‘Like my pain meant nothing’ — the alarming harshness of tactless anti-gay preaching

CNN’s Richard Allen Greene reports that “Harsh anti-gay preaching alarms gay rights supporters and Christian conservatives alike.”

Christian conservatives, apparently, don’t want their anti-gay preaching to come across as “harsh.” Coming across as harsh can make their anti-gay lobbying more difficult:

Many conservative Christians would agree with pastors such as Worley and Knapp that homosexual behavior is fundamentally wrong, [Ed] Stetzer said.

But that doesn’t mean they support them or their sermons, he added.

Charles Worley was the North Carolina pastor who called for concentration camps for LGBT people in which he hoped they would just die out. Curtis Knapp is the Kansas clergyman who says Worley doesn’t go far enough. Knapp said he wants the government to kill homosexuals.

Most anti-gay Christians don’t support Worley and Knapp because such outlandishly violent preaching makes it more difficult to persuade 50.1 percent of the country to agree to make the anti-gay tenets of their conservative Christianity the established religious law in America.

I discussed this same desire for a less-harsh-seeming anti-gay agenda in a recent post titled, “You can’t deny people their rights and be nice about it.”

That post was largely a response to Halee Gray Scott’s Christianity Today item, “I Am Not Charles Worley: The Plea of a Christian Who Opposes Gay Marriage.”

“I am not Charles Worley,” Scott wrote:

… and I’m tired of others, especially fellow Christians, assuming that because I’m opposed to gay marriage that I’m hateful like him. It’s time to extend a hermeneutic of grace to each other — especially to fellow Christians who still do not favor gay marriage and believe that homosexuality is not God’s intent for human sexuality.

That prompted me to write the 1,400-word essay linked above.

Here (via) is a shorter, more concise response to Scott, courtesy of Cordelia Chase:

(For those who can’t view that, Cordy says: “People who think their problems are so huge craze me. Like this time I sort of ran over this girl on her bike. It was the most traumatizing event of my life and she’s trying to make it about her leg! Like my pain meant nothing.”)