You’ll note if you bother to scroll back that I have consistently addressed my comments to the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC), a specific confraternity of Baptist churches that share a similar doctrinal outlook, as shown by the Faith and Message document I cited earlier. I was not addressing Baptists who lived in the South, but Southern Baptists.
I did NOT go from Nazis to Germans; you misread.
Wait a minute-um, the Golden Rule is do unto others as you WOULD have them do unto you. Not as they HAVE DONE unto you. Jesus Christ, weren’t you an altar boy? Which implies that you at LEAST have some knowledge of the Bible?
And btw, what the fuck is up with you? Are you channeling kirkland? Should I judge most gays by the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence or ACT UP? Of course not.
Holy shit, did something crawl up your ass and die or something?
BTW, Jimmy and Rosalyn Carter are SB, or at least they were.
Playing the martyr? I’ve been repeatedly attacked and vilified for venting my anger at the SBC’s antics. Remember when you said I looked like an ignorant whiner? That’s not exactly solid support, is it?
Ah. Cool.
Although it’s not so much that I misread as that we all (you included) got caught in a bit of a language fluke. Sucks when that happens.
You did start attacking people, gobear. You were the first one to call someone an asshole.
You know we agree with you. Have a drink and read over the thread again.
It is possible for me to support you as a gay person but not support your debating style. It’s not a game of all or nothing.
Likewise, and I said so in my first post to this thread, back on page 1. In view of the anger expressed by gobear, though, I downplayed the idea of “returning good for evil” in subsequent posts. But I believe the truth will out, and will win – and I think God is on the side of gobear and Mr Visible and andygirl and the other good gay men and women around here, not on the side of a group that insists on painting them as evil and then “believing its own rumors of a gold strike in Hell” (you may know the story). 
Any ideas on how to implement the idea of “return good for evil” that can be worked out in practice?
Well, then perhaps he should have said so. And quite frankly, I don’t see any difference between what gobear just said and those who go around and say that all Catholic priests are pedophiles.
Bullshit.
Tell that to the missionaries recently fired for refusing to sign a Creed.
Or Second Baptist Church of Liberty, Mo.
Lynn Williams and her congregations might disagree.
Oakhurst Baptist in Decatur and Virginia Highland Baptist in Atlanta, Ga. might feel they were treated intolerantly.
Islamic people might consider SBC President Jack Graham to be intolerant.
The entire DC Convention might have a different perspective, too.
Guin, Jimmy Carter and his wife disassocated themselves from the SBC over their increasingly strident behavior, as have many congregations.
If posters in this thread belonged to an organization that had a codified system of beliefs to which we all subscribed, then your point would have merit. But we’re all individuals, not members of a church, so your analogy doesn’t apply.
I did not insult Aries28 with the words she attributed to me.
Hey, if the SBC can bend the Bible to make it read as they wish, why can’t I?
Yes, something did. Thread after thread after thread after thread of people judging me and my life by their antiquated belief system. I’ve had enough.
And I have said NOTHING as nasty as Kirkland did. Go back to old threads and read his comments and then look at mine.
You’re right, and I’m sorry.
So when I’m filled with rage, I am not allowed to vent in the Pit? I’ve been so nice in GD my teeth hurt, plus I have some unpleasant stuff going on right now which is making me incredibly angry and sad at the same time.
That’s not even remotely analogous. Now if you changed that to " I don’t see any difference between what gobear just said and those who go around and say that all NAMBLA memebers are pedophiles," you’d be in the ballpark.
Just as NAMBLA officially endorses pedophilia (it is. after all, their raison d’etre), so too does the SBC officially endorse a program of antigay activity.
Read the OP.
Well, as I said earlier, the “fighting fire with fire” approach isn’t going to win friends within the Southern Baptist ranks.
As I have tried repeatedly to explain in this thread, what the SBC proclaims and does matters very little to many of its member churches. I have no problem attacking the decisions of the SBC. However, I object vehemently to the portrayal of Southern Baptists – even those who belong to member churches of the SBC – as “ignorant fuckwads” and the like.
It’s similar to someone objecting to a policy of the American government (or any government, for that matter), and then saying all Americans are ignorant fuckwads. Many Americans might actually object to the policy in question, and agree with the person voicing an objection to the policy. When the person expands their argument to say that all Americans are therefore stupid, ignorant, beer-swilling, ill-dressed, etc., I have a problem with that.
I believe that people such as gobear are on the side of the angels in this matter, and that the SBC is wrong. But because I belong to a church that is a member of the SBC, I have been branded with a variety of epithets in this thread. My point is (and has been) that there are a number of Southern Baptists who feel as I do, but attacking them is not the way to get them to rally in support of the cause.
You know what, though? On preview, I see I’m talking to a brick wall. I’m not an individual, I’m a member of the SBC. So forget it. It’s not worth it.
If so many SBs defy the leadership when they make these pronouncements, would it be too much to ask that you, oh I don’t know, rise up and oust the nutjobs from the positions of power and influence?
Maybe if you didn’t come in here, guns a’blazin’, ready to tar everyone with the same brush-“Oh, but I’m TIRED of it…I’m sick of it…I’ll just be an asshole then.”
Well guess what? They won. Honestly-yes, I agree with you-but there is NO NEED to scream at everyone here at the SDMB, when we AGREE with you.
And quite frankly, “Well, they started it, so I’ll do the same” IS immature. I left that behind in fourth grade-apparently you did not.
