The architect Frank Lloyd Wright once said "No stream rises higher then its source."  To see how true that is, just read anything in the news concerning  the religious right.  Particularly these days, what with the paladins of morality making excuses for the GOP’s coverup of Mark Foley’s behavior with teenage boys. 

Your gay and lesbian neighbors have been staring into this sewer for decades now and the only thing that keeps surprising me personally, is how big the lies have to get before anyone in the mainstream news media notices the stench.  But it isn’t the big outrages like Foley you should be paying attention to.  It’s the quick little moments of flinching guile, when even though honesty won’t hurt them, they still can’t own up to anything.  Let me show you one I came across this morning, while reading the news.

Pure.  Think about that word for a moment.  Think about the images it conjures.   Pure.  Edinburgh University’s course on Christian marriage is called, "Pure".  It teaches students Orthodox Christian teaching on relationships and sex.  It teaches chastity before marriage and so on.  Oh, and incidentally, that homosexuality can be cured.  Well…maybe not just incidentally …

Students nationwide have expressed their outrage after a Christian course aiming to ‘cure’ homosexuality piloted at Edinburgh University.

Students at the university began protesting the PURE course after it was discovered to recommend homophobic literature, such as What Some of You Were by Christopher Keane, which details the stories of "ex-gays" who have been “cured” of their homosexuality by the power of Christianity, and how "gay relationships are characterized more by promiscuity than by fidelity."

Unaccountably, gay students seem a tad upset about that… 

In response to the course, students at Edinburgh set up a Facebook group called "Stop Pure", which has enlisted 1,400 members within a fortnight. Students from around the country have joined from universities such as Oxford, Cambridge, St Andrews and Kings College London.

Group creator Lucy Chambers said: "We want to use the group to help make students aware of the issues raised by the presence of this course on our campuses and to encourage them to make a stand. Facebook is a great means to contact lots of students up and down the country in the space of a few minutes.

"We have already set in motion a process whereby our students’ association is investigating the course and it is our hope that we will be able to use the group, or perhaps set up a new one, to affect change nationwide."

Which, in their own way, is something the creators of "Pure" also have in mind…

The controversy surrounding the course called Pure, began after pilot courses were held at Edinburgh University. The pilot was deemed a success and the Edinburgh University Student newspaper printed details of the Universities and Colleges Christian Fellowship plans to roll out the courses across Britain.

But just because the Colleges Christian Fellowship is teaching kids that homosexuals don’t love, they just have sex, and that they can pray their dirty godless habit away, that doesn’t mean they’re homophobic mind you…

The [University’s Student Representative Council] has already been backed by the university’s chaplain, who said the course can no longer be held at the chapel for fear of upsetting people. But Matthew Tindale, a [Christian Union] staff worker, has denied it is discriminatory against homosexuals.

He said: "This is looking at the orthodox view on marriage, which says there should be no sex before marriage.

"If a heterosexual man came along who sleeps around, I am sure he would find it uncomfortable too.

Homosexuals don’t love, they just have sex…

"This is not about discriminating against homosexuals.

"Christian teaching shows that all sin is treated the same way, whether you are homosexual or heterosexual."

Now, look at that for a minute, look at the flinching guile in that statement.  He could have said, "Yes but the bible calls upon us to discriminate."  But he didn’t do that.  Instead he threw out a cheap sophistry.  Now think again about what "pure" means.  Does the word "truth" also come to mind?  As in, Honest?  Genuine.  Real.  Pure.   Here we have a course that is ostensibly about marriage, which is in fact more about spreading ex-gay propaganda then it is about marriage, and it’s called "Pure".  The only thing that’s pure about it is its animus toward gay people.  But the defenders of "pure" cannot even be honest about that much.

If a totalitarian state, like the old Soviet Union, decreed a law forbidding Christian religious worship, could it plausibly argue that the law did not discriminate against Christians, because everyone had to obey it, even the atheists?  Yet here is a man from the Christian Union claiming that their course does not discriminate against homosexuals, because even heterosexuals are forbidden from having homosexual relationships.  A fact which has heterosexuals all over the world crying in their beer I’m sure.  Or…you know…not.

A course on purity in relationships taught by louts like these is a bit like a course on economics as taught by Ken Lay and the board of Enron, or Dick Cheney and Haliburton.  All the lofty concepts of mutual honor and respect and trust and faithfulness between lovers, are merely waved around here like a street gang’s colors, and serve no higher purpose then to ennoble bigotry and make bigots respectable.  And what the students attending this course pay in tuition, is everything fine and noble and decent within themselves, that they could have become.  The reason this course and the people teaching it should be thrown off campus isn’t so much that it’s anti-gay, but that it degrades the very thing it purports to elevate and preserve, and thereby every trusting kid who sits through it, gay or straight. 

No stream rises higher then its source…  "Pure" makes the sacred a slave to the profane.  But it had to.  Look at the sort of people who created it.  Now look at every other thing this sort has ever done in the name of Values and Morality.  If you’re still wondering how the figureheads of the religious right, James Dobson and his like, could instinctively jump to the GOP’s defense in the matter of Mark Foley, you must still think that they really believe the things they say about morals and values and righteousness.  No.  They only wear those things, so you won’t see them for the gutter crawling scum that they are.