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| Rick Warren |
After his interview with Piers Morgan in which he compared being gay to eating arsenic, megachurch pastor Rick Warren is now playing the victim:
"If you disagree with somebody today you're often called a hater," Warren told HuffPost Live host Marc Lamont Hill. "I don't really hate anybody. Or you're called 'phobic.' I'm not afraid of anybody. I have many, many gay friends."
That said, Warren added that he might not agree with certain actions, and said that there is a moral difference between love and sex. "It's not a sin to love somebody," he said. "It might be a sin to have sex with them."
If you ask me, his explanation is worse than the original statement, which was the following:
Here’s what we know about life. I have all kinds of natural feelings in my life and it doesn’t necessarily mean that I should act on every feeling. Sometimes I get angry and I feel like punching a guy in the nose. It doesn’t mean I act on it. Sometimes I feel attracted to women who are not my wife. I don’t act on it. Just because I have a feeling doesn’t make it right. Not everything natural is good for me. Arsenic is natural.
Let me break this down for Mr. Warren and I feel extremely safe in saying that I speak for the vast majority of the lgbt community when I say this:
Dear Mr. Warren,
I don't give a rat's ass whether or not you hate me. I don't lay up awake at night wringing my hands or crying about whether or not you hate me. What I don't like . . . what the gay community does not . . . like is when folks like you who have an enormous platform manipulate it to trivialize us, to demean our lives, our loved ones, and our families. I don't know about any other group, but I as a gay man I don't like being compared to punching someone in the nose. And I certainly don't like being compared to the poison arsenic.
What you said about gays is no different than slurring women, or Jewish people, or African-Americans. It's not about hatred. Most of the time, it's never about hatred. It's about ignorance fueled by egotism disguised as religious beliefs and fevered imaginations about sexual intercourse. And by the way, just where in the heck are you coming from when you started talking about sex? Is that what it's about to you when it comes to gays? Those gay friends you speak of, is that what you think of them? Cases of flesh engaging in wanton sexual activity?
You are not talking about fictional characters here when you talk about gays. You are talking about real people. You are talking about mothers and fathers and children. Nieces, nephews, uncles, aunts, grandparents.
The gay community don't care about your hatred. We have had to deal with worse things than an odious pastor who may or may not hate us.
But your ignorance . . . now that's the problem. If you do have gay friends, perhaps you should converse more with them. Maybe then you wouldn't be so quick to use your platform to demean them and the rest of us gays.
Remember, there are some of us who don't have a platform like you do, therefore don't you think you have a major responsibility not to come across as an ignoramous?
You have every right to believe what you want in accordance to your religious philosophy but if you think that you will insult the gay community and expect us to smile about it, think again.
We don't want your tolerance and we certainly don't need your acceptance.
AND we will NOT put up with your ignorance.
(The sound you are now hearing is this queen dropping the microphone.)
And, NO Mr. Warren, you do NOT have gay friends. If they were your friends, you would stand up for their right to marry - the same right you have.
ReplyDeleteI get rather sick of the "I have L/G/B/T friends" as a PREFACE for validating ignorance.
ReplyDeleteRare are the L/G/B/T people who would stand up and say THAT ignorance would be acceptable.
I have cis-straight friends that I would be HORRIFIED to hear them use that justification for discrimination against me!
Hell no.
I viewed him on CNN International last night here in Guatemala. The man is plain dopey...I couldn't believe what a blockhead he has become (or perhaps he always was)...when he grabbed at the fact that his charities worked with hundreds of Gay Groups around the world I wanted to kick in the screen...imagine, the ¨good¨ he did/does in Uganda by being a spiritual buddy of the worst of the the worst-- the bigots and thieves that promote anti-gay deadly hate in Uganda. If he really wants to do something in Uganda he ought send a BIG FAT CHECK to Bishop Christopher Ssenyonjo who actually WORKS with the marginalized and despised (fearing for their lives) LGBT folks of Uganda. His past relationship with Pastor Martin Ssempa is a unholy disgrace of smugness and glossed over bare hate...get a grip, Pastor, you're running way over your head (and way out of control)...shame on the Camelback lightweights thinking/beliving they've made a tidy little case out of OUR SURVIVAL! The worst are the codependent suckemups with self-satisfied grins on their righteous faces...meanwhile, David Kato is murdered and few reflect on WHY THIS COULD BE...irresponsible Christians are thugs.
ReplyDeleteAccording to the Bible gluttony is a sin. What exactly is your waist size Rick? Perhaps you should punch yourself in the nose for not following scripture...
ReplyDeleteAs I think that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. more or less may have said...
ReplyDeleteIt's not courageous to forbid others what you allow for yourself.
I remembered Pastor Warren talking to Henry Louis Gates, Jr. on PBS about proslavery clergy, and went looking on the internet for the quote. Here it is, thanks to Richard, the Friendly Atheist:
ReplyDeleteWarren: They’re… isegesis, you’re reading INTO it instead of exegesis, reading OUT of it, what it actually says. And the Bible, like any other book, and people do it with the Constitution, make it mean what they want it to mean. I mean, the Supreme Court now finds all kinds of things in the constitution that isn’t there. But they try to create something out of it. And so everything that we look at, we read with our lenses, and if you were raised with a prejudicial lens you’re going to read Scripture wrong…
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/friendlyatheist/2012/04/18/rick-warren-must-not-understand-the-bibles-take-on-slavery/
(That probably should be eisegesis, not isegesis, for the pedantic among us. I guess that it's good that Warren knows what eisegesis means, even if he appears to uncritically practices it himself. I suspect that Pastor Warren in not credentialed and experienced as a Constitutional scholar, unlike the President.)
And how many of Pastor Warren's "gay friends" are actually openly gay people who are seeking out romantic relationships with people of the same sex? I mean, I have no doubt he has a lot of "gay friends" who are willing to shackle themselves to Warren's demands for celibacy or possibly even try to "turn straight."
ReplyDeleteChristopher Yuan comes to mind.
Pastor Warren conflates harmful behavior with harmless, even beneficial, behavior. Taking arsenic will kill you. Having sex with a woman not his wife will harm his wife. Punching a man in the nose will likely elicit a similar reaction from the punchee. However, loving a consenting adult of the same sex is NOT inherently harmful, like his other examples are, it's actually beautiful and I recommend it!
ReplyDelete