So I’m scanning my Google News headlines this morning, and I come across a tantalizing fragment of what looks like a letter to the editor of the Associated Baptist Press…

Associated Baptist Press, FL – 1 hour ago
(ABP) — Thanks to Dr. David Gushee for his engaging article on Christian ethics as they relate to gay and lesbian Christians.

However, when I click on the link the Associated Baptist Press website tells me…

You are not authorised to view this resource.
You need to login.

I double check to see if it’s a subscription only site and it appears not to be.  So perhaps they’re just blocking incoming links.  A lot of head up their butt websites do that these days.  So I go to the home page of the Associated Baptist Press website and look for a handy search box.  There’s one at the top and I enter what I assume is the name of the columnist the person in the Google link is responding to, "David Gushee".  I get a handy list of entries, including this…

Editor’s note: The recent series of articles by David Gushee on homosexuality generated an unusual amount of response. 

I’ll just bet it did.  After all, we homosexuals are one of the seven seals of the tribulation aren’t we?  I blogged some time ago about how, according to the Left Behind books, the Antichrist will be the son of a gay male couple…

This came to mind last night, as I read (via Andrew Sullivan) the following Wikipedia entry on Nicolae Carpathia, the Antichrist in Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins Left Behind stories…

Born in the county of Cluj in Romania, Carpathia’s birth is the product of genetic engineering. His mother Marilena Carpathia, is convinced by parties who are followers of Satan, although she is kept unaware of this, to become the mother of a child who they assure her would change the face of the world. Marilena’s husband, Sorin, and his gay lover, Baduna Marius, provide genetic material to facilitate Nicolae’s conception.

Dig it.  LaHaye and Jenkins are telling their readers that the Antichrist is, literally, the spawn of a gay male couple.

And some days I sit here at my computer and wonder if this is what it was like to be a Jew in 1920s Germany, watching the horror coming on the horizon.  This is the kind of stuff that gets people killed.  Someday, it might well get me killed.  Someone with a baseball bat or a gun comes along and takes my head off, because he thinks that gay people are going to deliver the world to the Antichrist.

And LaHaye and Jenkins are hardly alone in this.  Variations on this theme are popping up all across the kook pews.  The Gays are in league with Satan…  Just last week James Dobson was telling his listeners on the Focus on the Family radio broadcast, that same sex marriage was an attack on the family by the very forces of hell itself (via Ex-Gay Watch):

…as you all very well know marriage is under vicious attack, now I think from the forces of hell itself. Now it’s either going to continue to decline, and as I told you in my office a few minutes ago, I believe with that destruction of marriage will come the decline of western civilization itself.

So…yeah…I’ll fucking bet David Gushee’s recent series of articles on homosexuality generated an unusual amount of response.  On the other hand, I have to wonder what the Associated Baptist Press expected.  Baptists haven’t exactly been in the forefront of calling out all the anti-gay hatemongering that’s been going on for the past few decades.  There’s a reason I keep the Baptist part of my own life history at arm’s length.

Anyway, I found the article Google News had linked to, clicked on it, and found I was actually allowed to read it from one of their own internal links…

Gay Christians can’t wait any longer
By Peggy Campolo
Wednesday, 13 August 2008

Editor’s note: The recent series of articles by David Gushee on homosexuality generated an unusual amount of response. ABP solicited these two representative responses — from Peggy Campolo, an advocate for gay Christians, and George Guthrie, a professor at Union University.

Both articles are worth the read, if you can actually get to them.  Maybe the links I’ve posted here will work.  If not, you’ll probably have to do what I did.  (Update: I’ve just tested them and they seem to be working for now…)  Gushee writes…

It is clear that insofar as "Christianity" or "the church" is primarily associated in people’s minds with rejection of homosexuals, as poll data shows, our mission as witnesses to the love of God in Jesus Christ has been badly damaged. There are very good missional reasons for Christian leaders to back off of public crusades against gay rights, whatever one may think about the merits of the particular issues under discussion. We must be known for what (who) we are for, not what (who) we are against.

The crux of his article is this, basically…

A church that is in the process of abandoning basic tenets of Christian sexual morality has no credibility as a moral voice in culture. And, ironically, it has no credibility if it decides to abandon the church’s traditional stance on homosexuality.

It’s almost an Only Nixon Can Go To China kind of argument.  The problem with it is that at it’s core it’s still pretty damn arrogant.  I don’t know of any church that’s saying Hey gang…let’s just throw sexual morality out the window so we can all just have some fun!  What’s happening is that some congregations and some church leaders are seeing the old moral codes being challenged by the reality of gay people’s lives and they are finding them wanting.  That is leaving many of them to ask questions they’d never thought in their wildest dreams they’d ever find themselves asking, because the Bible was supposedly plain as day about all that homosexuality stuff.  If a man also lie with mankind, as he lieth with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination: they shall surely be put to death. Their blood shall be upon them… 

Simple, no?  God says, kill the homosexuals, and you get a free pass on that thou shalt not kill thing.  But it’s not so simple if you have a conscience.  You don’t see an abomination when you look at that kid who just came out to you.  You don’t see an abomination in the love and devotion of that same sex couple next door.  If anything, you see the same joy and peace and contentment you see in your own marriage.  And so the questions start tap tap tapping you on the shoulder.  Not all who wander are lost.  These people haven’t abandoned sexual morality.  It is in fact because they are moral people, that they are questioning what they’ve been taught all their lives about homosexuals and homosexuality.

Folks like Gushee, who I have no doubt is trying hard, and in good faith, to figure all this out, need to listen to themselves.  Because you are willing to willy-nilly toss out thousands of years of Christian sexual morality simply because you see in the love of same sex couples a reflection of God’s love too, you have no creditability as a moral voice.  I’m sorry?  It’s the folks who cling to ideology and dogma in the face of what their own two eyes can plainly see who have no moral conscience, let alone credibility as a moral voice.

And tucked into Peggy Campolo’s response is the moral truth in a nutshell…

A pastor friend of mine, who has conducted too many funerals for gay children of God who ended their lives because they could no longer live the lie that their churches and families demanded of them, tells of a suicide note left by a young Christian. He dearly loved the godly parents who had accepted him but could not bear the anguish felt when their church excluded them along with him. His final letter to his mother and father read simply, "I didn’t know how else to fix it."

Their blood shall be upon them…  No it won’t.