So here we have yet another pastor calling for the death of all gay people. (All credit to friendly and indefatigable Jeremy Hooper over at Good As You for finding and presenting the audio clip, and to the equally tireless folks at Towleroad for the audio transcription.)
Next up for Shoo-in For Hades is Pastor Curtis Knapp, of New Hope Baptist Church in Seneca, Kansas, who recently vomited out this:
They [homosexuals] should be put to death. That’s what happened in Israel. That’s why homosexuality wouldn’t have grown in Israel. It tends to limit conversions. It tends to limit people coming out of the closet. — ‘Oh, so you’re saying we should go out and start killing them, no?’ — I’m saying the government should. They won’t but they should. [You say], ‘Oh, I can’t believe you; you’re horrible. You’re a backwards neanderthal of a person.’ Is that what you’re calling scripture? Is God a neanderthal, backwards [gurble] in his morality. Is it his word or not? If it’s his word, he commanded it. It’s his idea, not mine. And I’m not ashamed of it.
When I first heard of this audio recording, I … well, immediately posted this on the wall of my Facebook page:
In the last two minutes four people have emailed me the link to this [recording]. I seriously appreciate that trust. But I’m gonna let this one go. Come a time, you just have to go, “Oh, look. Another stinking, wriggling, air-sucking bottom-feeder flopping out of control,” unhook it, and toss it back into the mucky gunk it came from. This coffinfish craves fame. And as sure as fart bubbles rise and break in the air, he’ll get it. But wouldn’t it be nice if at least every once in awhile we just ignored buffoons like this?
And then a considerable comment-confab developed about whether or not I should, in fact, ignore this buttcap. Then I started getting a bunch of emails from people very kindly (and persuasively) asking me to write something on my blog about him.
So I did/am. But you knew that.
This will, however, be my last time writing about a gay-bashing pastor who, before the Internet made him famous for saying whatever outrageously hateful thing he did, was known to virtually no one outside of his sad little cadre of dumbass parishioners.
These low-life, no-life pastors live for attention. But they’ve never had any way to get themselves any.
Well, now they do. Now they know that they can say things a hyena would be embarrassed to have flop out of its mouth, and then just sit back and wait for the Internet to make them go Typhoid Mary viral.
And once that happens they can look in the mirror, and instead of an obscure, marginally educated nobody looking back at them, they can see a man that people know. That people are talking about. Someone who’s making a difference in the world.
Someone who is finally someone.
And notice how each podunk pastor says something a little worse, a little more inflammatory, than did the one before him. First we had the guy screeching about punching and breaking the wrists of gay children. Then we had Mr. Aginit braying about puttin’ all the queers and lesbians behind electric fences. And now we have this rump-chapeau bitterly bemoaning the fact that the American government won’t obey God and visit genocide upon its LGBTQ citizens.
Who knows what’ll come tomorrow?
Not me. All I know is that it’ll be something worse. *
And then, as surely as battle follows the blaring of the war horns, there will be blood.
I once stayed at the mountain home of some friends who had a worm farm. They kept the worms in these huge wooden frames on the ground filled with good, dark soil. One night we all went to bed without turning off the bright lights of their back porch. When we awoke early the next morning, we found that all the worms, attracted (or maybe driven crazy by?) the lights, had crawled out of their frames, and were now everywhere. All the ground around my friends’ home had become alive with rapidly advancing, pinkish-brown little snakes—which also covered their kitchen floor like the most disgusting carpet ever. It was an unnerving disaster.
I’m not yet going to stop writing on the gay/Christian issue; I’ve fought in that war too long to leave before victory. But we’ve tipped now into a place where I think everyone in media would do well to consider the wisdom of sometimes just turning off the lights and letting the restless, wiggling worms remain where, God knows, they belong, which is in the darkness and buried in their dirt.
* Not three hours after I wrote that, someone sent me this, coming soon to a trillion other websites near you:
(P.S. Just to be clear, I’m only saying that I personally don’t want to play up every dinkus pastor who makes a point of braying about how sinful “the gays” are. As I just put it to a friend on Facebook with whom I was having a little chat about this post: “Well, I was just saying what I personally want to do. If nobody was covering these dickweeds, then it would be vital that I do. But me ignoring any of them might means zero relative to how much coverage they’ll get anyway. They’re bloody chum to the ravenous shark of media. They’ll be publicized, with or without me.)
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