Can known homosexuals join any Southern Baptist church?

[fallingblood]

I am not aware of anyone who has mentioned a Southern Baptist church that currently allows openly homosexual people to become church members. If there are any such churches, I assume that they are very rare exceptions.

You repeated this twice, on the same page. Repeating yourself does not make your argument more convincing. Really, it comes down to nothing more than spam.

The SBC does not see homosexuality as an unforgivable sin. In essence, they see the act associated with homosexuality, to be sinful. Now, you haven't pointed at anything that the SBC wouldn't allow a sinner into their church, because essentially, that is what we are talking about. They may not support such an act, but you have never provided anything that would make us assume that SBC churches will not allow a sinner to go to their church.

And once again, you get to the basis of your argument. You assume. You assume. You assume. You assume. That is all you really have. Assumptions.

Wikipedia says:

You seemed to miss the part in which they stated only about 6 million actually attend services. They get the 16 million number by also counting "non-resident" members, who are basically members who are not in touch with them. They also count all the people who show up just for Christmas or Easter, as "active" members. They also count those who haven't even shown up in over a year.

When you get down to it, their real number is about 6 million. As in this is how many people actually attend church. And those 6 million (or 16 if you want) are centered in only a handful of states, with not too much power.

The SBC estimates over 16 million members. Even six million people is a lot of people, especially when you add to that the number of members of individual Christian churches in other denominations that do not allow openly homosexual people to become church members. There is no doubt that many millions of American Christians oppose homosexuality, and same-sex marriage primarily, or solely, on biblical grounds. It just so happens that a large percentage of Protestant Christian opponents are Southern Baptists.

This is pretty much ridiculous. You are consistently moving the goal posts in order to try to make your argument a little better, but really, it is just foolish.

First, just because the SBC's position is whatever, doesn't mean everyone who goes to such a church will follow the same ideas. And really, this is nothing to do with Biblical grounds. It has to do with people being intolerant, and justifying that intolerance, plain and simple.

If we look at the percentage of individuals who accept homosexuality in the United States, we see that about 52% of the population does (that was in 2010 according to a Gallup Poll). Since 2006, every age group has increased in their acceptance of homosexuality. Both genders have increased in their acceptance of homosexuality. Both Republican and Democrat have increased in their acceptance of homosexuality. Conservative and Liberals have increased in their acceptance of homosexuality. Catholics and Protestants have increased in their acceptance of homosexuality. In general, we see from year to year, an increase in acceptance to homosexuality in every demographic.

Also, as a whole, with SBC's only having really about 6 million members (even at 16 million, this will hold true), they are still a minority. Why? Because if you add up all of the other Protestant denominations, they greatly outnumber the SBC. More so, outside those 5 states that 50% of all SBC members live, we see various other Protestant denominations greatly outweighing SBC churches.

More so, if you look at most denominations, you will find some that openly allow homosexuals, or allow celibate homosexuals. And even more homosexual-affirming denominations will have churches that are not very friendly.

So yes, there may be millions of Americans who oppose homosexuality (be they Christian, Muslim, Jew, Atheist, Buddhist, etc); however, in general, that number is declining yearly. And making things up about churches is not why that number is declining.

 

[angellous_evangellous]

I will leave the ad hominems up to you. Personal attacks serve only to divert attention away from discussing the issues.

It was an honest question. This is an international forum that has many members who speak English as a second language.

Often these folks don't understand important concepts in a debate, in your case the term "exceptional" and you don't seem to grasp what the SBC is, and ignore examples that you demanded.

If you didn't read English well, that would explain a lot. But because apparently you do read English as your first language, I can think of no other reason except for willful ignorance. I don't assume that you are stupid or otherwise incapable of understanding elementary concepts, but are for some reason nursing some kind of hostile bias.

In other words, my assumption that English isn't your first language was polite and considerate - far from an ad hominem.

 

[Agnostic75]

The SBC does not see homosexuality as an unforgivable sin. In essence, they see the act associated with homosexuality, to be sinful. Now, you haven't pointed at anything that the SBC wouldn't allow a sinner into their church, because essentially, that is what we are talking about.

