Christian churches are often the extended shadows of their Palestinian founders, or of their current pastor, or both.
It is decidedly the province of the pastor to define what "sin" is for his/her congregation. The rest of us get no look-in at all, primarily because "we" have no unified definition of "sin" ourselves.
Pastor Doug Wilson cloaks some of the blood-thirstiest passages of the First Testament in their proper epistemological cloaks - metaphors. The question to ask this pastor is why the politically incorrect passages he cites are dressed in metaphoric fig leaves, but the "story" of Sodom and Gomorrah is not extended a similar interpretation? The passages he cites are past events, the behaviors he decries refer to present living brothers and sisters in Christ. We who have ministered to the brutalized, expelled gay brethren of local Christian schools have all too concrete a picture of the suffering local Christian institutions have inflicted. Many victims of gay-bashings are often beaten by a baseball bat. Taking a bat to a political flag in public could also be interpreted by the IRS as a forfeiture of a religious federal tax exemption.
We on the liberal side of the angels need to pull our own coats about the totally un-American way many of us refuse to patronize local businesses rumored to be "owned" by Wilson's church. They are not so owned. Their owners are our neighbors trying to make a living just like us. Hitler caught up an entire nation of religious anti-Semites and made them into the biological, racial supporters of The Final Solution. His organizing phrase - "Buy not from the Jews!" Shame on us. I might ask why this local posse of the righteous are any better than those seeking to build a wall on our southern borders?
Ronald Hufham
Moscow
