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A group of evangelical leaders released a manifesto attacking "homosexual immorality and transgenderism" yesterday. (People are drowning, the nation's 4th largest city is underwater, but priorities!) The Nashville Statement didn't contain any big surprises. The Council on Biblical Manhood & Womanhood: A Coalition for Biblical Sexuality—quite a mouthful for a group that opposes oral sodomy—came out strongly against premarital sex, gay sex (both the pre- and post-marital varieties), same-sex marriage, and the rights and existences of transgender people. They're against anyone "adopting a homosexual or transgender self-conception" because that shit isn't "consistent with God's holy purposes in creation and redemption." (Remember, kids: God is your holy father and your holy father loves you and gave you life and life is a trick question and if you get the answer wrong your holy father will send you to hell where you'll be tortured for eternity because God is love. And cruel trick questions. Amen.)

The Council on Biblical Manhood & Womanhood also wants you to know that God didn't "design marriage" to be polygamous or polyamorous... which will be news to Esau (two wives), Moses (three wives), King David (eight wives), Solomon (300 wives), and scores of other biblical action figures. It'll also come as news to whoever wrote the books of Exodus, Leviticus and Deuteronomy, all of which acknowledge and affirm polygamy and include short lists of polygamous best practices. (Gallant married his brother's widow because his brother died before his wife could have a son; Goofus disowned his first-born son in favor a younger son born to a favored second wife.) The people who brought us the Nashville Statement—the usual bearers of false witness against their LGBT neighbors (Tony Perkins, James Dobson, James Robison, et al)—have all described the Bible as the inerrant word of God. Seems to me that they might wanna give it a read sometime. (Writers have been known to give promotional blurbs to books they haven't actually read—because they're too busy writing their own books and haven't learned to just say no to blurb requests—but if you're going to spend decades blurbing the same fucking book over and over and over again, you might wanna read that fucking book at some point.)

And you'll find this shocker buried deep within the Nashville Statement: homosexuals are invited to "walk in purity" with Jesus Christ. Stop sucking dicks (because the thought of men sucking each other off keeps Tony Perkins up at night), stop getting gay married (because all that hot gay honeymoon sex keeps Tony Perkins up at night), and start "living a rich and fruitful life pleasing to God" (who doesn't exist and so isn't sitting up at night with Tony Perkins obsessing about all the gay men out there sucking off their husbands). There's a teensy, weensy sign of progress here: whereas rightwing Christian bigots long pushed the idea that the love of Christ had the power to cure gay people of gayness, now they're pushing the idea that the love of Christ has the power to cure deprive gay people of intimacy, romantic love, long-term commitments, and wedding cakes stained with the tears of Christian cake bakers. Gayby steps!


Anyway...

Seems to me that a screenshot of The Nashville Statement should appear in the dictionary next to the word "unfuckingnecessary." (Not technically a word in English, I realize, but it should be and definitely is one in German.) Evangelical leaders aren't telling us anything we don't already know about their precious fee-fees with their slick new website and their 14 articles. The Kristian Kouncil Koalition claim they had no choice but to go public with a reaffirmation of their long-standing, well-known opposition to icky gay sex and scary transgender people because "the secular spirit of our age presents a great challenge to the Christian church."

That challenge can be summed up with two questions: Will the Christian Church continue to get human sexuality wrong—despite the science—in the same way it got the movement of the planets wrong for five centuries despite Galileo? Will the Christian church "blend into the spirit of the age" or continue to cling to the Bronze Age?

The Nashville Statement can be read here and the public is invited to sign. The mayor of Nashville didn't just decline to sign, she took to Twitter yesterday to tell the Council for Biblical Manhood & Womanhood: A Coalition for Biblical Sexuality to go fuck itself...


As for me, I was tempted to sarcastically sign the statement before sincerely blowing my husband last night. But I resisted the urge. (The former urge; the latter I succumbed to.) I didn't sign because the Council on Biblical Manhood & Womanhood is harvesting emails and soliciting donations—because anti-gay and anti-trans hate-mongering isn't any fun if it can't be monetized—and I already get enough spam and money begs from rightwing Christian bigots begging for donations as it is.

Oh, and what he said:

I hope the LGBTQ community doesn't fall for this mess. I can see how this can play out. We lodge intense verbal disagreement, leading Dobson, Perkins and the rest to do a media blitz on Fox News and other conservative-friendly news sources while playing the victim and calling out the LGBTQ community on our supposed intolerance of their "personally held religious beliefs."

Sorry my friends. Your statement doesn't move me. It doesn't anger me or sadden me... To put it succinctly: Ain't none of you special. Get over yourselves. No one gives a damn about what you think.

If you aren't following Alvin McEwen on Twitter... you should be.

UPDATE: And speaking of biblical sexuality, morality, and marriage...

UPDATE 2: