Pastor Gate

by shamanic

Look, without wading into the intraparty and apparently intrablogospheric war that's happening right now, I just want to tell you how bizarre I find the whole Jeremiah Wright flap. I live in the south where, let's face it, the pastors make their living by demonizing me for being gay. Black and white. There are certainly liberal churches and liberal churchgoers, but there's an incredibly ugly strain of Christianity that lives alongside me, and I don't think you can be a queer southerner without learning to tune the jackasses out.

So I have to wonder what would happen if some of these white, conservative preachers got their sermons from before Georgia's anti-gay marriage amendment passed up on YouTube. Would it shock America to learn how much hatred of gays flows out of Christian pulpits?

Probably not, but as long as it's a white person saying it we can marginalize him as a religious wacko and go about our business. Only when it's a black pastor is the issue one of "hatred of America." A lot of these people want the Constitution replaced with some Biblical document.

By definition, a lot of these people, black and white, hate America because they hate the freedoms that let people live lives of which they don't approve. That's the simple fact of the matter, black and white, and as a freedom loving American, I think they're entitled to their opinion, but don't make this something it isn't. Preachers say all kinds of screwed up things in their pulpits, just like the rest of us do in our day to day lives. Black and white, there's a lot of animosity toward what most of us think of as living. Black and white, there's a lot of hatred pouring from the church doors.