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03/05/2013
Illinois Family Institute vs. 'abhorrent' gays, incest, Zumba
Laurie Higgins' latest denunciation of marriage equality in her home state of Illinois is so chock full of obvious animus, it's hard to pick a proper snippet. There's this, in which the Illinois Family Institute's senior researcher decries young people's acceptance of their gay friends:
From birth our young people hear one monolithic cultural message about issues related to homosexuality. Our children are powerfully affected by the demagogic images and narratives to which they are exposed, and they don’t know how to think through or refute the propositions they hear daily. They are persuaded by deceit, and the church does next to nothing.
There's this one, encouraging churches to replace Zumba or Pilates exercise classes with courses on how to beat back homosexuality:
I visit the websites of theologically orthodox churches and see churches offering Zumba and Pilates classes, cupcake-decorating parties, and weight loss classes. Isn’t it at least as legitimate and more important for the church to equip its flock to understand the specious arguments used to normalize homosexuality as it is to lead them in the ways of Zumba? Why don’t churches offer seminars, workshops, or classes that teach people how to identify fallacious arguments and refute them on the critical issue of homosexuality?
She also conflates loving same-sex relationships between two consenting adults with unrelated matters like incest and polyamory:
Imagine that specious arguments and deceptive images were pervading our sitcoms and Hollywood films, endorsed by our president and elected leaders, trumpeted in the mainstream media, and shown to our five year-olds in picture books in school, but the ideas being promoted were that polyamory (aka sexual non-monogamy) is equivalent to heterosexual monogamy and that plural marriage is just as valuable and good as traditional marriage. Would the church remain as unconscionably silent as it is now?
What if the idea being propagated in our schools, entertainment industry, and mainstream press were that whites are inherently superior to other races or that legal civil marriage should be available to close blood relatives of the same sex (after all, there’s no risk of birth defects in such inherently sterile relationships)?
And, of course, she wishes that America's pastors would start preaching about "abhorrent" homosexuality, comparing today's churches with the ones that failed to stand up to Hitler:
If the teaching pastors in every theologically orthodox church had been proclaiming that homosexual acts are abhorrent to God and that such a thing as “homosexual marriage” cannot exist, and if our pastors had been teaching their members how to understand the images and ideas they encounter, and if they had been teaching by example what Christians should be doing, I don’t think we’d be here today.
Most churches today bear a striking resemblance to the German Evangelical Church during Hitler’s reign of terror, but we have even less reason for our cowardice since we don’t yet face imprisonment. The German Evangelical Church acted in ways virtually all Christians now view as ignoble, selfish, and cowardly. Some pastors argued that a “‘more reasonable tone would be more honoring to those with different views.’” One bishop told Martin Niemoller that those pastors who refused to join the resistance were “‘trying to bring peace to the church’” rather than “‘seem like . . . troublemakers.’” In response, Niemoller asked “‘What does it matter how we look in Germany compared with how we look in Heaven?’”
FULL ARTICLE: Pastors and Prelates, Fly Away Home, Your House is on Fire, Your Children All Gone… [IFI]
This is your opposition movement, Illinois. You can kid yourself into believing it's only about "marriage protection," if you want to live in that blissfully ignorant fantasy world. However, those of us who pay attention to what these folks are saying and choose to believe that they actually mean it will continue to shout the truth from the roof tops: "THEY HAVE NO INTENTION OF STOPPING AT MARRIAGE!"
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