He Comer writes,
Today, after seven years of attempting to build the courage and strength, I finally went back to my childhood Baptist church - the place where the stench of hatred, bigotry and oppression was, and still is, thick in the air. Grapevine Baptist Church in Lewisville, N.C., is a place where violence against gays and lesbians is honored, adored and glorified from the pulpit - a place where I heard many times, “Put the queers on a ship, pluck a hole into the side of it and send it out to sea,” or “Put all the gays in their own two states and shut the borders” (with the logical conclusion therefore being that all the gays would die out).
It is sad that although some change has been made, places like this still exist. What is also sad is that it would be easy to think of these people as evil or cruel when in actuality, I believe they are just misguided.
Check it out. Also check out the comment from a congregation member and Comer's response.
1 comment:
I admit I struggle with the cruel vs. misguided question myself. My gentler nature, which likes to give everyone the benefit of the doubt, would like to think that such people really are genuinely caring people who are simply misguided.
But then, I look at the world around us, and another part of me has a hard time accepting this. This is the part of me that has trouble reconciling how genuinely caring people can see the same things I do and still hold to such obviously hurtful ideologies. And I find it all too easy to wonder if there isn't some willfulness to that blindness.
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