No that is not what we are talking about. The title of this thread is "Can known homosexuals join any Southern Baptist church?" By "join," I mean "become a member of the church." I never said or implied that known homosexuals are not allowed to attend Southern Baptist churches, since I already know that in many if not most cases, they are. "Joining," and "attending," are two entirely different matters.

Consider the following:

civil unions « Unorthodox Faith

June 24, 2009

Last month at their annual convention, the Southern Baptists voted to sever their ties with the Broadway Baptist Church of Ft. Worth, Texas.

Broadway Baptist Church has been a part of the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) since the church’s inception in 1882. Over the years, two of Broadway’s pastors have served as leaders in the SBC. The relationship has been a fruitful one for more than a century.

Now, the SBC has ejected Broadway because of their position, or rather non-position, on homosexuality. Broadway’s leadership has refused to make a statement for or against homosexuality. A number of members of the church are openly homosexual.

The SBC has historically been opposed to homosexuality but during the 80′s, a more liberal element took control of the convention. Conservatives campaigned hard against the more progressive liberals and during the 90′s slowly took back the reins. The past decade has seen the SBC adopt a much more traditional position in many areas.

In 1997, they announced a boycott of the Disney companies because the SBC felt that Disney promoted immorality, particularly homosexuality. The boycott ran until 2005, and even after officially ending the boycott, the SBC leadership stated they would continue to “monitor the products and policies” of Disney.

The boycott was followed by a 1998 revision of “The Baptist Faith & Message”, the SBC’s guiding doctrinal statement. The revision included a new article stating plainly that the SBC believed marriage was the union of one man and one woman.

In 2000, the SBC officially adopted an updated version of “The Baptist Faith & Message”. In this document, they included two strongly worded anti-homosexual statements that reflected the beliefs of many SBC churches:

Christians should oppose…all forms of sexual immorality, including adultery, homosexuality, and pornography. (Article XV)
Marriage is the uniting of one man and one woman in covenant commitment for a lifetime. (Article XVIII, originally added in 1998)
​

While Broadway protests that they have done nothing to warrant their ejection and that they should not make moral judgments as qualifications for membership, the SBC leadership made it plain that “The Baptist Faith & Message” is the official position of the SBC, and churches who join the SBC are required to comply to it. Translation? Homosexuals are not welcome to participate in SBC churches.

The SBC does not single out homosexuality as the only sin that is worth ejecting churches from their ranks, but thus far, it is the only one to gain national media attention. Statistics are not available for churches ejected for other acts that might be considered sexual sins – adultery, fornication, divorce and remarriage or other practices.

The leadership at Broadway has stated plainly that it is not the practice of the SBC to deny membership to people committing adultery, so why should homosexuals be singled out. They further contend that they are not supporting homosexuality, but simply not discriminating against homosexuals.

That shows that a former Southern Baptist church allowed openly homosexual people to become church members, and when the Southern Baptist Convention found out that the Broadway church was not consistent with church policy, it kicked the church out of the Southern Baptist Convention. I assume that the Broadway church is a rare exception among Southern Baptist churches, but a welcome one none the less.

The Mormon church got a lot of criticism regarding Proposition 8. Largely as a result, the church softened its stand on civil unions. The Southern Baptist Convention also needs to be criticized. Ignoring them would only serve to help perpetuate their oppression of homosexuals. Membership in the Southern Baptist Convention has been declining for years, but it still has millions of members. It is still at least as large as the Mormon church in the U.S., and it still has lots of political influence in the Southern Bible Belt.

You seemed to miss the part in which they stated only about 6 million actually attend services. They get the 16 million number by also counting "non-resident" members, who are basically members who are not in touch with them. They also count all the people who show up just for Christmas or Easter, as "active" members. They also count those who haven't even shown up in over a year.

When you get down to it, their real number is about 6 million. As in this is how many people actually attend church. And those 6 million (or 16 if you want) are centered in only a handful of states, with not too much power.

On the contrary, six million votes is a lot of political power. Southern Baptist votes are highly prized by many national, and regional political candiates. Texas is the second most populous state in the U.S. In 1990, it had far more Southern Baptists than any other state. That is still probably true today.

Church visitors frequently attend churches whose policies they agree with. The Southern Baptist Convention's stong stand against homosexuality is probably known by the majority of people who visit SBC churches. The SBC boycott of Disney World was widely reported in the media.

 

[Agnostic75]

It was an honest question. This is an international forum that has many members who speak English as a second language.

Often these folks don't understand important concepts in a debate, in your case the term "exceptional" and you don't seem to grasp what the SBC is, and ignore examples that you demanded.

If you didn't read English well, that would explain a lot. But because apparently you do read English as your first language, I can think of no other reason except for willful ignorance. I don't assume that you are stupid or otherwise incapable of understanding elementary concepts, but are for some reason nursing some kind of hostile bias.

In other words, my assumption that English isn't your first language was polite and considerate - far from an ad hominem.

Let's stick to the topic of this thread, which is "Can known homosexuals attend any Southern Baptist church?" Do you know of any Southern Baptist churches that currently allow openly gay people to become church members? As far as I know, you have not stated any such examples.

What have I posted that you disagree with? Please refer to the post numbers.

 

[Agnostic75]

It was an honest question. This is an international forum that has many members who speak English as a second language.

Often these folks don't understand important concepts in a debate, in your case the term "exceptional" and you don't seem to grasp what the SBC is, and ignore examples that you demanded.

If you didn't read English well, that would explain a lot. But because apparently you do read English as your first language, I can think of no other reason except for willful ignorance. I don't assume that you are stupid or otherwise incapable of understanding elementary concepts, but are for some reason nursing some kind of hostile bias.

In other words, my assumption that English isn't your first language was polite and considerate - far from an ad hominem.

If there is a hostile bias, it is all yours since I have always been very polite towards you, and you have been very rude to me, for reasons that i do not understand. If I misunderstood some of what you said, that was just an honest misunderstanding.

You keep diverting attention away from the topic of this thread. Why is that?

 

[Agnostic75]

.......just because the SBC's position is whatever, doesn't mean everyone who goes to such a church will follow the same ideas.

Who said anything about everyone? Not me. The main issue is obviously "the majority of Southern Baptists," certainly not "all Southern Baptists."

The SBC strongly opposes homosexuality. All of its member churches know that, and they know that the SBC does not allow any of its member churches to allow openly homosexual people to become church members. Any member church whose majority does not like the SBC's position on homosexuality is free to leave the SBC whenever they want to. So, we can assume that the majority, if not a sizeable majority of Southern Baptists do not want to allow openly homosexual people to become church members enough for them to leave the SBC.

Consider the following:

Evangelical pastors jump into the 2012 political fray - Los Angeles Times

Los Angeles Times

September 10, 2011

He wasn't alone. The straw poll drew a slew of previously apolitical Iowa pastors — a constituency increasingly heeding a call to speak out on politics.

"There is a concerted assault on everything that we consider sacred — and we pastors need to move to the forefront of the battle," said Demastus, wearing a T-shirt and shorts for the Saturday event.

Demastus is part of a growing movement of evangelical pastors who are jumping into the electoral fray as never before, preaching political engagement from the pulpit as they mobilize for the 2012 election.

This new activism has substantial muscle behind it: a cadre of experienced Christian organizers and some of the conservative movement's most generous donors, who are setting up technologically sophisticated operations to reach pastors and their congregations in battleground states.

The passion for politics stems from a collision of historic forces, including heightened local organizing around the issues of abortion and gay marriage and a view of the country's debt as a moral crisis that violates biblical instruction. Another major factor: Both Texas Gov. Rick Perry and Bachmann, contenders for the GOP nomination, are openly appealing to evangelical Christian voters as they blast President Obama's leadership.

Both Republican and Democratic strategists say that pastors have already helped unleash an army of voters to shape the GOP primary contests in Iowa and South Carolina, two states with large numbers of conservative Christians. They are making plans to do the same in states that are even more important to next year's general election. Those include Ohio, Florida, Iowa, Virginia and Colorado, where evangelical voters make up about a quarter of the electorate and their participation could greatly aid Republicans.

"The Christian activist right is the largest, best-organized and, I believe, the most powerful force in American politics today," said Rob Stein, a Democratic strategist who recently provided briefings on the constituency to wealthy donors on the left. "No other political group comes even close."

Religious leaders have long been active in political causes. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. used his Baptist pulpit to agitate for civil rights, and fiery televangelists Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell awakened the religious right in the 1970s and 1980s with calls to fight what they saw as America's moral decay.

But the current awakening is different. It springs from the grass roots — small and independent churches — and is fueled by emails and YouTube videos. And it is driven less by personality than by the biblical teaching to be the "salt" and "light" of society — in other words, to have a beneficial influence on the world.

"This is the congregational version of the 'tea party,'" says Richard Land, president of the conservative Southern Baptist Convention's Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission. "Pastors who in the past would dodge my calls are calling me saying, 'How can we be involved?'"

No politcal strategist would claim that Southern Baptists are not politically powerful In some Southern Bible Belt states.

 

[angellous_evangellous]

No politcal strategist would claim that Southern Baptists are not politically powerful In some Southern Bible Belt states.

Yes, they too think that the SBC is the big bad wolf.

Name a few political strategists in each of the Bible Belt states and present the rubric by which they measure the power of the SBC.

I think that you're pulling stuff out of your ***. Put it back. It stinks.

 

[angellous_evangellous]

You keep diverting attention away from the topic of this thread. Why is that?

You've proven yourself either incompetent or unwilling (my guess) to talk intelligently on your topic.

I'm merely pointing that out. My comment on your English was so that I would not criticize you for being incompetent when it's not your fault. If I knew you were I child or otherwise a moron I would lighten up as well -- but because I assume that you are neither -- I'll merrily go along pointing out your inconsistencies to the benefit of others rather than yourself.

 

[Trey of Diamonds]

 

[Sunstone]

Please allow me to join with Trey in suggesting the subject has been adequately discussed and debated.

 

[angellous_evangellous]

Please allow me to join with Trey in suggesting the subject has been adequately discussed and debated.

At least we haven't sunk so low as to repeat our own posts verbatim.

 

[Agnostic75]

If you had read my post, you would see that I did list examples related to BOTH the SBC (which is in your OP) and the Assemblies of God.

That was your post #59. You only made one post before that, post #46, and all that you said about Southern Baptists was “why a homosexual would want to have anything to do with the SBC is beyond me - the SBC would kill, skin, and eat them alive (and I mean that in the most literal sense possible) if they could.” What was that an example of?

 

[Agnostic75]

How about any Mormon church, and any Assembly of God church?p

I know homosexuals who are ordained ministers in
both churches.

Why a homosexual would want to have anything to do with the SBC is beyond me -
the SBC would kill, skin, and eat them alive (and I mean that in the most literal sense possible) if they could.

The Assemblies of God I think are a little more humane I think. I've encountered much more tolerance there.

Please provide some examples. An occasional Assembly of God church would not surprise me, but any Mormon church would surprise me, meaning any Mormon church that was officially affiliated with the parent church in Utah.

Don't worry, I'm not upset at all that you misquoted me. [It's never a good idea to modify what a person said AND THEN QUOTE IT. In fact, I'm pretty sure that such an action IS AGAINST THE RULES OF THE FORUM.]

If you had read my post, you would see that I did list examples related to BOTH the SBC (which is in your OP) and the Assemblies of God. I did not address the LDS church at all, because I don't know anything about it.

First of all, you did address the LDS church since as I just showed, you said "I know homosexuals who are ordained ministers in both churches."

Second, how did I misquote you? If I did, I apologize, and it was not intentional.

 

[Agnostic75]

Name a few political strategists in each of the Bible Belt states and present the rubric by which they measure the power of the SBC.

Evangelical pastors jump into the 2012 political fray - Los Angeles Times

Los Angeles Times


September 10, 2011


He wasn't alone. The straw poll drew a slew of previously apolitical Iowa pastors — a constituency increasingly heeding a call to speak out on politics.


"There is a concerted assault on everything that we consider sacred — and we pastors need to move to the forefront of the battle," said Demastus, wearing a T-shirt and shorts for the Saturday event.


Demastus is part of a growing movement of evangelical pastors who are jumping into the electoral fray as never before, preaching political engagement from the pulpit as they mobilize for the 2012 election.


This new activism has substantial muscle behind it: a cadre of experienced Christian organizers and some of the conservative movement's most generous donors, who are setting up technologically sophisticated operations to reach pastors and their congregations in battleground states.


The passion for politics stems from a collision of historic forces, including heightened local organizing around the issues of abortion and gay marriage and a view of the country's debt as a moral crisis that violates biblical instruction. Another major factor: Both Texas Gov. Rick Perry and Bachmann, contenders for the GOP nomination, are openly appealing to evangelical Christian voters as they blast President Obama's leadership.


Both Republican and Democratic strategists say that pastors have already helped unleash an army of voters to shape the GOP primary contests in Iowa and South Carolina, two states with large numbers of conservative Christians. They are making plans to do the same in states that are even more important to next year's general election. Those include Ohio, Florida, Iowa, Virginia and Colorado, where evangelical voters make up about a quarter of the electorate and their participation could greatly aid Republicans.


"The Christian activist right is the largest, best-organized and, I believe, the most powerful force in American politics today," said Rob Stein, a Democratic strategist who recently provided briefings on the constituency to wealthy donors on the left.

"No other political group comes even close."


Religious leaders have long been active in political causes. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. used his Baptist pulpit to agitate for civil rights, and fiery televangelists Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell awakened the religious right in the 1970s and 1980s with calls to fight what they saw as America's moral decay.


But the current awakening is different. It springs from the grass roots — small and independent churches — and is fueled by emails and YouTube videos. And it is driven less by personality than by the biblical teaching to be the "salt" and "light" of society — in other words, to have a beneficial influence on the world.


"This is the congregational version of the 'tea party,'" says Richard Land, president of the conservative Southern Baptist Convention's Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission. "Pastors who in the past would dodge my calls are calling me saying, 'How can we be involved?'"

 

[Agnostic75]

Since this post is large, I will post it in two parts. This is part 1.

http://www.oneorlando.org/images/The_Southern_Baptist_Conspiracy_pdf.pdf

The Southern Baptist Conspiracy
By Vicki Nantz
(Printed in Watermark, March 17, 2011)

When investor-candidate Rick Scott merged his interests with the Southern Baptist Church last summer through a bit of strategic gay-baiting, his campaign immediately acquired more assets than his enormous wealth could buy, and the Baptists bought themselves another governor. So it came as no surprise that after a January closed-door meeting with Baptist leaders, Governor Scott appointed the former CFO of the Florida Baptist Children’s Home to lead the Department of Children & Families. And within weeks of that appointment, the Florida Baptist Witness newspaper officially called on Scott and his DCF chief to reinstate anti-gay adoption discrimination. So goes the southern tradition of allowing a 19th Century church to make public policy in the 21st Century.

There is nothing new about the Southern Baptist anti-gay conspiracy in Florida politics. Baptists have employed a Tallahassee lobbyist for the past 16 years. And John Stemberger admitted in 2008 following the passage of his so-called Marriage Protection Amendment, “There’s no question in my mind, as the organizer, that without Florida Baptist churches this would not have happened, period.” With 2,300 Florida congregations and 1 million foot soldiers, the Southern Baptist army is formidable, and anti-gay voter referendums are easily passed.

Since 1977, Florida’s Southern Baptists have crusaded against civil rights advancements for LGBT people. The nation’s anti-gay movement actually began in singer Anita Bryant’s Baptist church when Dade County Commissioners voted to include “sexual preference” in the county human rights ordinance. Bryant rallied her supporters to repeal that ordinance, and her religion-fueled bigotry ignited a hysteria that spread across the state and nation. By dishonestly conflating homosexuality and pedophilia, Bryant inspired the Florida Legislature to pass an adoption statute in the summer of 1977 that categorically banned all gay people from adopting children. That ban was enforced until 2010.

While many religious faiths share an antipathy toward the gay community, few are as militant in their efforts to harm gay families as are the nation’s 16 million Southern Baptists, the largest protestant denomination in America. Even now, the Southern Baptist Convention posts on their national website the malicious rhetoric of the Family Research Council, an organization the Southern Poverty Law Center has officially labeled a hate group. “Get this straight: God did not make anybody homosexual,” writes the website author who is a vice president at FRC. The Florida Baptist Convention (the state arm of the SBC) instructs members on its website to “oppose the immorality” of “homosexuality.” The Baptist websites use words like “abomination,” “perversion,” and “of the devil” to exhort their members to be politically engaged in defeating equality measures across the U.S. Accordingly, if Southern Baptists are not politically engaged, “then we disobey the commands of Christ and allow Satan to prevail by default.” Fueling the illusory battle with Satan has served Republican politicians well, and they court the Southern Baptists every election cycle, promising institutional anti-gay bigotry in return for zealous support of their political agendas.

 

[Agnostic75]

This is part 2.


http://www.oneorlando.org/images/The_Southern_Baptist_Conspiracy_pdf.pdf

Oppression of minorities is nothing new for this denomination which had its origins in the defense of slavery in 1845 - an immoral beginning to a powerful religious-political movement that for 120 years would not even admit African-Americans into its services. The Baptists supported Jim Crow laws and opposed desegregation and the civil rights movement. They also opposed giving women the right to vote, and in more recent years have condemned feminism. Even today, women are not permitted to be pastors or leaders in their own homes (“a wife is to submit herself graciously to her husband” who is to “lead the family&#8221. Parents are urged to send any child suspected of being gay to a reparative therapy program so they can be “cured,” never mind that those programs have been proven to harm children psychologically and tear families apart. Of paramount concern for the white, straight, male leadership of the Southern Baptist Church is that nothing challenges their perceived higher order in the universe.

Whether it’s organizing a boycott of Disney World to punish Ellen for coming out on a Disney-owned sitcom, or bussing in out-of-state parishioners to protest a local anti-discrimination ordinance (like Orlando’s Chapter 57), it is inevitably the Southern Baptist Church leading the anti-gay fray. National campaigns against hate crime legislation, ENDA, or DADT are always Baptist-led. It was even a Southern Baptist preacher, George Rekers, who was hired to defend the state’s anti-gay adoption statute when Martin Gill sued for the right to adopt his foster kids. (Rekers also helped create California’s discriminatory Proposition 8, and the Boy Scout’s ban on gays. He has been soundly discredited by multiple courts and was exposed as a fraud in the Miami “Rent Boy” scandal of 2010 when he was found in the company of a male escort.)

The Southern Baptist Convention vehemently reacted to the idea of same-sex marriage with the 1996 “Resolution on Homosexual Marriage,” still posted on their website. It condemns gay relationships (“a homosexual sexual relationship is always sinful, impure, degrading, shameful, unnatural, indecent and perverted” and it lays out a political road map for opposing marriage equality nationwide. The SBC promises to fight efforts to legitimize “thoroughly wicked” same-sex marriage, and vows “we will never conform to or obey anything required by any governing body to implement, impose or act upon any such law. So help us God.” That resolution helped fuel the passage of the 1996 federal Defense of Marriage Act, and Florida’s DOMA in 1997.

Baptists bypassed the Legislature to champion Florida’s 2008 Amendment 2, the so-called Marriage Protection Amendment, which constitutionally banned same-sex marriage. The referendum leaders, activist-attorneys John Stemberger and Mathew Staver, relied on the network of Southern Baptists to obtain the required signatures in each district, finance their myriad organizations, and even preach specific sermons on the necessity of discriminating against gay people. The national SBC implored their vast membership to support anti-gay marriage amendments in Florida, California and Arizona, and all three passed easily. Candidate Rick Scott needed that Baptist network to win in 2010, so he predictably turned to gay-baiting, telling the Florida Baptist Witness that he was opposed to LGBT civil rights protections and adoption and foster parent privileges for gays. This news fired up the Baptists who had been lukewarm to Scott. It was no surprise then that Governor-elect Scott held a closed-door meeting with his Southern Baptist benefactors on the very morning of his inauguration. Within weeks, House Speaker Dean Cannon and Senate President Mike Haridopolos (both Southern Baptists) told the Baptist newspaper that they, too, would like to see adoption discrimination reinstated.

Scott, Cannon and Haridopolos will not have to initiate an anti-gay measure themselves. Liberty Counsel’s Mathew Staver (former preacher and current Tea Party activist), plans to stop gays from adopting, presumably through the well-oiled Southern Baptist referendum express in 2012. He is currently courting Southern Baptist preacher and Fox News commentator, Mike Huckabee, who may be on that 2012 ballot himself. Huckabee, who now lives in Destin, Florida, recently told The New Yorker that gays should not be allowed to adopt because “children are not puppies.”

Although the Southern Baptists claim that they do not advocate “violence and hatred directed at homosexuals,” everything they espouse promotes violence and hatred towards LGBT people. The defamatory anti-gay “research” they cite has been repeatedly discredited in court as religiously biased and untrue. Every scornful word they use to describe LGBT people is dangerously provocative (“abomination,” “perverted,” “wicked&#8221. They have even directly exported this animus around the world to leaders like Uganda’s Museveni, who now wants to execute gay people - so much for not advocating violence.


Who can stop the Southern Baptist war on Florida’s gay community? Gay rights organizations completely underestimated the power and reach of the Southern Baptists in 2008 and were surprised when the Marriage Protection Amendment passed with 62% of the vote. Even now, those organizations tiptoe around the rabid elephant in the room, unwilling to publicly condemn the church for stirring and profiting from gay hatred. Cultural leaders look the other way, and progressive candidates recoil at being labeled gay-friendly. If only someone would reach out to national business leaders who could counter the religious extremism by expressing a simple truth in these times of economic challenge: Fortune 500 companies will not bring their jobs and riches to a state that endorses anti-gay discrimination, nor should they.


It’s time for the hate to stop. It’s time for all decent human beings to condemn the tactics of the Southern Baptist Church and demand that its leadership, and their political allies like Rick Scott, end the malicious campaign against the gay community. It’s past time for Baptist parishioners to rise up from their pews and leave or reform their church on behalf of their own gay children, parents and friends who continue to be persecuted in the name of their God.

 

[Agnostic75]

And really, this is nothing to do with Biblical grounds. It has to do with people being intolerant, and justifying that intolerance, plain and simple.

Yes, intolerance is often a part of it, but many Christians who strongly oppose same-sex behavior believe that God opposes same-sex behavior, and many of them will be happy to debate that with you. Even if the Bible does not oppose same-sex behavior, many Christians believe that it does.

I once read some comments by a young Christian man who had a gay sexual identity. He said that he was celibate, but only because he believed that the Bible opposes same-sex behavior. His celibacy was not because he was intolerant with himself, but because he believed that the Bible opposes same-sex behavior. Some celibate homsoexuals are even afraid to masturbate because they believe that God will punish them.

There is no way that you could know how many Christian opponents of same-sex behavior oppose it because of intolerance only, the Bible only, or a combination of both.

 

[Agnostic75]

SOUTHERN BAPTIST CONVENTION AND HOMOSEXUALITY

2009-JUN-23: TX: Fort Worth church kicked out of Southern Baptists: The Southern Baptist Convention has terminated its 127 year relationship with the Broadway Baptist Church in Fort Worth, TX. The reason is that the congregation is too lenient with GLBT members. The messengers (delegates) to the convention were not allowed to be seated.

Kathy Madeja, chairperson of the congregation's board of deacons said:

"We do not believe Broadway has taken any action which would justify its being deemed not in friendly cooperation with the SBC. It is unfortunate that the Southern Baptist Convention decided otherwise and severed its affiliation with Broadway Baptist Church."
​

Earlier, the Rev. Jorene Taylor Swift, a Broadway minister, wrote a letter to the denomination's executive committee stating:

"We are not a church where homosexuality is a defining issue. While we extend hospitality to everyone -- including homosexuals -- we do not endorse, approve or affirm homosexual behavior."
​

​

 

[angellous_evangellous]

 

[angellous_evangellous]