Yeah, the SBC sucks. Individual SBs, however, do not. If you had clarified this, then, hey-no problem.
Homebrew-I thought so, but I wasn’t sure. I’m not surprised-although it did throw me for a loop when I saw Jimmy Carter on Pat Robertson’s show a couple of years ago-endorsing his new book. Weird.
Oh for fucks sake. How fucking hypocritical and shallow of you.
For those of you who actually cared to read this thread, it was ME who said all those things, not gobear. She has no basis to attribute them to gobear.
And if she (or you for that matter) used gobears logic instead of her own maybe you two could understand how foolish you sound. You keep attacking his personal character and then blaming your attacks based on “well he attacked us.”
then I see this
Well thats all great and good, but unfortunately NOBODY attacking gobear or even YOU Guinastasia have followed it.
That is gobears point, why should he follow a rule to which he doesn’t even have a spiritual belief in, when NON OF YOU DO!
He is not attacking everyone who happens to be baptists, but all the fools in the SBC who perscibe to this belief. Why non of you can understand that is beyond me.
You know, if a large group of my fellow citizens purported that my love for my husband was a sin, that I would burn in hell forever for loving him and that we should be denied all benefits under the law as a couple because they disapproved of our union, I would most likely be even more hostile than gobear.
It’s easy to preach tolerence when one’s sexual orientation precludes being the victim of small minded bigotry.
I imagine it’s hard to be generous of spirit when one’s life style is constantly under siege.
It’s rather like a white person advising southern blacks to go easy on civil rights action in the 1950’s and 1960’s because marches and protests just alienate the moderate whites.
And well you should be cause it’s far too large and disparate a group. But you are making a false comparison. A fairer one would be “It’s similar to someone objecting to a policy of the Bush administration, and then saying all Bush administration members are ignorant fuckwads.”
So you are a member of the SBC and you disagree with their stance on gay folks. I’m thankful, but does that mean that one must never name the SBC when the SBC leadership is making these decisions?
Is Land speaking only as a private individual, or is he speaking on behalf of the SBC as a whole?
In this thread, Equipoise is complaining about the Chicago Board of Education making her move. Did all of the people bitching at me pop into that thread and upbraid the OP for condemning the entire Chicago school system?
I for one have been trying to clear that up. Can we all agree that gobear is specifically targetting only the decision-making body of the SBC? Gobear, can you understand that the way your attack was phrased made it seem like you were attacking all Baptists, and not just that particular body? Can we all agree that there was a misunderstanding in communication?
BTW, gobear, I’m sorry you’re having a bad day. I hope it gets better.
Pardon me – if I feel that the Roman Catholic bishops (who constitute the leadership of the RCC in this country) have been remiss, sometimes to the point of criminal neglect, in dealing with the priests-molesting-youths issue, I don’t feel that I’m condemning Guinastasia or all the other sincere and well-meaning Roman Catholics I know (including one lesbian lady whom I love like a daughter who is a staunch RC) by saying that “the Roman Catholic Church is at fault for not acting more strongly and more rapidly to combat this problem” – I’m clearly speaking of the hierarchy that run the institution, not the decent people who belong to it.
And by the same token, when spokespersons for the SBC state publicly a stance which condemns gay people and which attempts to “convert” gay people away from their sexuality, if I condemn “the SBC,” I’m not calling Sauron or the three sincere and compassionate Southern Baptists that I work closely with over at the Pizza Parlor by those names – I’m speaking of the leadership who have taken that abhorrent stance. (BTW, “Southern Baptist” used pronominally or adjectivally is nearly always taken to mean “member/leader of the SBC” rather than "person who is Baptist and who lives in the South, regardless of what convention his church is affiliated with. The black deacon who lives about a mile from here in North Carolina and is a staunch Baptist would quickly correct me if I called him a “Southern Baptist” – he’s a member of Pilot Missionary Baptist, which is affiliated with the National Baptist Convention, U.S.A., Inc. and the North Carolina Missionary Baptist Convention – if I’ve gotten my convention names straight, and for him, “Southern Baptist” means “belonging to the SBC” which he emphatically does not.
And just for the record, what jlzania said strikes a nerve, with me at least. Anybody remember Uncle Toby? He was the first time I ever Pitted anyone out of anger – but then, he claimed that my marriage was not a proper one, because we didn’t have (biological) children. And, as I’ve reported elsewhere, I know a little bit about what gobear has been through in his life – it happened to me once. So if he’s sufficiently enraged at the latest attempt to call him an abomination, his life partnership a means to justify gratifying lust, his love for his partner as nothing more than a one-night stand, and himself as no better than a predatory pedophile or a practitioner of bestiality, then yeah, I think he’s got every right to vent his spleen here, and everybody who isn’t directly impacted by it that is taking offense at the words he used had damn well better take a good look at everything they’ve ever said on this board, and see if they ever exaggerated, stereotyped, or otherwise misrepresented facts when they were angry. For some of you, it’ll take all night – and I guarantee that anyone with over 100 posts will find some generalization that isn’t quite the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.
And when you’ve done that, and been honest with yourself about what you said, you might just want to think about coming back here and giving gobear an apology.
The Southern Baptist denomination is, as defined by its own statements of purpose, pretty squarely anti-gay. Some of its individual members, however, are not. Could those that are not help change things, please? 'Cause, really, it is difficult to talk about the denomination’s bigotry, arrogance and pathetic attempts at platitudes without implicating those that call themselves part of that denomination.
Esprix