Here’s the story:
http://gawker.com/5863878/horrible-hicks-ban-interracial-couples-from-church?autoplay
and
Guess they’re not that big into “Freewill.”
Oh, and here’s their statement:
The dumbassery, it burns.
Thats some old-school racism. I feel like we should put the congregation in a museum or something.
I’m just shocked my former in-laws aren’t from that county.
I’m having trouble with this part - “but is intended to promote greater unity among the church body and the community we serve.” How does exclusion promote unity?
I’m pretty sure there’s an inbreeding joke in there somewhere, but I’m too lazy to dig for it.
What could possibly be more unifying than a Them by which to define Us? It’s all very well to look forward to the lamb lying down with the lion in a New Jerusalem, but when you’re talking about people here and now with genes that code for varying levels of melanin and substantially different hair getting cozy, that’s just plain crazy talk.
In other news, Kentucky voted 7,458,286-321 to ban baptist churches that dont endorse interracial marriage.
This happened several counties away from me, but it was our local TV station that reported it first (along with the Lexington Herald-Leader), so it has been all over my Facebook feed.
This is how I look at it–this was unusual and outrageous enough that it made the news. I’m not sure that would have been true even 20 years ago. And from reading the story it seems they weren’t able to get anybody on record defending this bushwa, so at least there’s a sense of shame in there somewhere.
So in its own weird way this story represents progress. This attitude may still be around, and it might even occasionally surface in tiny backwoods churches dumb enough to put their racist policies in writing, but a generation ago this might have been within the range of socially acceptable beliefs here in EKY and now it definitely isn’t.
According to online map searches, Gulnare is a community located in a rural area between Pikeville, KY and Inez, KY. From the perspective of someone who has visited Pike County, the news of this ‘church’ is not surprising. In far Eastern KY and other parts of rural Appalachia, there are pockets of relatively isolated populations where time moves slowly and some prevailing beliefs are shockingly backward.
Here is the Herald-Leader story. I love this:
This happens a lot and it drives me batshit. You can’t just say you were taken out of context and leave it there. You have to actually explain what the context was that gave your words a whole different meaning.
Aren’t you glad tho that the congregations which believe this way just come out & declare it so that people will know to avoid them? Tho I am surprised this woman did not know what the prevailing sentiment was.
By “out of context” he means it wasn’t supposed to reach the ears of brown people.
According to Wikipedia, the African-American population of Pike County is less than 0.5% – there isn’t much opportunity for miscegenation there.
When I first read about this on Fark, it sounded slightly significant. Then I read this line:
9 to 6? 9 to frickin’ 6?!?
This story is based on the fact there are 9 outwardly racist people in Kentucky. I’m not saying this is good, but really, nine people? It’s not exactly a landslide decision by a megachurch, is it?
My guess is that they meant board members.
What the hell?
I typically support non profit status for religious institutions, but this makes me rethink that.
It looks like they now have a female pastor but still won’t allow interracial marriages.
Just remember that another Baptist church employed a clergyman named Martin Luther King Jr.
Yes, it would make sense that a black church had a black pastor.
So anything any baptist church does from here on out is A O.K.!
You have to admire their fair mindedness for making and exception for funerals. That must have been the thing that got the centrists to vote for the measure.