I am impressed with her courage in coming forward and for speaking up for Carrie. The elected officials of city of Beverly Hills are not demonstrating tolerance or kindness by continuing the avalanche of hatred against supporters of Prop 8.”
“The Bible says that marriage is between a man and a woman. In Leviticus it says, ‘If man lies with mankind as he would lie with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination. They shall surely be put to death and their blood shall be upon them.’ The Bible is pretty black and white.
In a time when anti-gay hysteria seems to be sweeping the African continent, when gay people are being set upon in nation after nation by mobs hopped up on the genocidal rhetoric of religious fundamentalists and political extremists, some vacant beauty pageant wannabe starts waving Leviticus around and Maggie Gallagher immediately, Immediately rushes to praise her for her…courage…of all things, without the slightest shred of thought to any consequences for gay people that this Their Blood Is Upon Them thing might possibly have. The danger to gay people clearly, obviously, sickeningly, never crossed her mind. And seriously…if you thought it might, you have not been paying attention.
Can we please dispense now with all this love the sinner hate the sin claptrap. There is no love in Maggie Gallagher for gay people. None. There is not a shred of regard in that barren wasteland she calls a conscience for our lives, let alone love. In her novel The Charioteer, the author Mary Renault described Gallagher’s kind, and Ashley’s, precisely…
Not wicked, he thought: that’ not the word, that’ sentimentality. These are just runts…They don’t sin in the sight of heaven and feel despair: they only throw away lighted cigarettes on Exmoor, and go on holiday leaving the cat to starve, and drive on after accidents without stopping. A wicked man nowadays can set millions of them in motion, and when he’ gone howling mad from looking at his own face, they’ll be marching still with their mouth’ open and their hands hanging by their knees, on and on and on…”
Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel said, The opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference. See it there in Gallagher’s reflexive solidarity with anyone willing to denounce same-sex marriage regardless of that little Their Blood Is Upon Them thing. She’s not ignoring it. She didn’t even see it. It did not register. The threat to our lives her crusade rouses in the mob does not concern her one iota. No, it is not hate. It is indifference.
Indifference…
They have no instinctive sense of sympathy. Their moral compass only points inward. They are unmoved…indifferent…
…utterly, starkly, shockingly, indifferent…
These are the ones who, in another time, in another place, could live right friggin’ next to the concentration camps and say later, with horrifically genuine sincerity, “We heard the rumors but we didn’t believe them…”
Courage. Courage is taking your lover’s hand in yours in a world where moral thugs praise beauty queens who use their moment in the spotlight to tell the world: Their Blood Is Upon Them.
A British evangelical group called “Church Society for Bible, Church and Nation” — an oxymoron, to be sure — warns that former ex-gay Peterson Toscano is “promoting immorality” by teaching what the Bible says about gender.
The Society, which opposes an allowance of privacy for Christians, says of Toscano and his “Transfigurations” play about transgender issues in the Bible:
Toscano is someone who has apparently trawled the Bible and attempted to find in it references to people who “do not fit the gender binary’. This sort of argument is not uncommon and anyone who had encountered it will know just how the desire to find such leads to a twisted and selective reading into the text of Scripture, yet sadly many who dismiss the plain teaching of Scripture seem enthralled by such perverse handling of the text.
To “trawl” means to dig deeply; apparently the Society prefers a superficial approach to the Bible, instead. Hence its rejection of the Bible when its stories deviate from strict gender roles policed by self-righteous evangelicals.
But Toscano doesn’t need us to defend him; he ably discusses Transfigurations right here:
In Focus on the Family’s youth magazine Boundless, Exodus International executive vice president Randy Thomas has just published an entire article which pretends, from start to finish, that there is opposition — anywhere — to Christian individuals’ involvement in “public policy.”
Thomas’ verbose strawman argument in defense of political involvement sidesteps all the specifics for which he and his employers have been criticized:
Instead of addressing any pertinent facts regarding his organizations’ actual public policies, Thomas weaves a bizarre and egocentric — perhaps megalomaniacal — correlation between the Jewish tradition of a battle at Jericho, and a defense of “public policy” — no matter how immoral, anti-family, anti-freedom, and anti-faith his policies happen to be.
In other words, Thomas seems to believe that by referencing Bible keywords often enough in a speech or article, he can conceal — even from himself — the immorality of his actions. Does Thomas really believe that the Christian God is so easily fooled?
In the wake of Newsweek’s forthright article acknowledging the Bible’s conflicting and evolving definitions of marriage, here are more examples of prooftexting and cherry-picking of Bible verses by three ex-gay activists:
Randy Thomas, vice president of Exodus International, responded saying the musical showed a “sincere misunderstanding of Scripture.”
Tim Wilkins, a former homosexual who heads Cross Ministry, argued that gay marriage supporters “are doing the very thing they accuse Christians of.”
“They focus on Leviticus and ignore New Testament passages that forbid homosexuality. WHY? Because Leviticus provides easier arguments with its prohibitions against certain foods.”
SBC’s [Bob] Stith also denounced Hollywood’s attempt to make biblical arguments. “Anyone who cares to spend thirty minutes of serious study would see the many flaws in Black’ argument,” he said.
Clearing up some of the confusion, Stith called it a “factual error” to claim that Scripture nowhere says homosexuals are an abomination.
Thomas presumes to possess the sole correct understanding of the Bible. Both he and Wilkins fail to cite any actual Bible verses. Meanwhile, Stith cherry-picks verses that seem to smear same-sex-attracted persons while he ignores neighboring verses that condemn Stith’s chosen lifestyle.
a comprehensive overview of the Bible’s various conflicting definitions of marriage,
an observation that Ozzie-and-Harriet couples are absent from the Bible,
a recognition of evolving Jewish and Christian history and traditions regarding marriage
Religious-rightists have invested decades of effort into cherry-picking a handful of Bible verses, in order to redefine church-goers’ perception of “Biblical” marriage. In the new fundamentalist world order, divorce and serial remarriage are taken for granted. Meanwhile, fundamentalists have effectively suppressed public discussion of Bible verses that forbid divorce, mandate celibacy and non-marriage among Christian men, accept polygamy, and allow husbands — under certain circumstances — to commit honor killings or sell wives and children into slavery.
On Dec. 10 — showing no sign that it had read the Newsweek article — Exodus released a statement that falsely accused Newsweek of “abandoning the truth of the Bible” and “maligning and manipulating Scripture.” Exodus president Alan Chambers falsely described himself as a “former homosexual” and falsely described the Bible’s “teaching” (singular, sic) on sexuality and relationships as one of “freedom.”
Exodus says Newsweek does a disservice “to those looking for spiritual and intellectual honesty.” Despite its claim to defend the Bible, Exodus fails to cite a single Bible verse.
Exodus leaves the impression that it believes readers would be better-served with cherry-picked Bible verses which excuse a social-conservative lifestyle of sex-orientation dishonesty, feigned abstinence, unsafe premarital sex, unwed pregnancy, shotgun marriage, divorce, remarriage, and rigid Protestant rules for husband and wife which disrespect both tradition and individuals’ skills and personalities.
Posted October 11th, 2008 by Rev. Steven F. Kindle
By the Rev. Steven F. Kindle, Clergy United, Inc.
The question is not: Will marriage survive the inclusion of non-heterosexuals into its mix? Of course it will. No, the appropriate question is: Can America be America if it does not end its oppression of gay Americans? Will we become a nation that is willing to endure second-class citizens after two centuries of steady emancipation of other oppressed groups? I suggest to you that America’s soul is at great risk by this moral failure. This is a justice issue that needs to be addressed and resolved in favor of the oppressed. Offering same-sex marriage is the final step in recognizing the full, unencumbered humanity of non-heterosexuals, and their inclusion as fully emancipated American citizens.
The history of the United States can be summarized, quite accurately, as the slow but sure realization of the vision of its founding document, the Declaration of Independence, that all are created equal.
The same founders who agreed that “All men are created equal” also said, “Slaves shall represent 3/5 of a human being.” They and their successors also denied women the right to vote and upheld “separate but equal” Jim Crow laws, making interracial marriages illegal and restricted immigration to maintain white majority.
The founders had something in mind when they wrote the Constitution, but it’s not the republic in which we now live. In fact, their prejudices went so deep that they didn’t even feel the need to write “all white, landed, protestant, heterosexual, free men are created equal.” Forget about their slaves, forget about women, forget about those without land, forget about gay people-the only ones who had the right to vote, and thus the right to participate in the building of this new republic were people exactly like them.
In the intervening years, slavery has been abolished, women have been fully emancipated and nonwhites have been given the full dignity of the law. The inalienable right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness for all Americans is now the realized dream of that distant day.
There is, however, one exception: non-heterosexual Americans, who are described by Harvard sociologist Byrne Fone as victims of the last acceptable bigotry in America.
It is my contention that withholding marriage rights for non-heterosexuals is unconstitutional, unchristian, and un-American. I will make the case for same-sex marriage being beneficial to America by providing four bedrock reasons why same sex marriage rights deserve to be placed on par with heterosexual marriage rights.
Yeah, so this happened in Pennsylvania:
