Disable, Defeat and Demolish Homophobic Christianity
Edward H. Sebesta
The above is the conceptual sketch of the symbol for homophobic Christianity. Art is a way of directly expressing an idea and can be used to fight homophobic Christianity.
Copyright © 2024 Edward H. Sebesta Gay Partisan Press All rights reserved. ISBN: The author can be contacted at this Substack newsletter. Dallas Gay Liberation https://dallasgayliberation.substack.com/
DEDICATION To all the Gays living and dead who have been tormented by Christians and in particular all the Gays that were burned alive by Christians.
CONTENTS Introduction
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1 Homophobic Christianity can be brought down. They are vulnerable.
Pg 1
2 Why this must be done,
Pg 6
3 Who will be part of the effort?
Pg 8
4 The problem with the Gay Christian campaign for acceptance within Christianity.
Pg 10
5 The Pathologies of Homophobic Christianity.
Pg 16
6 Is Christianity basically anti-Gay?
Pg 20
7 Seeing the reality of Christianity as a murderous religion.
Pg 23
8 Exposing the pathologies of Christianity.
Pg 32
9 Additional Tactics to go after homophobic Christianity.
Pg 37
10 Mobilizing Gays not in the Abrahamic faiths.
Pg 40
11 Conclusion
Pg 43
Appendix – Specific things to do.
Pg 43
About the Author
Pg 46
INTRODUCTION It can be done. We can disable, defeat and demolish homophobic Christianity. One barrier to the defeat of homophobic Christianity is the idea that Christianity is built into the reality of life and will always be so, thus we don’t even try. The reality is that Christianity is vulnerable and despite how it might seem, very vulnerable. We no longer have to beg for acceptance or tolerance, we can go on the offensive. The precipitous decline of Christianity in the United States and other parts of the Western world where it hasn’t completely collapsed already is just one factor. Another factor is that much of the public, because of the activities of the Evangelicals, has become very annoyed with Evangelicals, Fundamentalists and other such like Christians and with Christianity in general. The percentage of Gays who identify as Christians is less than 50% now, and so the possibility of a large faction of the Gay community to resist Christian homophobia and take action against them is greater than ever. However, the previously mentioned changes, though very important, are only a few of the reasons that going after homophobic Christianity in 2023 is much more possible than it was in 1969 when the Stonewall Riots occurred, the first San Francisco Gay Pride Parade in 1972, or Harvey Milk was elected to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in 1978. Milk’s election was 43 years ago, a couple generations ago. There have been important major structural changes in society which provide for us a much different situation in which to operate than in 1963, sixty years ago. Society is much more educated now than it was. In the 1960s there were public campaigns to tell parents that though they were able to get good jobs without a high school diploma, it would be a basic requirement in the future. The beginning of there being a large portion of the working public with college degrees begins with the G.I. Bill passed after World War II and by the 1960s going to college after high school became a common thing. It isn’t just that the public is much more educated now than it was in the 1960s, it is that it is much more common that children today have grandparents who went to college. There are more people in families where education has been multigenerational affecting attitudes towards social questions. The United States has urbanized some time ago, but in 2023, the nation has a population which mostly has been urbanized for multiple generations. The different populations of the world and the different religions of the world are not isolated from each other as they were. When I was growing up in the 1960s, I might read about Hinduism, but it would be really unlikely I would meet a Hindu person. Even when I went to college, there were just a few students from overseas, but not American Hindus, Muslims, Buddhists. Now we have large populations of Hindus, Muslims, Buddhists and others in the United States. Other nations which previously were predominately Christians have large nonChristian populations. Christianity isn’t the default religion anymore. It is just one religion among many. International air travel was a new activity in the 1960s and not as wide spread as now. The focus of international vacations was Europe. Now international travel is much more common and people go to non-Western locations such as Thailand or Japan. Business travel is much more
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common. It is much easier to see Christianity as parochial and not universal. Long distance phone calling was very expensive in the 1960s and there was no internet. A live international broadcast was a novelty and poor quality. Now, with the internet, you can watch a movie from a provider anywhere in the world and subtitles are almost always provided. We are on social platforms which are global. Even language barriers are less with Google translate and other software translators. We live in a culture that is more and more global, witness the new enthusiasm for Korean dramas. The world where you existed functionally confined to a national culture which was predominantly to a great degree Christian and in which Christianity would tend to be the reference standard is gone. The society where non-Christians were seen as small exceptions or exotics or the residents of some distant strange foreign land, is now a society which has United States Postal Stamps for Diwali and Eid. This has resulted in two very important things which have dislodged Christianity from a position of strength. First, Christianity has been decentered. It is now just another religion among many religions in the world. Second, Christianity is no-longer the default state of an individual in our society or in other previously predominately Christian societies. It no longer has a default of being truth unless rejected, it is now just another religious faith. More than ever, a person can be conscious that perhaps he or she is Christian merely because their parents were. The world system of imperialism of Christian nations dominating the world is long gone. It was a system which repressed local religions, enabled missionaries, in which missionaries colluded with imperialism, and gave Christianity prestige as the religion of power and backed by power as if it was favored by God. It has been largely gone for three generations now. Instead, there is the historical memory of Christianity being the religion of the former imperial oppressors and having been instruments of imperial conquest and repression. In the next decade there won’t be many people left who were alive when Christian nations dominated the world and the world order was a Christian order dominating the imagination. Instead, we have now a multipolar world now with important world powers that aren’t Christian. There are world powers that can defy Christian public opinion such as India and China. There are advanced nations leading in technology which aren’t Christian such as Taiwan and Japan. In terms of Gross Domestic Product, China and Japan are the 2nd and 3rd largest economies. India is the 7th largest. There are nations that are very successful without Christianity. Christianity is no longer associated with success, progress, or modernization or can represent themselves as integral to the progress of civilization. Christianity is no longer a dominating power of the world or of the imagination. We should not allow them to dominate our imaginations or intimidate us as to what we can do to fight homophobic Christianity.
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Disable, Defeat and Demolish Homophobic Christianity
There are myriad opportunities in which we can disable, defeat and destroy homophobic Christianity. A discussion of specifically what might be done will be in the appendix.
Technical Tools, Saving pages on the Internet Archive. The Internet Archive is a powerful tool for anyone researching and documenting homophobic Christianity. It is online at https://archive.org/ and the WayBack Machine is what you need to be familiar with. Webpages disappear or are modified to remove incriminating evidence. I had sone church change a reference to same-sex attraction to broken sexuality. In other cases stuff can just disappear. If you have a webpage with important information you need to copy the URL, the web address, into the WayBack Machine and check if it is archived. If it isn’t archived, a message will say, “This page is available on the web!” and there will be a button labeled, “Save this URL in the WayBack Machine.” Click on it. Then a menu appears, click on the “SAVE PAGE” button again. It will then start saving the page. Give the Internet Archive a little time, it is saving millions of pages all the time. It will tell you when it is done. It will be the very latest version of that page. The Internet Archive saved pages include the date saved in their URLs. If the page has been saved before, a timeline and calendar graphic will appear with the dates in which the page was archived. HOWEVER, if the last date it was archived was before what you are interested in, you need to save the today version of the webpage. So click on the WayBack Machine logo. A Save Page Now choice will be shown, and you put the URL in the black, you can just paste it in, and then click on the SAVE PAGE button. And the page will be saved. Give it a minute or two or five. The Internet Archive can be very busy at times. Now the page is saved on the Internet Archive, and even if the original page is deleted, a copy is still there. Also, for some reason the archiving in the past might not be as good as it should be, and even though there is reference to your item, a fresh archiving might be better. The Internet Archive doesn’t work so well with archiving YouTube videos, and not at all with Facebook and other social media. Always save the specific URL of interest. Sometimes saving the main page will lead the Internet archive to save the pages to which the main page links to, sometimes it doesn’t. Also, save the page right away. A minute delay and it might be gone.
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1 HOMOPHOBIC CHRISTIANITY CAN BE BROUGHT DOWN. THEY ARE VULNERABLE. They are vulnerable. Christianity is in a historically severe decline in the United States. This Gallup News article, “U.S. Church Membership Falls Below Majority for First Time,” by Jeffrey Jones shows total religious membership declining to 47% in 2020. Membership in this article includes churches, synagogues, and mosques. As late as 1985, it was 71 percent who were members of religious groups. What is also significant is that the decline hasn’t been a steady drop. From 1985 to 2000 it declined from 71 to 70, and to 61 about 2008, (chart is a little hard to read). The percentage then drops to 47 in 2020. The article points out that church membership is “strongly correlated with age,” with those born before 1946 being religious group members 66% of the time, those born between 1946 and 1964, members 58%, those born between 1965 and 1980 members 50%, and those born between 1981 and 1996 members 36%. Christianity is going to be more vulnerable as time progresses. Population replacement doesn’t explain all the decline with newer generations replacing older generations as the article points out. For each birth cohort, that is those born in a certain range of years, there was a decline in church membership from the 1998-2000 survey to the 2018-2020 survey. The three groups, born before 1946, born 1946 to 1964, born 1965 to 1980 lost 11%, 9%, and 12% over 20 years respectively. For the birth cohort of those born from 1981 to 1996, there is no 1998-2000 date, but there is 2008-2010 date and in ten years they have dropped from 51% to 36%, a delta of 15%. On a historical time scale, Christianity in America is essentially in a free fall. For the younger generations, polls shows that people aren’t joining up once they settle down, get married and have children. The church membership isn’t going to be increasing as they get older. Christianity is in in catastrophic decline. Though it might seem small when you look at it as being about roughly 1.5% per year, years pass quickly. It could be that by 2030 the percentage would drop 15% from 47% to 32%. Given that many churches rejected safety practices and vaccines during the covid pandemic, and the fatality rate was much higher among older persons, the percentage might be much less in 2030, it might be significantly less than 47% now. The report shows that the decline is among all subgroups, whether they review it by geographical region, sex, political party, college education, and other factors. Another measure of engagement is another Gallup report, “U.S. Church Attendance Still Lower Than Pre-Pandemic,” June 26, 2023. This shows that church attendance is for a May 1 to 24, 2023 survey was 31%. This is down from 42% in a 2009 survey. Gallup has a chart and it shows that attendance had gone up and down at or about 40% since 1940, and the fall off is in the last roughly 15 years. There are opportunities for a Gay campaign to accelerate this decline.
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Disable, Defeat and Demolish Homophobic Christianity
As they decline and they increasingly are given over to extremism, they will be more isolated in public opinion and easier to target as a smaller group. One major development since the 1980s and the advent of the Moral Majority is that an increasing fraction of Americans are annoyed by right-wing Christians and their self-indulgent, self-serving, and self-righteous ways. If Gays mount a campaign against homophobic Christianity, it will have the sympathy of a large number of people who might pick up some useful tactics from us. There is another reason Christians are in a vulnerable situation. Gays come from all backgrounds and almost everyone has a Gay relative. Gays have siblings, parents, cousins, aunts and uncles, grandparents, co-workers, colleagues, and though these others may have issues with homosexuality, they don’t want to see the Gay person they know hurt or be the target of anger. The Evangelical Churches have recognized this and have adopted, “Love the Sinner and hate the sin,” slogan realizing that their older outright hostility was working more against them than Gays. They have largely retreated from the openly hostile campaign. Further, given that Gays come from all background, the point of contesting homophobic Christianity is among relatives and in families. This also has been recognized by Evangelicals and there is book and class on how to not alienate your Gay kids but still be bigoted in Jesus. There is “Uncommon Love: God’s Heart for Christian Parents of Gay Kids,” which is, as the webpage for the book states, “A Bible Study for Parents of LGBTQ Kids.” The webpage for the book states: … more and more kids are coming out—and many of these are from Christian homes with Christian parents. These parents don’t know what to do, how to respond …
According to the webpage having Gay children is “heart-wrenching” and book intends to avoid the following from happening: … the parents blow up the relationship by rejecting their kids or their lifestyle in harsh or inappropriate ways, or they completely compromise their faith in God and their own identity as Christians. The primary purpose of this Bible study is to help parents to maintain loving, mutually respectful relationships with their LGBTQ children, offering them compassionate understanding and unconditional love without compromising their own identity, faith, and values1.
The homophobic churches are realizing that rather than reject those they love, people start critically thinking about their religious beliefs and change them. Evangelical Christians are often in it for the emotional fun ride and hating their children isn’t so much fun. If we could get the Gay children of Evangelical Christian parents to be somewhat more aggressive, we might just bring down homophobic Christianity in a very short period of time. Christians aren’t the best or brightest. Demographically the members of homophobic churches are not typically that well educated. They burble out inanities in explaining why they don’t believe in evolution or deny the reality of geology. There are some members of the elite educated which have religious beliefs, but largely the intellectual classes don’t believe in religion or if they have strong religious beliefs they are perpetually annoyed by the braying of the 1
https://uncommonlove.online/
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Evangelicals. This is not to say that homophobic Christians lack strategies and tactics for their homophobic agenda, or that we shouldn’t take seriously their abilities to conduct homophobic campaigns, it is that we should be able to outsmart them. Major powers have arisen in the world which are hostile or wary of Christianity and they also see threats from Christianity. These powers are not against specifically homophobic Christianity, but Christianity in general realizing that it is an essential threat to their civilizations. The historical record of what Christianity has done to other religions and how Christianity has persecuted them is very clear, especially outside the Christian influenced West where Western history often is not filtered to not offend Christian sensibilities, where Western history is seen as what was inflicted on them. Homophobic Christians can hardly plead tolerance and a defense of human rights complaining about foreign governments, when they loudly attack tolerance and human rights for Gays outside the West. Further, these other group resisting Christian aggressions might have methods, tactics, strategies, and information which we could learn or use that might be very useful in combatting homophobic Christianity. As an example, there is this article, “How Christianity and Islam decimated Africa’s traditional religions,” in the Hindu Post. https://hindupost.in/dharma-religion/how-christianity-and-islam-decimated-africas-traditionalreligions
When some African Christian homophobe is ranting how homosexuality is Western, we can point out that Christianity is an import brought in by the European imperialists to their nation and destroyed their society. The Hindu Post shouldn’t be necessarily considered a trusted source for all things and they have their own issues, but that doesn’t mean we can’t use what is useful generated by these other anti-Christian forces. Other groups, also realize that Christianity is an essential threat to their existence. In East Asia surely the persecution of Korean shamans and indigenous religion is instructive to similar religions in East Asia and Southeast Asia. Observing the historical record of Christianity obliterating the religions of the Norse, Romans, Mayans and Incans surely gives pause to other religions. The essential fact in considering who else might be also allies or just in opposition to Christianity, is that we are not alone in recognizing a serious threat to ourselves arising from Christianity. Another thing is that the LGBT are not now predominately Christian. If and when Gay Christians undermine the defense of the LGBT, they can be subjected to popular criticism. This Pew Research Center study, May 24, 2019, “Lesbian, gay and bisexual Americans are less religious than straight adults by traditional measures,” reveals that 49% of LGBT are not with any denomination.2 The distribution of LGBT religious faith is: Christian 48%; non-Christian 11%, and Unaffiliated was 41%. The 41% unaffiliated was: Atheist 8%; Agnostic 9%; and Nothing in 2
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2019/05/24/lesbian-gay-and-bisexual-americans-are-less-religiousthan-straight-adults-by-traditional-measures/ 12/27/2023.
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Disable, Defeat and Demolish Homophobic Christianity
Particular 24%. In discussing the non-Christian faith LGBT, the article states: In another contrast, while only 6% of the general public affiliates with a non-Christian faith, almost twice as many (11%) gay, lesbian and bisexual adults do so. And almost half of these gay, lesbian and bisexual adults (or 5% of adults overall) said they belong to one of the smaller faith groups, including Unitarian Universalist and other liberal faith traditions (2.9%) and New Age groups (2.4%), such as Wiccans and pagans. The Jewish and Buddhist faiths also attracted small percentages (2% each) of LGB adults. One out of four LGBT persons are nothing in particular, but not atheist or agnostic either. In other reporting this demographic for young people in general is called Spiritual, but not denominational. The Nothing in Particular, 24%, is more than Evangelical 13%, Mainline Christianity 11%, Historically Black Christian 5%, and Catholic 17%.
A more recent study, “Religiosity Among LGBT Adults in the US,” by the UCLA School of Law Williams Institute, corroborates that about half are religious and half aren’t, and also like the general population, being religious declines with younger LGBT.3 Though there will be likely some LGBT opposition to a vigorous campaign against homophobic Christianity, it won’t have an overwhelming support of the LGBT who are dropping Christianity faster than the general population. Further, there is a large faction of LGBT who strongly resent homophobic Christianity. The homophobic Christians are a declining fraction of the nation, they are resented by a large part of the public, and the LGBT is likely to be very supportive of a Gay campaign against homophobic Christianity. There are also the reasons given in the Introduction for this book as to how society has structurally changed such that Christians are longer in the position where they can dominate society as they once were able. (Please read it if you haven’t.) The reason that Evangelicals and other homophobic Christians have been able to campaign against Gays is that there hasn’t been a strong aggressive campaign against them. Instead, the campaign has been mostly throwing sentimental syrups at homophobic Christians and with suggestions such as, “fight hate with love” and other silly nonsense. We tend to think that Christianity is a permanent feature of life because it has been present in Western society for centuries previous and we tend to think that we just have to live with their homophobia and it will be a running struggle going on indefinitely into the future. However, the modern age has been a world of changes and flux, nothing can be assumed to be permanent, and the situation Christianity finds itself in is certainly in flux, and rapid decline. A discussion of specifically what might be done will be in the appendix. There are very many opportunities to disable, defeat and demolish homophobic Christianity. We need to start.
3
https://williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu/publications/lgbt-religiosity-us/
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Technical Tools, Digging up deleted pages on the Internet Archive. Sometimes webpages are changed so the information of interest isn’t there, and sometimes the page is entirely deleted. If you have the URL, put it in the WayBackMachine, press return and see when it has been archived. The Internet Archive does a lot of automatic saving of the web, and the page of interest might have been archived in the past. You can then look at earlier versions of the page. The Internet Archiving of some institutions can be poor, so you need to always archive what is of interest. When you don’t have the particular URL, you might try putting the main page of the site in the WayBackMachine and look at what pages were archived. Visit a page and click on the links, hopefully they work and your webpage of interest will be found. Even if the link doesn’t work, you can copy the link and put it into the WayBackMachine. Otherwise you are going to have to do some detective work. Someone on the web might have had a link to the page, and copying that link, you can put it into the WayBackMachine. The link might be in a newsletter of theirs, in a newspaper, or on their Facebook, in their X (formerly Twitter) or someplace else. Someone might have reported on it, and have the link in their report. Googling is a good way to track it down. Sometimes you can figure out what the URL is. If it is a series with the calendar as part of the URL, say, www.hatinggays.com/March2021, you could try putting in www.hatinggays.com/Feb2021 or February2021. Sometimes the website URL was changed. You can look on the Internet Archive for the earliest archiving of the current URL and look on that page for information about the URL being changed. At least you have a time window when it was changed and can do searching on social media for some notice in that time period. Maybe look at the church directory of their denomination for that year and see what link they are using. You have to do detective work, and you will get better as time goes on.
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2 WHY THIS MUST BE DONE. It might be asked why this chapter needs to be written since the attacks on Gays by homophobic Christians happens globally and are often vicious and why it needs to be done is obvious. The homophobic Christians are outspoken and fill social discourse with their attacks on Gays and in many places their hostility to Gays is a major part of politics. A chapter detailing the attacks on Gays globally would merely tell the informed reader what the reader already knows in general and this chapter will assume that the reader is informed about the attacks by Christian homophobes. The attacks, advocacy of anti-Gay policies, and the instigation of hostility against Gay would be way more than enough justification for why we need a program to disable, defeat and defeat homophobic Christianity. This chapter could just stop here, but there is another reason we need to defeat homophobic Christianity, and which isn’t considered since we are constantly preoccupied with fending off the attacks by homophobic Christians. The constant effort in fighting back against homophobic Christians keeps us from developing and cultivating our Gay lives. Do we have the regular romantic lives in high school that straights do and allowing our social development? No instead, we have the struggle to come out and manage a closeted life until we are safely on our own. Generally, we aren’t even assured physical safety in schools, let alone date and engage in social activities like straights do. What type of life would that be if we lived freely? Would it be an imitation of straight life or be something different? It remains a speculation and will remain a speculation in a society where homophobic Christians are attacking even Straight-Gay alliances in the schools. How might Gays live isn’t really explored. What might types of support do Gays need or want from institutions and government is displaced by concerns that basic rights will be denied and government will be deployed to attack Gays. We likely don’t even bother to imagine what we might want or need since it seems impossible to attain it in a hostile society. Since the lives we might live are not lived, what they might be is harder to imagine and it makes it difficult to describe what we lose due to the constant attacks of homophobic Christianity which drives us to be focusing on how we might survive rather than thrive. We don’t realize how homophobic Christianity constricts our imaginations.
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Disable, Defeat and Demolish Homophobic Christianity
How might our lives be if we led lives like everyone else focused on developing ourselves rather than dealing with internalized homophobia and coming out, keeping our identities secret, and figuring out how to navigate hazards? What might be the possibilities for Gay life if we cultivated and developed our lives and society was supportive? We would likely be living very different lives and be a very different community of different Gay individuals. The next generation wouldn’t be in darkness, but could stand and breath free in the light.
Technical Tools, Looking at homophobic books on the Internet Archive, Amazon, Google Books, elsewhere. Sometimes the homophobic stuff isn’t on their webpages. It is in their books. Go to the Internet Archive, but this time click on the Advanced Search button. Don’t use the search blank with GO button. You will then go to the Advanced Search page. At that page you can put their name in as the Creator. Many of the books they have written will show up. Click on the book of interest and a viewer for the book will show up. There will be a search magnifying lens on the viewer. Use the one down on the viewing page, NOT the one up in the right-hand corner. The search engine isn’t like google, so you will have to search homosexual, homosexuals, homosexuality, etc. This will save you from having to purchase their books, and actually the online book is easier to use since you can search it. A lot of these pastors are small publishing houses and they can have dozens of books. If the person has uncommon name, it is fairly easy to just have a search result of their books. However if their name is common, you might have to use other search terms to narrow it down. Sometimes Amazon.com has a preview of the book which you can view. Sometimes https://books.google.com/ will have a preview. However, Google Books can be tricky. You search terms on the Google Books page you can get as results and see the page. If you go to the book in Google books and search the book you will see the word is present, but just get a snippet of the page. Sometimes sections of the book are quoted elsewhere. You will have to hunt it down by Googling. This is your last resort. Avoid book pirating pages.
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3 WHO WILL BE PART OF THE EFFORT? Everyone who wants to fight against homophobic Christianity is welcome. This is regardless of where they are on the political spectrum, whether their interest is primary or tangential or contingent, and regardless of religion or sexual identity. The deciding question is who is pulling our wagon forward, who isn’t, and who is trying to block it. Unfortunately, in the Gay community, across the political spectrum, there are those who feel their ideology contains the whole of Gay liberation or is Gay liberation and seek to exclude those who don’t share their political or other partisan views. Our movement needs to look at whether you are pulling the wagon forward or not. For those who can’t work across the political spectrum, they might go off and have their own partisan group. The only downside is that their partisan effort will look like it is an appendage of some political movement, and we will have to be careful that it doesn’t impact the perception of our efforts. There are going to be those whose interest in this question might be tangential or contingent. A group also being harassed or persecuted by Christians might be interested in supporting our effort in so much as it fits into their plans to resist Christian aggression. A group might find parts of our campaign useful for their agenda. Working with them will have to be flexible and dependent with what their agenda is. Straights can be supporters and involved. We will need all the help we can get. Finally Gay Christians can be part of the effort. This might seem contradictory since a later chapter in this book is devoted to criticizing the efforts, arguments, and tactics of Gay Christians as being impediments to defeating homophobic Christianity. However, we shouldn’t jump to conclusions that they won’t be part of the effort. First, some Gay Christians might realize that their agenda isn’t necessarily the agenda of the whole Gay community. Second, Gay Christians where they are able to eliminate homophobic Christianity have eliminated homophobic Christianity. Let them do what they can do. It needs to be acknowledged that they can neutralize in some cases homophobic Christianity. Third, Gay Christians, upon hearing our criticisms, might modify or change their tactics. Fourth, they might point to our more militant movement as a tactic to apply pressure on some Christian groups. Fifth, there might arise new forms and types of Gay Christianity that aren’t just Gays who are members of a largely straight churches or just focused on acceptance by the straight Christian
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community. Sixth, the author has heard of mystical Christian movements which are very different than the predominate forms of Christianity. The Gay Christians likely will be a separate movement, but it will be a movement generally recognized as pushing their own religious agenda, and it will be a movement that can proceed on its own. If they are pulling the wagon forward, they are working for our agenda. If they aren’t pulling the wagon forward or blocking it, we should be unsparing in our criticism. Who is to be excluded, are those who represent themselves as defending us from homophobic attacks, but aren’t really doing so, and their agenda is really to defend Christianity. Arguments by their religious leaders that Gays shouldn’t be targeted because there are many types of sin, are still classifying homosexuality as a sin and their agenda is defending Christianity. Those who argue that it is up to God to judge and punish, are just side stepping the issue. This won’t be an atheist movement. Gays in other faiths will be welcome. There are Gays in religious movements and groups which are currently being targeted by Christians, and they are often the same Christians who are homophobic. In the West there isn’t any specific Gay religious option either. We need to have an alternative to homophobic Christianity that isn’t atheism, there really needs to be the development of Gay non-Christian religious activities. Not everyone is going to be an atheist. A broad base group would be a group which would be more likely to have different ideas to choose from to use for our campaign against homophobic Christianity and support multiple ways and efforts to fight homophobic Christianity. Technical Tools. You need Snagit for a screen capture tool. Snagit is cheap. It has lots of screen capturing abilities and it saves as both PDF or JPEG and other formats. Windows Snip and Sketch can do some captures, but Snagit is much better for others. It includes a video capture tool that is fairly good. The Internet archive doesn’t work or work well with social media. The panorama feature is really useful. You can scroll down a page and capture it, even though it might be long. It has an editor which is not bad. You can trim captures right after you have done them. I have tried about a half dozen of the other tools, they were really poor.
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4 THE PROBLEM WITH THE GAY CHRISTIAN CAMPAIGN FOR ACCEPTANCE. Again, this is not to push the Gay Christians out of the Gay community. However, some of their efforts have a negative impact on the fight against homophobic Christianity. Many have assumed that the agenda of Gay Christians is the agenda of the Gay community as a whole when it is only the agenda of Gay Christians. Criticism of the agenda of Gay Christians has been sectarian and largely atheistic arguments against religious belief in general and the belief in god or gods. There hasn’t been critical thinking about how the Gay Christian agenda impacts the general Gay community and how it limits efforts in fighting homophobic Christianity.
The agenda of Gay Christians is to find a place for Gays within Christianity. In the United States it has been mostly the Catholic and Protestant Christianities in which they were raised in.
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Disable, Defeat and Demolish Homophobic Christianity
Whether this is an attainable goal or makes logical sense is often the sole consideration in judging the efforts of Gay Christians. The question is debated whether it is logically consistent to be Gay and Christian. There are other things to consider. Both the Gay Christians and the largely atheist Gays that oppose them confine the question into whether being Gay is likely possible fit into Christianity or the very old argument of whether god or gods exist, both are arguments that will go on forever. We need to reframe the discussion. What needs to be our position is that we have a right to exist and that is the beginning and end of our thinking. We don’t accept any argument for our annihilation. Whether Christianity is inherently homophobic or not is not our problem. Our goal is to not be victimized by Christian homophobia, not to save Christianity from homophobia, or reform them to not be homophobic. If Gay Christians want to undertake to save Christianity from homophobia or reform them not to be homophobic, that is their concern, but not the concern of the general Gay community. How individual Gays might manage their personal identities is a discussion that doesn’t lead to discussing the defense of the Gay community. Defending the Gay community from homophobic Christianity is our agenda regardless of consequences. Arguing over the Bible It is something that Gay Christians do, and which is understandable from their perspective, is to argue over whether the Bible says homosexuality is wrong. It is something that is necessary to their agenda, but pernicious to the welfare of the Gay community as a whole. When persons argue over whether the Bible says homosexuality is acceptable or not, they make our right to exist contingent over the outcome of a contorted theological argument. An argument, which like most theological arguments, is never ending and never resolved. It also gives Christians authority over whether we have a right to exist or not. If you are arguing on whether the Bible says Gays have a right to exist, you are also asserting that it is a question which the Bible is the determining authority. It is a very adverse strategic place from which to argue also. Anti-Gay Christian activists are likely to have studied all the arguments that Gay Christians have and have themselves developed fairly good counter arguments. They are very likely to be aware of what psychological weaknesses Gay Christians have. It should be no wonder that there are Gays who have decided to renounce being Gay and there are “ex-gays,” since they have decided that their right to be Gay is based on arguing over the Bible. The argument over whether the Bible allows homosexuality also greatly constrains the issue to be within Christianity, not our right to exist in a secular state. Constraining the argument to about what the Bible justifies or condemns excludes other arguments which might be used against homophobic Christianity. One would be, if your religion
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Disable, Defeat and Demolish Homophobic Christianity
is anti-Gay, it is a stupid religion. The Gay Christian doesn’t consider that homophobia in Christianity and homophobic elements in the Bible are evidence that Christianity is invalid. The Gay Christian is a Christian who argues from the assumption, a given, that Christianity is correct and therefore the problem is fitting being Gay into Christianity, not that perhaps Christianity itself isn’t valid. Our position should be that, “If you religion is homophobic, it is invalid.” Our position should be that the homophobic elements in the Bible are evidences that the Bible is invalid as a moral source.
If your religion is anti-Gay, it is a stupid religion. There are other options available for the general Gay community which the Gay Christians won’t consider. Gays could raise questions about the validity of Christianity in general and highlight some of the Bibles weirder texts. Gays could discuss what are the psychological pathologies of those choosing a homophobic church or just Evangelical churches in general. Gays could point out that some of these religious groups are sociopathic. Gays could work to decenter Christianity in the American religious imagination to be instead just one speculation or belief among many. When discussions arise over what might be done in defense of the Gay community from homophobic Christianity, the discussion of counter measures tends to get shutdown by Christians, Gay and otherwise, by shifting the argument into what is “real Christianity,” or what the Bible says. There is no discussion of the historical record of Christianity, its propensity to engage in persecution or that globally the default of Christianity is homophobia. There is no discussion that there might be structural reasons in its texts and theology for it to be homophobic as its default state which it is overwhelmingly globally and has been historically. There is no discussion that there might be structural reasons for it to be an ongoing source of disorder and persecution in general, such as the wars of religion, the burning of witches, the burning of other Christians, the collusion with power to oppress the weak. There is no discussion of what measures might be taken, what organizing might be done to fight back, instead there are sentimental statements about the Bible and Christianity, love and Jesus, which aren’t providing protection for the Gay community and at best have made a few Christians, churches, and denominations, a small minority of global Christianity, not focus on targeting Gays. When a Gay Christian starts going on about Leviticus, red dresses and shrimp, we should consider whether as Gays we have to have a response to every paragraph in every religious book on the planet that some homophobe might try apply to us. We might suggest that the Gay Christians should be mentioning the pro-slavery parts of the Bible, New and Old Testament and point out that all the branches of Christianity just wish these sections away with the same nonliteral higher interpretation liberalism. Of course, that would be rather severe in impact on Christianity and the Gay Christian wants into the house and not bring it down. We don’t all want into the house.
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Disable, Defeat and Demolish Homophobic Christianity
The Gay Christians generally have a begging posture and are weak. You can easily find churches with national identities in their names. There are Norwegian Lutheran Churches and Swedish Lutheran Churches in Minnesota. There are Korean, Chinese and other nationality named Baptist Churches. However, I will never forget the response to my referring to the Metropolitan Community Church (MCC) as a Gay church, and these alarmed voices which all said, “It isn’t a Gay church, it is a church with a lot of Gay members.” Even today MCC rejects being known as a Gay church.
“Don’t fight hate with hate” Is an example of subtle
GASLIGHTING. Where our legitimate hurt and anger at the injustices we suffer is being equated to the bigotry and abuse of our oppressors. Being angry doesn’t mean you are being hateful; it means you love yourself enough to get upset at your own mistreatment. Credit: frontier-heart.
Too many and too often Gay Christians tend to have a tone of begging. Also, their aspiration is to be accepted back into their churches, not to criticize them, and certainly not to criticize or doubt Christianity. They are enslaved to defend and maintain and argue for highly involved rationales that Christianity isn’t homophobic. When the notorious W.A. Criswell, of 1st Baptist Church in Dallas, notorious for his racism, his anti-Catholic attack on President John F. Kennedy, and his sermons about Gays dying of AIDS because of their sodomy, died, there were numerous Gay Christians in Dallas who were published in the Gay paper, Dallas Voice, praising him based on the most ridiculous and unfounded pretexts. The article was titled, “Despite conservative stance, Criswell not seen as antigay crusader,” but he certainly was.4 The Gay Christians insist on dragging the defense of Gays into the Bible and be contingent on the outcome of some convoluted and contorted theological conflict which will never be resolved and which enables homophobic Christians to have authority over us. Gay Christians tend to overstate what little progress they have made. When Pope Francis stated that Gays shouldn’t be arrested, but it still was a sin, Gay Catholics were just ecstatic. However, it was 2023 when Francis stated this, not the 1970s. It should be a given that we shouldn’t be arrested and any church saying homosexuality is a sin is attacking us. In 2023 the issue isn’t any more whether we will be arrested, but will we be able to get married and not face discrimination in employment, housing, medical care, and other social rights and for religions 4
Dallas Voice, Jan. 18, 2002, Vol. 18 No. 39, https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth616334/, page 8,9.
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whether we can be clergy or hold other offices. Gay Christians don’t critically assess what their prospect are. Given that they are Christians as a given, they have to hope that the future will be successful. The rest of us can be more realistic in our assessments. The campaign of Gay Christians for acceptance has had limited and mixed success, even though the Gay Christian groups have been operating since the 1970s two generations ago. The Gay Catholics are always saying that the Catholic church moves very slowly to explain the very minimal progress made. Small incremental progress is sometimes represented as some great accomplishment by Gay Christians whose expectations are very low. In the case of the United Methodist, the denomination is crumbling over the issue of Gays in 2023, and the Episcopalians have had many churches leave over the issue of Gays. The current prospects for Gay Christians to eliminate or even substantially reduce homophobic Christianity are not good. This is not to say they haven’t made some progress, but it falls way short of what needs to happen. The Gay Christian movement isn’t the solution to homophobic Christianity. Gay Christians will not consider and are likely to oppose the multitude of possible actions that could be taken to fight homophobic Christianity and actions that are likely to be much more powerful in fighting homophobic Christianity since they involve or might involve challenging the legitimacy of homophobic Christianity. If some Gay Christian group or individual does get in the way or oppose effective action, they need to face strong criticism. Gay Christians have another negative effect. They see heterosexual Christianity as the standard for living. Their fervent hope is to be accepted in heterosexual churches. They tend to think that if they adhere to heteronormative restricted lifestyles, monogamous relationships, and be the best middle-class person they can be, they will be accepted. They will be embarrassed by those Gays who don’t follow or want to live their restricted lives. They don’t conceive of a distinct Gay theology and separate religious path and a denomination oriented specifically and integrally for Gays, rather than an adaptation or modification of straight Christianity. There is a very strong tendency of Gay Christians to be a Respectability Gays. They often are upset that some Gays aren’t respectability Gays. They tend to blame their lack of acceptance by straight Christians on other Gays. They tend to have a repressive attitude towards how Gays might be. They tend to be Gays who have an attitude that the homophobia is somehow the fault of the Gays who they don’t consider respectable, and Gay Christians generally aren’t going to have a militant attitude towards homophobic Christianity. Gays who have a bundle of negative attitude towards other Gays aren’t going to have a fighting spirit. The Gay Christians are the type that want to let their straight friends know that they don’t approve of Lil Nas X, are more in sympathy with the homophobic Christians than with the Gay community. This isn’t to say that some Gay Christians won’t reconsider what they do in the future once our campaign is underway and hopefully will, but likely there will be self-imposed limits on what they can do as Gay Christians since they are Christians. For us, we need to move beyond the arguments and tactics of the Gay Christians and not let their personal religious agendas restrain us. We need to aggressively do what is necessary to protect the Gay community against
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Disable, Defeat and Demolish Homophobic Christianity
homophobic Christianity.
Finding the anti-Gay parts of YouTube Videos. You can search for videos, but you really don’t want to have to listen to 30 minutes of Evangelical ranting and you also need to get your research done quickly. There is a way to find the parts with the homophobic statements. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8.
Click on the thumbnail of video of interest at YouTube. Under the video you will see a gray book with text and ending with “…more”. Click on the more. The gray box will expand. Scroll down until you see transcript. Click on transcript and it will appear on the right side of the window. Then press Ctrl + F at the same time. A search window will appear. Put the term of interest and press Enter. Sometimes it will just search without pressing enter. 9. Use the term “homo” since it will search for word parts. Other word parts are sex and sexual. 10. The transcript will scroll down automatically to the word of interest and highlight it. 11. Sometimes a video will show up in the Google search, but I won’t find anything. Not sure why. Often, they will have a video hosted on both their webpage and YouTube or Facebook and YouTube, once you have the time, you can also have links to the same video on other platforms with the times of interest in your report. There are no transcripts for Facebook videos and usually not on their webpages. Having a video where people can see their homophobic talk, has impact. Vimeo doesn’t have searching and it generally isn’t used by homophobes.
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5 THE PATHOLOGIES OF HOMOPHOBIC CHRISTIANS The individual homophobic Christian is a bad person. What is the motivation and why would a person want to be a member of a Church which includes as its program going after Gays? We need to stop thinking of Christian homophobes as misguided or uninformed or misled or having made some error in logic, they are bad people. Certainly by 2023 they can’t be said to be misinformed by the popular misconceptions, stereotypes, and misinformation about Gays of the early 20th century. They have chosen to be homophobes and self-righteous ones empowered by their fentanyl Jesus in the face of modern life. People need to stop making excuses for them. The followers of homophobic Christianity are self-indulgent, self-serving, self-deluding and self-aggrandizing with a pathological need to fill their meaningless lives. Christianity is an amusement park ride with drama and an opportunity to feel special and be on a crusade in a dramatic role. Joining a church or group on a crusade against some evil, makes the whole world a theater for their personal adventure as a hero. They are fearfully grasping for an anchor in the modern world, and if it means persecuting homosexuals, they don’t care. Homosexuals, being only roughly 3% of the population, make a useful target to crusade against. They can be the Others for the members to crusade against, and only being a few percent, there is a minimal loss of potential Gay members for the church. Crusading against Gays allows dramatic roles of being true to God against the modern world and likely other internal narratives. They don’t care about the impact against Gays, since they are deluded that their attacks on Gays are actually saving Gays and a benefit to Gays. They are on a fentanyl Jesus fun ride and they aren’t going to let Gays tell them differently. These Christians have emotional thinking and aren’t very analytical if at all. Using a slang word, they are delulu for Jesus. The current opposition to this homophobic Christianity assumes that they are homophobic in good faith because of a logical error in their thinking and with a good clear explanation they will change their minds and be saved from this error. They are called Christians, not Aristotelians. Analytically thinking isn’t their strong point. These are the same people who deny geological science are not mentally on solid ground. We don’t want to save them; we want to disable them as functioning Christian homophobes
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that can harm us. The counter-tactic needs to confront them with their pathologies to collapse their motivations for their homophobic Christianity. The public needs to see their motivations as pathological also, so they are confronted by society in general as well as us. They may not stop being active in homophobic Christianity immediately, but it will be in their minds and work on them, mentally grind their delusions over time. At some point they will realize they aren’t on some great crusade for Jesus, but just a performer in a Christian circus. They will realize that they have chosen a fantasy to fill their empty lives and have been fools. They wanted to be a hero, not a buffoon. We need to consider every way that the arrogant self-indulgent homophobe can be psychologically disabled. The flow of new members to these homophobic churches can be reduced if the public is aware that homophobic Christianity is a self-indulgent pathology and not as a solution to empty lives, and the attrition can be increased reducing total net membership. Being represented as a pathology the churches will have diminished moral authority in society. The homophobic Christians aren’t going to care if their pastor or leader has private jets or a 300-room house, they just want the fun ride. Even if their pastor is exposed as patronizing prostitutes or some other scandal, they want to forgive him so they can get back to the fun ride or failing that, just find another pastor to provide the fun ride. There are many pastors competing for the homophobic Christian’s patronage. They aren’t interested in some argument over the Bible or that Christianity isn’t logically coherent, when they have the emotional need for the fun ride. They aren’t particularly analytical after all. They don’t care if it rains or freezes, as long as they have their fentanyl Jesus. Posts showing some logical inconsistency in Christianity isn’t going to have much effect either. They wouldn’t have gotten involved in homophobic Christianity if they had much in the way of logical or analytical thinking. Again, they are called Christians, not Aristotelians. Posts which foment internal emotional conflict in them can be effective. For example, the author posted once that, “Most people are Christian because of some empire, Roman, Spanish or European.” The author was surprised that it got a strong response from a Christian person who imagined he was a social justice champion and the idea of people being Christian as a result of imperialism conflicted with his self-conception as a social justice champion. Most Christianity on planet earth derives from some invasion of some place resulting in oppression and the destruction of the local culture. The preservation of cultures in many places is tied to the defeat of Christians. National identity and decolonialization conflicts with Christian identity. Pointing out to someone that they are Christian because their ancestors were mentally raped by invaders is something that can reach them. Going on about the illogic underlying a concept of a God which might respond to your prayer to get promoted but let children starve elsewhere is going to go nowhere with them. You have to put their self-indulgent emotional needs in conflict with each other. You won’t get far in attacking the leader of their group, or trying to show that there are logical inconsistencies in Christianity, that their leaders collude with exploitive elites, or point out scandals. Christianity has effectively resisted these types of attacks and issues for twenty centuries.
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Disable, Defeat and Demolish Homophobic Christianity
You might as well try teaching a cat algebra. It is on the emotional level that these homophobic Christians can be reached. It is on an emotional level that homophobic Christian parents often give up their homophobia when they have a Gay child. Being bigoted towards your child makes the Jesus fun ride less fun. Though the churches are trying to make trying to solve that disincentive to be a homophobic Christian as earlier mentioned in Chapter 1 with programs like “Uncommon Love.” When individuals get engaged with homophobic Christianity it is a pathology and needs to be publicly proclaimed as such. Loser Christians Evangelical Christianity is also a predator and recruits those who can’t manage their lives which compose some of the membership of the homophobic churches. They are homophobic Christians because they have failed to manage their lives. They are grasping for an absolute authority to get a grip on their lives. This needs to be made very clear to them. The author was at a protest and a person from the church came out to tell us joyously that Jesus had saved him from addiction. The author immediately stated, “So Jesus is a duct tape holding you together,” and “How did I manage not to become an addict without knowing Jesus.” A local church in the Bishop Arts Area of Oak Cliff, a section of Dallas, Texas on social media tells prospective members that they don’t have to be alone, that Jesus loves them, that they can have a family within the church. There are a lot of people that don’t cope with modern life. A lot of time they join the church seeing it as a solution to their life problems, and then at some point when they are hooked in, they have to make the choice either to give up the church and the church’s emotional support or adopt the church’s homophobic ideology. This church makes this easier by representing their homophobic Christianity as some type of love for Gays. There are Gays who prioritize everyone’s needs above themselves and there are Gays who wish to exalt themselves as some type of saint by not fighting back against aggressions. Gay Christians think not fighting back by “turning the other check” in the face of homophobic Christian aggressions make them Christ like. Their self-indulgence shouldn’t get in the way of defending the Gay community. So, one of the questions that might come up is if we disable this class of people, they could end up having the original issues that drove them to the church. First thing, the church hasn’t solved their problems, they are just using it as a substitute for skills in navigating modern life or just living. Second, we aren’t responsible for these additional bad choices made by these people to solve their life problems, certainly not from those who chose to be the enemies of Gays as part of their solution to their problems. We have value as humans, and they are attempting to destroy our value as humans. The choice is clear. We aren’t responsible to make homophobic life solutions work. We aren’t obligated to be victims to make homophobic life solutions work. If you have chosen homophobia, you have made a bad decision. If you have chosen homophobia, you are our enemy, it is just that simple.
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Disable, Defeat and Demolish Homophobic Christianity
If the previously mentioned former addict reverted to addiction because he lost his delusions in Jesus, that isn’t our problem, and it is just an additional bad decision in a series of bad decisions that this person has made. These homophobic solutions can appeal to distraught Gays There are Gays who can’t manage their lives and a church may seem like a solution to their problems just as it is for others. There are Gays who are lonely and their lives seem meaningless, or they are depressed, and an Evangelical church which tells them that they can become a member of a family and be part of a great metaphysical drama has its appeal. Ex-Gays don’t become exGays because they made a logical error. When homophobic literature is handed out at Pride events or in Gay neighborhoods it needs to not be shrugged off or laughed at. Every Gay person passing by needs to get a copy of the hand out to exhaust the supply. At a local Pride event, homophobic leaflets were stuck on every car in the parking lot for the event. No one went out to gather them up. I gathered some, but I am 71 and was exhausted in the summer heat and from walking to the parking lot and couldn’t gather up all of them. We need to do what we can to stop homophobic Christians from recruiting Gays. There also needs to be Gay alternatives for persons needing help in their lives. Social organizations for sports, games, bingo, are also ways of blocking the homophobic recruiting of Gays. The Gay Christian churches serve a useful purpose in providing a place for Gays as an alternative to a homophobic church. Choosing homophobic Christianity is in the service of some pathology, and is selfindulgent, self-serving, self-deluding and self-aggrandizing. We need to focus on publicizing that, rather than focus on some theological argument or some logical inconsistency in their faith. Our effort against homophobia needs to focus on understanding the underlying psychology of the homophobic Christian and seek to have the homophobic Christian confront their pathologies. They are likely to be additional elements in their pathologies which can be targeted than the ones discussed in this chapter. We need to conduct psychological warfare against homophobic Christians. Their pathologies are an opportunity to do so. The homophobic Christian is a bad person.
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6 IS CHRISTIANITY BASICALLY ANTI-GAY? Christianity is sex negative. 1. It is anti-sex and only tolerates it to perpetuate humanity. It strictly regulates sex as if it
was dangerous. Lust is a sin.
2. The mother of Jesus is almost always called the Virgin Mary. The Christian religion finds it impossible to have Jesus be the result of sexual activity and male orgasm. 3. Jesus doesn’t have a sex life. Neither does the Father or the Holy Ghost. 4. There aren’t any stories in the Bible of angels having sex either. 5. Christianity generally promotes celibacy as a virtue and spiritual attainment. Not having sex is to be pure.
It is hard to see how an anti-sex religion would not see homosexuality in a negative light given that it has no utility for reproduction. In regards to homosexuality, both the Old Testament and New Testament calls out for the death of those who engaged in homosexual sex. Christians partition the Bible when it suits their purpose. So, they decide to be able to eat shrimp because it is forbidden only in the Old Testament. However, homosexuality is condemned in the New Testament Gospels also with the penalty of death. So, Christians who want to accept Gays do a further partition it down to what Jesus said. This is not without precedent. Both the New and Old Testament is solidly pro-slavery, and Jesus uses slavery to explain his religion, but since Jesus didn’t make some specific, legal statement supporting slavery, Christians now days claim that their religion doesn’t endorse slavery. This is a theological view that didn’t arise until very recently in history. It is now simply unacceptable for a religion to support slavery and so Christians have acquired a new theology. Theology is infinitely elastic and accommodating to social change and human wants and desires. The Sons of Confederate Veterans in their magazine raged that people didn’t believe a
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Biblical defense of slavery and they do to defend the Confederacy. Foolishly they think that what the Bible says, will actually make a difference. No theological question or disagreement is ever entirely resolved in Christianity even when entire groups have been burned alive in an attempt to do so. Theology isn’t mathematics. The Christians may assemble a series of statements and assert that the statements constitute a proof, but usually other Christians will have assembled other statements purposed as being a proof contrary to the other proof. Since there isn’t an overwhelming social opinion regarding accepting homosexuality like there is against slavery, homophobic Christianity is dominant globally. Even if by some unforeseen reason homophobia became as unacceptable as slavery universally is, the situation would not be assured. Theological opinions aren’t stable and will vary with circumstances. With all the vicious homophobic statements in the Bible, it certainly would require tremendous societal pressures, equivalent to the social pressures against slavery, to keep Christianity from reverting to its historical homophobic self. Even then, it would be a disaster waiting for some future development to unleash it on the Gay community. What needs to be looked at is how Christianity performs, how it behaves, what is its historical record is, in the varying situations that in which Christianity has existed, in time, geography, and different societies. If homophobic Christianity was the exception, only happening in a particular place and historical period, then it might be that it doesn’t have an inherent homophobic character. However, nearly always, globally, historically, except in recent times and then only with a small fraction of Christians in liberal Western democracies, Christianity has been viciously homophobic. The very word “faggot” comes from the practice of burning homosexuals alive. Acceptance of homosexuality by some Christians is largely just tolerance to resolve any conflict between their identities as being a Christian and being a nice person. It is similar to the societal pressures which forced Christianity to not be pro-slavery. Even then, Evangelicals adopt a formula of, “love the sinner, hate the sin,” which shows how ineffectual and limited this identity conflict can be to restrain Christian homophobia. There can be other evasive rationalizations. Recently a church has moved into Dallas County which calls for the government to execute Gays. A local Christian wrote a letter to the editor published in the local major daily that their Christian god was in charge of judging and punishment and not the government, avoiding the question whether homosexuality was a sin or whether it was something their god would punish. There is no recognition by Christians that the churches calling out for the execution of Gays is merely the pot of Christian homophobia boiling over. Though many were quick to say not all Christians are homophobic, we didn’t see any contingents from churches at the protests of this church. Functionally Christianity globally is nearly always homophobic with only a small fraction of Christians being tolerant and an even smaller fraction which are actually supportive. The fraction that is tolerant or supportive is contingent on social pressures in favor of Gays.
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There is always a possibility of reversion into the overwhelmingly predominant homophobic Christianity in history. There is no absolute answer whether Christianity is anti-Gay or not given the elasticity of theology and its essentially non-rationalistic nature. Nothing is to be gained by getting into this theological quagmire. Stilton cheese could be declared an abomination or a virtue depending on some emotional need. The question needs to be asked in relation to the security of Gays now and in the future. In developing plans to stop the current attacks of homophobic Christianity and prevent them in the future what should our assessment of Christianity be? By that criteria Christianity is homophobic. It has been a deadly danger to Gays historically, it is a deadly danger to Gays now, and shows every indication of being an ongoing danger to Gays. That should be the basis of our plans for the defense of the Gay community. As for those few Christians globally, who aren’t homophobic and aren’t just tolerant, we aren’t required to support their theological position if it limits or undermines our ability to defend the Gay community. They have not considered that if a religion is homophobic, maybe it is invalid. Their agenda is perhaps desperately holding on to Christianity by a process of denying reality. They have merely adopted a formula to meet their own emotional needs. They have made the decision that Christianity is valid despite its clear and vicious history and current predominant homophobic behavior. They are engaged in a personal need to have Christianity in some form and yet not be vicious fanatics. It isn’t our struggle. We have to defend the Gay community without being restrained by what they have decided or distracted by theological questions. Our defense needs to be based on the assessment that Christianity is inherently homophobic as it has been historically and now globally overwhelmingly is. Google Alert for tracking. There is a Google Alert page which you can set up and it will report to you what Google indexing has found matching your search terms and email you results on a daily or weekly basis. You can set up more than one search engine and you can modify them to be more precise in their reporting. For example, I might set up a search for pages with the AND function of “church,” “homosexual,” “Dallas,” and get notified when a page uses those three terms is found by Google.
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7 SEEING THE REALITY OF CHRISTIANITY AS A MURDEROUS RELIGION We have trouble seeing Christianity for what it is, since most of us were raised in a Christian society and live in a society where Christianity is the predominate religion and normalized and so we are conditioned not to see it as it is. The LGBT establishment hasn’t considered criticizing Christianity itself, despite it being the major force against LGBT globally. The issue of homophobic Christianity has been left to Gay Christians with their begging and failing agenda. We need to describe Christianity as it really is without restraint. We need to have an aggressive program against Christian aggression regardless how others might whine. We need to excavate and surface its weird, bizarre and violent nature and have the general public, not just Gays, realize that it is always a potential danger to a free society. Christianity is bad because it is generally homophobic and has a predisposition to being homophobic. No other justification is needed to judge Christianity as bad. It has a built-in predisposition to be actively hostile, since the acceptance of homosexuality represents a loss of power for Christians who seek to dominate and control society and have the Bible as an absolute authority over life. Gays will also be a convenient target for Christians being a small minority and one in which so much of the Bible can be quoted against. Though the weird, bizarre, violent, disordered nature of Christianity is extensive, its homophobic campaigns, predisposition to homophobia, and its attacks on Gays is a sufficient reason in itself to condemn Christianity completely. If your religion is homophobic, it is stupid, needs always to be our basic principle and slogan. The Christians have shaped the popular imagination to see themselves as normal and other religions as evil. They have asserted that some religions are actually the worship of the devil or they are the snares of the devil. It is in the New Testament as part of their faith to disparage other religions as being devil worship, so much better to justify persecuting them and putting them to death.
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Corinthians Chapter 10 KJV. (Kings James Version.) 20: But I say, that the things which the Gentiles sacrifice, they sacrifice to devils, and not to God: and I would not that ye should have fellowship with devils. 21: Ye cannot drink the cup of the Lord, and the cup of devils: ye cannot be partakers of the Lord's table, and of the table of devils. 22: Do we provoke the Lord to jealousy? are we stronger than he? [Boldface added.]
This is all because the Christian God is jealous. The indigenous religions of Europe were characterized as devil worship as part of a successful campaign to obliterate them. Popular fiction and American movies have reinforced this view of indigenous European religions as being evil and involving the devil. This Christian worldview of other religions as evil is a reoccurring theme in fiction and movies where another religion in a foreign nation is sinister and evil. In movies there is the theme that something in the ruins of some ancient temple unleashes a horrible evil. Though Christians have and do say the worst outrageous things about other religions, when someone criticizes them, they whine loudly about anti-Christian bias. Even a casual observation of Christian history objectively shows Christianity as the world threatening violent religion far more dangerous than other religions. They burned persons based on wild accusations of being witches. They burned each other based on doctrinal disputes. They persecuted other religions. The indigenous religions of Latin America, Philippines, Europe, and Africa are extinct or nearly so. A priest burned the Codex of the Mayans claiming they were works of the devil. Christianity is the violent, intolerant, persecuting cult that took over the Roman Empire and then Western Civilization. Their desire to terminate other religions through persecution isn’t confined to the historic past. Korean Shamans were intensely persecuted in the last half of the 20th century by Christians. The Christians don’t intend to compete, they intend to exterminate. From Exodus KJV. Exodus 22:18 “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.” [Boldface added.] Exodus 22:20 “He that sacrificeth unto any god, save unto the LORD only, he shall be utterly destroyed.” [Boldface added.]
The Christian god being his usual genocidal self declares. Exodus 23:23 “For mine Angel shall go before thee, and bring thee in unto the Amorites, and the Hittites, and the Perizzites, and the Cannanites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites, and I will cut them off.” [Boldface added.]
Cutting them off means wiping them out. After wiping these peoples out, this line commands, Exodus 23:24 Thou shalt not bow down to their gods, nor serve them, nor do after their works, but thou shalt utterly overthrow them, and quite break down their images. [Boldface
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added.]
God insists on his genocide because as stated in: Exodus 23:32, 23:33, “Thou shalt make no covenant with them, nor with their gods. They shall not dwell in thy land, lest they make thee sin against me: for if you serve their gods, it will surely be a snare unto thee.” [Boldface added.]
The jealous God is always fearing competition. Deuteronomy, Chapter 13, KJV, shows the murderous psychopathic danger of Christianity. 1: If there arise among you a prophet, or a dreamer of dreams, and giveth thee a sign or a wonder, 2: And the sign or the wonder come to pass, whereof he spake unto thee, saying, Let us go after other gods, which thou hast not known, and let us serve them; 3: Thou shalt not hearken unto the words of that prophet, or that dreamer of dreams: for the LORD your God proveth you, to know whether ye love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul. 4: Ye shall walk after the LORD your God, and fear him, and keep his commandments, and obey his voice, and ye shall serve him, and cleave unto him. 5: And that prophet, or that dreamer of dreams, shall be put to death; because he hath spoken to turn you away from the LORD your God, which brought you out of the land of Egypt, and redeemed you out of the house of bondage, to thrust thee out of the way which the LORD thy God commanded thee to walk in. So shalt thou put the evil away from the midst of thee. 6: If thy brother, the son of thy mother, or thy son, or thy daughter, or the wife of thy bosom, or thy friend, which is as thine own soul, entice thee secretly, saying, Let us go and serve other gods, which thou hast not known, thou, nor thy fathers; 7: Namely, of the gods of the people which are around you, nigh unto thee, or far off from thee, from the one end of the earth even unto the other end of the earth; 8: Thou shalt not consent unto him, nor hearken unto him; neither shall thine eye pity him, neither shalt thou spare, neither shalt thou conceal him: 9: But thou shalt surely kill him; thine hand shall be first upon him to put him to death, and afterwards the hand of all the people. 10: And thou shalt stone him with stones, that he die; because he hath sought to thrust thee away from the Lord thy God, which brought thee out of the land of Egypt, from the house of bondage. 11: And all Israel shall hear, and fear, and shall do no more any such wickedness as this is among you. 12: If thou shalt hear say in one of thy cities, which the Lord thy God hath given thee to dwell there, saying, 13: Certain men, the children of Belial, are gone out from among you, and have withdrawn the inhabitants of their city, saying, Let us go and serve other gods, which ye have not known; 14: Then shalt thou enquire, and make search, and ask diligently; and, behold, if it be truth, and the thing certain, that such abomination is wrought among you; 15: Thou shalt surely smite the inhabitants of that city with the edge of the sword, destroying it utterly, and all that is therein, and the cattle thereof, with the edge of the sword. 16: And thou shalt gather all the spoil of it into the midst of the street thereof, and shalt burn with fire the city, and all the spoil thereof every whit, for the Lord thy God: and it shall be an heap forever; it shall not be built again. 17: And there shall cleave nought of the cursed thing to thine hand: that the Lord may turn from the fierceness of his anger, and shew thee mercy, and have compassion upon thee, and multiply thee, as he hath sworn unto thy fathers; 18: When thou shalt hearken to the voice of the Lord thy God, to keep all his commandments
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which I command thee this day, to do that which is right in the eyes of the Lord thy God. [Boldface added.]
Deuteronomy, Chapter 17, KJV, wants to stone people also. 2: If there be found among you, within any of thy gates which the Lord thy God giveth thee, man or woman, that hath wrought wickedness in the sight of the Lord thy God, in transgressing his covenant, 3: And hath gone and served other gods, and worshipped them, either the sun, or moon, or any of the host of heaven, which I have not commanded; 4: And it be told thee, and thou hast heard of it, and enquired diligently, and, behold, it be true, and the thing certain, that such abomination is wrought in Israel: 5: Then shalt thou bring forth that man or that woman, which have committed that wicked thing, unto thy gates, even that man or that woman, and shalt stone them with stones, till they die. 6: At the mouth of two witnesses, or three witnesses, shall he that is worthy of death be put to death; but at the mouth of one witness he shall not be put to death. 7: The hands of the witnesses shall be first upon him to put him to death, and afterward the hands of all the people. So thou shalt put the evil away from among you. [Boldface added.]
Regarding the New Testament, Christians are likely to talk about Christ and his ending throwing stones and that stone throwing is over. Perhaps stone throwing is over, but there is more than one way to kill people. In 1 Corinthians Chapter 10 god goes on a psychopathic murderous spree with those who don’t believe or want to have additional sources of divine guidance. 7: Neither be ye idolaters, as were some of them; as it is written, The people sat down to eat and drink, and rose up to play. 8: Neither let us commit fornication, as some of them committed, and fell in one day three and twenty thousand. 9: Neither let us tempt Christ, as some of them also tempted, and were destroyed of serpents. 10: Neither murmur ye, as some of them also murmured, and were destroyed of the destroyer.11: Now all these things happened unto them for ensamples: and they are written for our admonition, upon whom the ends of the world are come. [Boldface added.]
[The message of the above verse is that god is quick to strike dead those who don’t follow his rules and those who resent his rules, and that should serve as an example of what will happen to idolators. The animating spirit of Christianity is terror.] 12: Wherefore let him that thinketh he standeth take heed lest he fall. 13: There hath no temptation taken you but such as is common to man: but God is faithful, who will not suffer you to be tempted above that ye are able; but will with the temptation also make a way to escape, that ye may be able to bear it. 14: Wherefore, my dearly beloved, flee from idolatry.
[They are to flee to ritual cannibalism in which they devour their god. The language in the Bible is quite precise about “blood” and “body,” it isn’t some esoteric cosmic energy or spirt food, it is “blood” and “body.”] 15: I speak as to wise men; judge ye what I say. 16: The cup of blessing which we bless, is it not the communion of the blood of Christ? The bread which we break, is it not the communion of the body of Christ? 17: For we being many are one bread, and one body: for we are all partakers of that one bread. 18: Behold Israel after the flesh: are not they which
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eat of the sacrifices partakers of the altar?
[The last part is the part which was the part mentioned earlier, besides god’s threat to murder you, these other gods are devils. They want you to know that the Christian god is jealous. This is a jealousy driven to murder. ] 19: What say I then? that the idol is anything, or that which is offered in sacrifice to idols is anything? 20: But I say, that the things which the Gentiles sacrifice, they sacrifice to devils, and not to God: and I would not that ye should have fellowship with devils. 21: Ye cannot drink the cup of the Lord, and the cup of devils: ye cannot be partakers of the Lord's table, and of the table of devils. 22: Do we provoke the Lord to jealousy? are we stronger than he?
There is more than one example that death awaits people following other religions in the New Testament. In Romans, Chapter 1, Paul asserts that Christianity is obvious and so to not believe in Christianity means you are a fool or unrighteous and first you will be made homosexual and then you are worthy of death. True, no stones are necessarily involved, but you are dead by other means. The Christians usually burned people alive, maybe because it made a more terrifying spectacle to frighten people. A stoning means picking up stones, the body, the mess afterwards and though it allows direct community participation, it really takes the terrorizing drama of someone shrieking as they go up in flames in a big visible bonfire to push Christian mythologies. Also, how many people can actually view a stoning, and it probably is over fairly quick, whereas a bonfire can be a spectacle viewed by many more people and last longer. The text, Romans, Chapter 1, KJV. 16: For I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ: for it is the power of God unto salvation to every one that believeth; to the Jew first, and also to the Greek. 17: For therein is the righteousness of God revealed from faith to faith: as it is written, The just shall live by faith. 18: For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who hold the truth in unrighteousness; 19: Because that which may be known of God is manifest in them; for God hath shewed it unto them. [Boldface added.]
[Verses 18, 19, & 20 above assert that if you don’t buy into the ludicrous Christian mythology, you must be an evil person.] 20: For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead; so that they are without excuse:
[Verses 18, 19, & 20 above assert that if you don’t buy into the ludicrous Christian mythology, you must be an evil person.] 21: Because that, when they knew God, they glorified him not as God, neither were thankful; but became vain in their imaginations, and their foolish heart was darkened. 22: Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools,
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23: And changed the glory of the uncorruptible God into an image made like to corruptible man, and to birds, and fourfooted beasts, and creeping things. 24: Wherefore God also gave them up to uncleanness through the lusts of their own hearts, to dishonour their own bodies between themselves: 25: Who changed the truth of God into a lie, and worshipped and served the creature more than the Creator, who is blessed for ever. Amen. 26: For this cause God gave them up unto vile affections: for even their women did change the natural use into that which is against nature: 27: And likewise also the men, leaving the natural use of the woman, burned in their lust one toward another; men with men working that which is unseemly, and receiving in themselves that recompence of their error which was meet. 28: And even as they did not like to retain God in their knowledge, God gave them over to a reprobate mind, to do those things which are not convenient; 29: Being filled with all unrighteousness, fornication, wickedness, covetousness, maliciousness; full of envy, murder, debate, deceit, malignity; whisperers, 30: Backbiters, haters of God, despiteful, proud, boasters, inventors of evil things, disobedient to parents, 31: Without understanding, covenant breakers, without natural affection, implacable, unmerciful: 32: Who knowing the judgment of God, that they which commit such things are worthy of death, not only do the same, but have pleasure in them that do them. [Boldface added.]
Who needs serial killers with these psychopaths about? With instructions like these it isn’t surprising that the Christians obliterated one religion after another globally in murderous campaigns. Religious tolerance in the Western world arises through the need for the British to have white solidarity in subduing the world and competing with other imperial powers. Historian Gerald Horne has pointed out that white solidarity was needed to control slaves, which would be able to exploit divisions among white people, and thus there is the is the First Amendment and religious freedom.5 The rise of religious tolerance comes in a specific historical context and may not continue with new contexts. With imperialism gone, the West goes on to fight the Cold War and needs solidarity at home and not antagonize former European imperial colonies, now independent nonChristian nations. Time marches on and one situation is replaced by another situation which later is replace yet by another. Since 1939 we have gone from a world structured around European world powers, to a world structured by the Cold War of Communism versus Capitalism, and now the multipolar world. Whether religious tolerance remains in this newest world or in future worlds 5
Horne, Gerald, “The Counter-Revolution of 1776,” New York Univ. Press, NYC, 2014, pages 3-4. Horne elaborates on this in this interview regarding his book, “The Dawning of the Apocalypse: The Roots of Slavery, White Supremacy, Settler Colonialism, and Capitalism in the Long Sixteenth Century,” https://platypus1917.org/2020/09/01/an-interview-with-gerald-horne/, downloaded 12/9/2023.
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remains to be seen. Given the behavior of Christians in the United States in the later part of the 20th century the indication is that it won’t. The campaign of the Christian Koreans against their indigenous religion is not surprising in that they weren’t in the Western flow of history and contained by Western imperial needs, nor the other Western historical contexts. Gays should remind all the non-Christian religions in the world, that Christianity is always potentially their murderous enemy with the goal of obliterating them, as they have in the past terminated other religions, if the historical context changes, and history never stops. Christianity has a violent disordered history based on its intrinsic nature and is hazard for the future. The selected texts of the Bible about idolatry are just an example of some of the violent murderous and bizarre texts of the Bible. Fire rains down on cities and destroys them. Daughters are offered by their father to be gang banged to mobs wanting to “know” (rape) some angels.6 One project to be done in defeating homophobic Christianity is producing a Psychopatholgia of the Bible with all its murderous and lurid sections. It isn’t surprising, given the Old and New Testaments call for violence and murder and its other lurid and bizarre sections, that the history of Christianity has been one of persecution and violence with religious wars and burning heretics and witches. That it has been the accomplice of world imperialism and has colluded with power over the centuries. That slave holders were ever resorting to it to support their activities. The concern about Christianity as a danger in the future based on its belief system, is supported by its past record over 20 centuries. Its present behavior is restrained by the modern secular state, but where it hasn’t been, the consequences can plainly be seen. Extremism isn’t a new acquisition for Christianity or some addition, it is a built-in feature that is only recently has become partially suppressed for some religious groups in the Western world. With the extreme language of the Bible with its wild ramblings of slavery, incest, genocide and other events, it is not surprising that there have been a long series of apocalyptic hysterias that the world is coming to an end. With its irrational hysterical writings, it is not surprising that Christians have disordered mental responses to science, rejecting the geological age of the earth, the age of the universe, evolution, and now vaccines for Covid despite the clearest evidences for each. Nor is this a new development. To be entertained and to fulfill crusading fantasies they continue to have hysterical responses to things like a game Dungeons and Dragons, Halloween celebrations, Ouija boards, and video games. Christianity for many is short circuiting their brains. Copernicus wrote his book about the planets and earth rotating around the sun carefully as a speculation to avoid prosecution, but it became a banned book in 1616. Galileo wasn’t so lucky 6
Call me old fashion, but I just don’t think this is good family values.
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and was prosecuted by the Inquisition for his belief that the Earth and planets rotated around the sun and put on trial in 1633. There was the 1925 Scopes trial of John Thomas Scopes for teaching evolution. Geologic evidence is just wished away and the earth’s age is not billions of years, but measured in thousands of years. Texas Attorney General is suing Pfizer for their Covid vaccine. The anti-vaccine political forces in Texas are the more hysterical Christian forces. It is an ongoing story of Christian illogical thinking. Christianity is a writhing mass of intolerance, violence, horrors, and an urge to exterminate. This presents numerous opportunities to undermine its credibility and to get allies to oppose it. People understand clearly enough that though they might not be the target now of some extremist force, that extremism is always looking for targets and they might be next. In the defense of the Gay community against homophobic Christianity, Christianity is an easy target and there are abundant opportunities to push back against homophobic Christianity and take the offensive and put homophobic Christianity seriously on the defensive. Even if they are negative towards homosexuality, they still might oppose Christian attacks on Gays. The reason this hasn’t been done before is not just because it has been generally thought that the Gay Christians were handling this and it might well be left to them, but because there is opposition to taking on Christianity. The Gay Christians won’t like it. Their goal is to join Christianity, not criticize anything more than its prohibition against homosexuality. To do so, they see the issue narrowly as a theological error in particular parts of the Bible, and not something that results from Christianity as a whole. A lot of others think the problem will be solved because we will all be filled with sentimental feelings and just reinterpret the Bible until it is unrecognizable. The Gay Democrats certainly won’t want this, because the Democrats won’t want a Gay movement targeting Christianity. It is not good for elections. A very large fraction of Gays are just tolerating being Gay, because we are born that way, and expect no more than toleration by straights and see the toleration as a great gift by straights, and will fear our agenda will upset that toleration. Others, including Gays, will in reality regard Gay rights as a frill, and trivial, and not justifying any program that might cause a ruckus. Since we haven’t examined Christianity, assessed it, and seen its inherent danger to the Gay community, as well as perceiving it and publicizing it as the weird violent cult that it is, we have rejected and foregone a great powerful weapon for our fight. As for Christians that aren’t anti-Gay, and by this, the Christians that accept Gay clergy and Gay marriage and don’t have Gays as 2nd class citizens, they are on a project to somehow cling to Christianity and be in the modern world. Their project involves rationalizing away much of the murderous and rabid parts of the Bible and focusing on the happy bits. When the author states, “Theological interpretation is infinitely elastic,” the author is thinking of them. They are the Christians that haven’t let go yet. It is their struggle, not ours. Their theological adventures should not preclude the Gay community from undertaking an effective defense and initiating a successful offense. Though this chapter has made a few specific recommendations based on the acknowledgement of Christianity as a dangerous cult, what strategies and actions that might be
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done based on this assessment will be in the next chapter. Using Google Advance Search This is a really powerful tool to search a site. Often you will come across a site and it has many pages. Some of the pages are reachable by going first to a page, and then an other page. Sometimes it isn’t clear from the page titles where the homophobic material is. The Google Advanced Search is what you want to use. You will want to put in “any of these words” all the terms you are searching for. The first time it can be tedious, but next time Google Advance search will remember. Then in site or domain, but the basic domain name. Then press on Advanced Search button. If any of those terms are on any of the webpages for the site, they should show up. Notice the word should. They might have the word you are looking for as an image. Also, their page might have robot.txt function instructing Google not to save. Also, it can be that the main website has links to other domains and that is where you will find it. However, if www.hate.com has a link to www.hostile.com, you just use advanced search on that domain also. Another advantage of Google Advance Search, is that it will have indexed any pages that are left over from a website design change. There is no way to get to them on the website, but they are on the server to be found. Some times you will want to use the “exact word or phrase,” since you are looking for “same sex” and you won’t want to get all the articles using the word “sex.” You can try, and perhaps there will be a few, but it might be there are 30 or 40 and you will need to narrow it down. You can also use the “none of these words” to exclude pages you don’t want. This is useful if you are getting too many results to go through. Though this doesn’t happen often.
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8 EXPOSING THE PATHOLOGIES OF CHRISTIANITY About what doesn’t work and why progress has been poor. Before discussing what we need to do, it would be good to discuss what isn’t effective. First thing, just posting items in atheist groups where they will be read only by other atheists, doesn’t do much. It might be of use to an atheist having to deal with some Christian, but generally, most of the members of these groups are fairly familiar with all the critical ideas concerning Christianity. Additionally, some of these atheist groups don’t allow sharing of a post. What would be good, is if they shared it on their personal Facebook page, or X (formerly twitter) or on other social media, and not some contained forum. Some of these atheists still haven’t gotten over their fundamentalist childhoods and they need to get over it and move on to do something. If we are going to make progress, we must be willing to speak up and speak to the public. Closeted Gay atheists are like closeted Gays in general, they largely don’t contribute to the fight. For Gays in the alternative religions, there is no thought at all that there is a responsibility to defend the Gay community. A lot of the members are escapist and their interest in alternative religions is to escape challenges and are alarmed by the idea of fighting any homophobia at all. For some Gays in alternative religions, their religion is an anti-depressant and they fear conflict. When and if they do reject homophobic Christianity, they are often only doing so in similarly confined spaces in social media. They tend to be closeted also. The leadership of the LGBT thinks that happy talk about inclusion and love and other things is going to deal with homophobic Christianity. Clearly it isn’t. This strategy avoids conflicts that might cause issues for the Democratic political establishment which wants to get Gay votes, but also hopes to get Christian votes at the same time, and doesn’t want to call out Christian homophobia as Christian problem. Lots of local and national LGBT groups get funding from government for social services or donations from corporations. None of them want any controversy. LGBT political groups have an agenda connected to the agenda of the more general (straight) political groups which also don’t want to have a campaign targeting homophobic Christianity as a Christian problem. A campaign against homophobic Christianity will need to be outside the existing LGBT groups and formations.
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Criticism of Christian leaders’ material wealth isn’t going to do much except convince those who have already rejected Evangelical Christianity that their decision was correct. The believers don’t care if their leader has one private jet or a dozen, they may in fact feel the more jets, the more their leader is valid. There has been the proposal to go after tax exemptions for churches that are political. This idea is usually proposed with no real means proposed to actually have it accomplished. Mostly it is proposed in place of doing something to shut down the conversation of actually doing something. Unless the churches lose their power, they aren’t going to lose tax exemptions for being political. Having this action item as a starting item for a campaign against homophobic Christianity makes no sense. Even if they could lose their tax exemptions under some change in the law, they would alter their behavior to evade losing their tax exemptions. Even if they left politics entirely, these homophobic churches would still campaign against Gays in the social sphere. The atheists fight for the separation of church and state. This has some value, but even separated from the state, homophobic Christianity can still go after Gays in society. The separation of church and state usually isn’t that sustainable if a large fraction of society is Christian. Separation of church and state in the past didn’t prevent the laws against homosexual sex. Separation of church and state historically has meant that one Christian faction can’t use the government to go after another Christian faction or get privileged over other Christian factions. Though it does restrain Christians going after each other, they can always unite to go after us. Again, getting effective separation of church and state would happen after Christianity lost political power, and so it isn’t a starting point for a campaign. The discussion about the separation of church and state isn’t about Christian homophobia and isn’t going after Christian homophobia. Don’t push away potential allies by making this an atheist movement. Besides the Abrahamic faiths, (Christian, Muslim, Judaism), the other religions aren’t that much concerned about Gays. They may not be all that friendly, but they aren’t that much concerned either about homosexuality, and are not focused on going after Gays. Christianity has antagonized a lot of religious groups in history and these other religious can easily see how Christianity has obliterated competing religions. Christians thrive on persecution in terms of abuse. Martyrdom is a major element in their religion. Avoid tactics which feed into their self-glorification as persons suffering for Christ. Vandalism, violence, verbal abuse like cursing, or other abusive tactics enable their fantasies as crusaders or martyrs for Christ. Avoid tactics which center them in things. They always need to be seen as just one bad choice among multiple religious and philosophical choices. Talk about Christian mythology, not Bible stories. Also, don’t push away Gays who are against homophobic Christianity, but aren’t going to be pushed into atheism. We don’t want to force people into having to decide to be atheists as a precondition to deciding to go after homophobic Christianity. A lot of people aren’t ready and never will be ready to give up the potential of religion and metaphysical speculation about life. There needs to be the development of Gay spiritual alternatives to Christianity. The movement can’t be pushing people out of Christianity with only one place to go spiritually, that is atheism. There is no need to have people be atheists to go after homophobic Christianity. Some
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people will always want some religious life or spiritual life, and not live in a world materialist world. Gay atheists use atheism to reject religious belief which would include Christianity which would then necessarily reject homophobic Christianity. That works for them, but it isn’t going to be acceptable to everyone, and even not acceptable to most people. Further there is one concern. Gay atheists who only rely on atheism to reject homophobic Christianity, are in a fragile situation, should they stop being atheist, will they fall back into homophobic Christianity? Most importantly, atheism isn’t a required step to reject homophobic Christianity. There are many paths which lead to the rejection of homophobic Christianity. A movement against homophobic Christianity will require that everyone wanting to fight homophobic Christianity work together and understand that there are multiple paths to do so. Further, there is a great potential in these alternative religions to mobilize Gays in ways that will also be a force against homophobic Christianity. These competing religious alternatives might motivate Gay Christians to push a little harder against homophobic Christianity. What needs to be done. We need to organize. There isn’t a group currently that specifically is targeting homophobic Christianity. We probably could do a lot, even without new ideas, if we had an organized campaign. We need to speak openly, forcefully, directly and critically without restraint about the pathological nature of Christianity. Up until now this hasn’t been done. Gay atheists and Gays in alternative religions are scarcely even visible in the LGBT communities. Even with the already existing arguments of Gay atheists and Gay in alternative religions there is a possibility of progress if these arguments were expressed in the general Gay community. We need to adopt outspoken, provocative, agitating and creative tactics to de-normalize Christianity. Even when our arguments are denounced, it gets people to think about them. We should not rely on just showing some logical inconsistency in Christianity. Analytical logic isn’t a deciding method for most people. Our efforts need to emotionally reach people. Point out that Christianity is a religion of terror relying on hellfire and punishment in the afterlife, when they can’t do punishment like slaughter and burning people at the stake in this life. Point out that their god is a violent psychopath and is motivated by jealously. Point out the violent, psychopathic history of Christianity as directly related to their theology. Point out the disgusting, vicious, horrible, and lurid parts of the Bible. Make it very visible. Point out the ritual cannibalism of their God called communion. Point out that Christianity is fragile. It doesn’t really have faith in itself, it sees competing religious as a real danger. It sees critical thinking and commentary about Christianity as a real danger to itself. That is why it is hysterical about people worshiping other religions, criticizing Christianity. This is why Christianity is exclusionary, and doesn’t allow people to worship more than one god, and why it demands total loyalty, it knows that it isn’t a pleasant religion and without a policy of terrorizing and separating, containing, constraining its members inside Christianity, it likely will disintegrate.
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Point out that Christianity is fragile, and that is why they are always trying to run the lives of non-believers and police them. If non-believers are able to exist openly and freely and successfully not following Christian rules, it tends to undermine the credibility of Christian theology and their ability to control their membership. Also, since many people become Christians to put their lives in order, they want to have society dominated by their rules since they are tempted by things that might bring them back to disorder. If they can’t handle alcohol and their Christianity is a duct tape to keep themselves together, but just to help themselves, they want to regulate your use of alcohol. When the historical nature of Christianity is pointed out, the standard evasion is that the Christian faith is composed of people and their failings. Yet, isn’t the Christian faith supposed to make people better, not worse? Christians have a, “heads I win, tails you lose theology.” Anything good comes from God, anything bad is the results of a failed Christian person or the society it existed in. Though when this argument is pointed out to Christians, as a logical argument it will do nothing, as an example of them being foolish and irrational, an emotional approach, it might have impact. Always make clear the Christian origin of disordered behavior and things for which they are the origin. For example, in Korea, the three outbreaks of Covid are attributed to Christian groups not following Covid safety there.7 Globally Christians resisted Covid safety and lot of Christians died of it. This wasn’t an accident, a group that rejects rational thinking and has an ongoing hysteria is likely to do irrational things undermining their own safety and the safety of society. Recently, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton sued Pfizer for the Covid vaccine using reasoning that ArsTechnica called “pure stupid.” 8 Who are the anti-vaxxers in society that are supporting Paxton? It is Evangelical Christians. Point out Christianity’s irrational anti-science views and in particular how it mentally processes scientific evidence. When Christians are doing some atrocious or disordered thing point out that it derived from the nature of their religion. Point out that there is always this potential that Christians will have an irrational reaction undermining the safety of society. The next pandemic might be Nipah. Its fatality rate is 40% to 100%, transmissible between humans, and it has no vaccine. Texas Attorney General Paxton is suing Pfizer who is working on developing a vaccine for Nipah. Outbreaks in Asia are contained by strenuous containment measures. Imagine what would happen if Nipah came to the United States and there was no vaccine and Evangelical Christians refused to follow safety procedures and were babbling about being vaccinated in Christ. It could be like something in a science fiction movie. The morgues would be filled up, hospitals would be mobbed by panicked people, people would fear to go to work, dead bodies would be in the streets. If it was the case that there was any Nipah vaccine available, people would be begging for it, why would Pfizer ship mRNA Nipah vaccines to Texas, where they might be sued, when there are people desperately waiting for it elsewhere? Though hopefully a Nipah or other such like outbreak doesn’t happen and Moderna’s Nipah vaccine is successful, this one possible future is mentioned to show as an example how really 7 8
https://divinity.uchicago.edu/sightings/articles/christian-apocalypse-pandemic-stricken-south-korea https://arstechnica.com/health/2023/12/texas-sues-pfizer-with-covid-anti-vax-argument-that-is-pure-stupid/
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disastrous Christian irrationality might be. The scientific press discusses a lot of potential deadly pandemic viruses. The reasons that Christianity so often is driven to disordered behavior is inherent in its nature. Some denomination or church might not be currently campaigning to go after another religion, or Gays or something else, they may not be campaigning against vaccines or harassing biology teachers trying to teach evolution, but it needs to be perceived that a relapse is always possible. Make a point to show how the Bible, both New and Old Testament supports slavery, which it does, and Jesus uses slavery examples to explain his religion. The purpose isn’t to justify slavery, or to push the Gay Christian argument that some things are to be regarded in the Bible and somethings discarded. The purpose is to show how Christian theology is opportunistic and selfserving and self-delusional and is incoherent. They ignore some sections and focus on others to serve their agenda. A side benefit would be that people realize that Christianity supports slavery. It just happens that is pro-slavery elements are at this time is dormant, like a herpes virus. Educate the public how Christianity has an inherent psychopathic self-serving nature and is a danger to society. Look for allies among those who are also threaten by Christianity. This shouldn’t be hard; they have bullied so many. Take multiple paths to fight homophobic Christianity and don’t allow religious, spiritual, metaphysical or philosophical differences divide us and defeat us. Some keywords to use. The contemporary homophobic Church sometimes rejects the concept of a person being a type. They also don’t like using terms that Gays use. They might, but some don’t. They also prefer their terminology. So you might find that “homosexual” won’t be used, but “same sex attraction,” will be used. They sometimes refer to “broken sexuality.” You need to be observant as to what terminology homophobic religious groups are using.
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9 ADDITIONAL TACTICS TO GO AFTER HOMOPHOBIC CHRISTIANITY Make homophobia visible. Constantly pound on the issue and make the issue prominent. Don’t allow homophobic Churches to have a public image without their homophobia being prominent and them labeled as the enemy of Gays. Don’t allow their homophobia to be a minor issue unknown to most. Don’t allow churches which tolerate Gays as 2nd class members or don’t fully support the rights of Gay people to escape being labeled homophobic. Make sure that when their name is mentioned, they are known as a homophobic church with that a prominent part of their public identity. Make sure that as a homophobic church they are understood to be bigoted and vicious and stupid. Research all the prominent churches in the city and identify which ones are homophobic. Perhaps make a map of the homophobic churches. Make the issue of homophobia an issue in all things. Always, express contempt for homophobic churches. If they mail out literature and you receive it in the mail, burn it. If they hand out homophobic literature in the Gay neighborhood or at a Pride event, keep the hand out and burn it. Make a video of the burning with a commentary about the people that handout homophobic Christian literature. If they ask for some favor from the government, funding, support for a social service they run, speak up against it on the basis of their homophobia. Deny them participation in government whenever possible. In Dallas there were many homophobic churches giving invocations to the Dallas City Council. What committees are homophobes appointed to needs to be investigated and their appointments opposed. One important thing about the invocation project is that it was something one person could do. It is important to indicate which projects can be done by one person, or by just two persons, and have a good chance of initial success. The author reviewed the invocations given, gave a detailed report, and the practice of allowing homophobes to give the invocations stopped. It also got some local news reporting.9
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https://www.dallasobserver.com/news/author-claims-city-hall-hosts-anti-lgbtq-invocation-speakers-15444214
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Identifying weak spots where one person can successfully combat homophobic Christianity is important for two reasons. First, we want to identify areas where we can successfully go after homophobic Christianity with a good chance of success with not much effort to fight homophobic Christianity. Maximum payoff with minimum effort. Second, one person projects are something that can be initiated by one person without organizational support. Initially we are going to have a lot cases where a person is not a part of a group in their city. Even after we are mobilized, there will be situations where an area, county or city will just have one activist, and oneperson projects will represent things they might do. When some church calls for the execution of Gays, compare the beliefs of the other homophobic churches and what they use as a basis, and show that the church calling for the execution of Gays is merely the pot of heated homophobia boiling over and not that much different from the other churches. Don’t allow these other churches to distance themselves from the church calling for the execution of Gays. The church that wants to execute Gays is merely taking their homophobia to its logical conclusion. When homophobic Christian groups appeal for U.S. government help for a problem of persecution in a foreign land on the basis of human rights, point out that they are opportunistically using the issue of human rights, but they don’t support human rights. In particular where they have a record of persecuting Gays in that nation. Also, point out that the first thing they likely would do if they weren’t being persecuted would be to persecute Gays. Point out which denominations are colluding with dictators. Show how Christianity is complicit with colonialism and the destruction of indigenous culture and religion around the world. Educate the public how Christianity destroyed the original religions in many parts of the world. Point to ancient temples in Japan and asked where the ancient temples in Latin America or Africa are. What American denominations were involved with the destruction of indigenous religions in Africa? We need to point out which cultures survived because they decisively defeated Christianity. The obliteration of indigenous religion in Uganda, was due to Christianity in collusion with European imperialists defeating the indigenous monarchy, whereas the Chinese and Japanese were able to defeat the Christians which is why they still have ancient temples and their religions. People have other identities besides being Christian. We need to make sure they understand when their other identities conflict with being Christian. We need to alert Gays elsewhere about the anti-Gay programs of American missionaries. We need to alert Gays globally how Korean Christians persecute Gays. The campaign against homophobic Christianity needs to be global. When the local paper is talking about Our Lady of Guadalupe, point out that it was a myth used to destroy indigenous culture, consolidate the Spanish conquest of Mexico, and enable imperial rule over them. Don’t let people privilege Christians over other religions. If they want God capitalized, then they should capitalize God or Gods when used for other religions. Don’t let other religious practices be called superstitions or mythologies. Or make sure you start talking about the Christian mythologies.
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Point out to people that the origin of their Christianity is some imperial oppressor in the past, whether Roman, Spanish, Portuguese, British, French or some other imperial power. We need to point out to people when their Christianity originates with slavery. When a foreign government adopts anti-Gay policies based on homophobic Christianity, it needs to have serious consequences. Recently in 2023, though the Ugandan government adopted a bill with a death penalty for Gays, the Democratic Biden administration still allowed several Ugandan government officials to attend a convention in Dallas, Texas in Sept.2023. The fact that the Democrats were lax on Uganda’s homophobia didn’t seem to bother the LGBT Democrats here. When religious leaders in foreign nations criticize an American ambassador for being Gay, have consequences for that denomination. Deny them visas for visiting the United States. If it is a Catholic bishop make it a diplomatic issue and call the Vatican ambassador in for talks. Stop all discussion of their possible problems in a foreign nation. Homophobes from other nations should be considered undesirable aliens. When so-called social justice activists are giving homophobia a free pass, call it out. Don’t participate in coalitions where there are homophobic groups involved. In your personal life, absolutely don’t tolerate homophobia from family members or relatives. No agreeing to disagree. No peace with homophobia at the dinner table or holidays. Gays are so used to homophobia being present in society and so conditioned to think nothing can be done, we overlook ways of challenging it. There is a tendency to accept the abridgment of our rights and our humanity as that is the way things are. We need to look at everything and think about where it might intersect with the issue of homophobia and if it does, agitate the issue. We need to look for pressure points to make homophobic Christian groups regret they were ever homophobic. This list of additional tactics is somewhat short, but with the actions discussed in earlier chapters it is more than enough to start with for a new movement to fight homophobic Christianity. Undoubtedly, we will come up with additional tactics as we get started. Using Artificial Intelligence tools. You need to be very careful when using them. A lot of them just make up stuff and fake references. When you go check out the reference, they don’t exist or don’t support the claim. They will be something we will likely need to use in the future, but use with caution.
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10 MOBILIZING GAYS NOT IN THE ABRAHAMIC FAITHS The Abrahamic faiths are Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. The Abrahamic faiths all share the anti-Gay teachings of the Old Testament and for the Christians and Muslims, there are other additional anti-Gay teachings. However, there are multiple other religions Gays of which Gays are members. There are Buddhist Gays, there are Hindu Gays, and other religions. There are Gays who describe themselves as spiritual. Others consider themselves, Pagans, witches, Druids, and other alternative religions. There are New Agers. There are likely a large group of Gays who are undecided. All these Gays with their different religious background are possible to be mobilized to fight homophobic Christianity. The members of these other religions are very aware of the hostility of Christianity towards their religion from Christian groups currently denouncing their religion and which have done so historically. They know of the Christians talking about “heeeeethans.” There are a lot of Gays which are spiritually undecided or not self-defined. They do know that they don’t like homophobic Christianity which is badgering them for not being Christians and for being Gay. This effort to oppose homophobic Christianity is not an atheist effort. It is an effort open to everyone who wants to fight homophobic Christianity. Even Gay members of the Abrahamic faiths might have a role to play, though I don’t conceive how yet, but I am not a member of an Abrahamic faith. Gay atheists seem like a group that would have a strong interest in fighting homophobic Christianity, but that isn’t confirmed. It might be other segments of the Gay community which will be most interested. The goal is to reach out to all groups that might want to fight homophobic Christianity and don’t presume who will or won’t fight. The issues with mobilizing people in these other faiths is that in some cases they seem to be focused on escape. They seem not to be organized or think it is possible. The Gays in alternative religions seem to scarcely known to the general Gay community. There isn’t a concept that one of their tasks should be the defense of the Gay community. Religious organizations can be supporting. They provide a ready-made social group. They can have social activities. They provide people with a sense of belonging. They can also provide some emergency support when needed and further they can be a network to find jobs. At this time for Gays, generally they are presented with a choice of Christian religious community or individualist atheism. There needs to be other choices. Having organized alternative religious Gay groups could provide institutional support for fighting homophobic Christianity and also be a path to find allies. The author intends to put some effort to get Gays in these other religions mobilized. It doesn’t matter that the author is agnostic, the author doesn’t need to believe, others need to be believers, he just needs to assist and work on organizing. At the same time the author wants to mobilize atheists, as a potential group which seems likely to want to fight homophobic Christianity.
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The author isn’t dogmatic and the author’s goal is to bring down homophobic Christianity and to defend the Gay community. Atheists who are hostile to religion, should reflect that their hostility is from dealing with the Abrahamic faiths, often personal experiences involving being the target of hostility by Abrahamic faiths, most often Christianity, often bigoted parents, or having to go through an emotional experience of leaving the faith they grew up in and which had put homophobic ideas in their head that they had to work through. Gay atheists shouldn’t allow their experiences to result in attacking Gays who aren’t atheist. They don’t have to endorse non-Abrahamic faiths, but they should realize that they are very different from the Abrahamic faiths. Their hostility towards Christianity is justified, but not justified against faiths which don’t target Gays. One thing the author has observed about these other groups, Pagan, witches, Druids, is that there isn’t a concept of having specifically Gay groups, and no program or idea of defending the Gay community. They are mostly individualistic, and who haven’t conceptualized being members of Gay religious communities. How these communities might be organized hasn’t been conceptualized yet. It is exploratory, but the author is investing time and money into this effort. It might be that an organization will be drawing on those who are called New Agers or other speculative metaphysical groups. The author has visited the Taoist temple of the Gay God Tu’er in New Taipei City, Taiwan to see what they do. He plans on visiting and seeing what Gays do in Thailand. What organizing that might be done in the United States won’t necessarily be to duplicate or be branches of those faiths in the United States. The goal in visiting these religious groups is to learn about general methods by which they are able to function and mobilize and also what different possibilities for religious alternatives might be. It maybe that organizing persons in alternative religions will be not drawing on existing groups, but draw on new persons who are not part of existing groups. Even if the net results are a sort of combination New Age and Philosophical society it could provide an important social setting for Gays and also be the basis of opposing homophobic Christianity. It might be a way to collect groups of individuals together who can then go and do something based on their specific interests. For those who might say think that there is a contradiction in the goals of this book, should understand there is no contradiction. The goal is to mobilize as many different forces and movements as possible to defeat homophobic Christianity. History History is a powerful weapon. Our historical memories, whatever fables they might be, shape our understanding of society and what direction society should go. Monuments to the past are about directing the future. Historical fables, like false testimony, is often involved in the concealment of crimes. Christianity has been the partner to power since Roman times, and by this has been the accessory to many crimes when not committing them themselves. This is obscured in popular
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history in the West since it would be unpopular in the West to produce accurate histories. However, outside the West, there are other historians, with other agendas, with other fables. The task isn’t to switch from one set of fables to another or attempt to arbitrate between them or create an accurate history of the past. That would be a task of vast scope and perhaps never ending. What we need to do is to show the history of the Christians and demolish their fables. We need to make some obvious historical comparisons. The presence of Christianity coinciding with colonialism in East and Southeast Asia is one obvious observation. The wiping out of the indigenous religions in Africa versus their preservation in Thailand, China, and Japan. There are other fables, such as asserting Indian Christianity goes back to the Nestorian Christians in the 6th century, when in reality most of the modern Christianities in India arrived on colonial gun boats. What Nestorian Christianity that did persist, continues under Portuguese control starting in the 16th century, the same century in which Portuguese colonial rule of Goa starts. Historians outside the West can give perspectives on the partnerships of imperialism and Christianity and the destruction of indigenous religions. We don’t have to support their agendas, but we can learn from their studies. For those who have a specific historic interest in an area, it would be very helpful to have them focus on the historical record of those areas regarding Christianity and dispel some of the historical fables that Christians put out. The history of the Japanese successfully thwarting the destruction of their civilization by Christians is reported very one-sidedly. In Western Europe, projects which bring into historical memory the destruction of indigenous religions would be helpful. They myth of populations Christianized through persuasion rather than coercion needs to be critically examined.
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11 CONCLUSION. We need to disable, demolish and defeat homophobic Christianity. Homophobic Christianity is one of the leading serious global problems that Gays face. There hasn’t previously been proposed a systematic comprehensive approach to defeating homophobic Christianity. Instead, it has been different actions, often ad hoc, without a coherent plan, with a lot of sentimental thinking. There has been no organization dedicated to dealing with homophobic Christianity. Instead, different groups at different times might undertake some protest at some point in response to some specific event or issue, but there hasn’t been an ongoing plan, no passing down to other groups what they have learned. Christianity itself hasn’t been critically reviewed and the efforts to deal with homophobic Christianity haven’t been to defeat them, but to reform them. There has been a refusal to realize that they are bad people, and not misguided. This book isn’t written to be the final plan on how to defeat homophobic Christianity, but to propose an initial comprehensive plan to start a systematic approach to combatting homophobic Christianity and to stop self-defeating actions. It is also a starting point to be built upon as homophobic Christianity is fought and from that experience and learnings the approach to fighting homophobic Christianity can be improved and developed. It is also proposed to start a discussion on a systematic plan to defeat homophobic Christianity. It needs to be asked, “What has this book overlooked?” However, it isn’t a plan to discuss idly what might be done, but a discussion by those who are actively fighting homophobic Christianity. Finally it is to start mobilizing Gays to fight homophobic Christianity by showing a plan by which homophobic Christianity can be defeated and the need for an organization to execute a plan. When victory can be imagined as possible, people are ready to fight. The attacks on the Gay community by homophobic Christians are intolerable and need to stop. The time to mobilize to disable, defeat and demolish Christianity is now.
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APPENDIX: Getting started with projects. What we can do is still in development and what opportunities there are will change over time. Having an appendix with specific projects will result in an appendix which will constantly be becoming out of date and won’t be a source to learn about new tactics. Further, what might work well for the author in his local, might not be relevant elsewhere. For example, as mentioned before, the author reviewed who was giving invocations for the Dallas City Council and about three-quarters were nasty homophobes. He presented the results to the Dallas City Council and the city changed who were to give invocations. It got local coverage in the weekly alternative paper. It was a very successful project. However, that might not be useful elsewhere, either because the City Council meeting doesn’t have invocations, or because they don’t have invocations by homophobes. As this project was successfully carried out in more and more cities, there would be fewer and few cities remaining for it to be done. As an item in a list it would be less and less likely to be of use to others. So an appendix would end up with a list that would be a lengthy addition to the book, but be continuously out of date or not relevant with only some items of use to the reader. The lists of possible projects needs to be online. The activities of others need to be followed online to learn what can be done and how to do it successfully. The author does recommends having an online newsletter to report your activities. In particular the author recommends a Substack newsletter. It is free and they are known for not being censorious and not giving into censorious pressure. To get readers, do investigative reporting on more than homophobic Christianity in your community, to build up interest in the newsletter. The author is bearing down on homophobic Christianity with this Substack newsletter: https://dallasgayliberation.substack.com/ Since this is Dallas, some of these homophobes have statewide and national influence, such as Robert Jeffress of First Baptist Dallas Church. In subscribing, it is free, the readers could learn what might be done in their city or state. Also, there will be some useful resources and leads. As an example, there is a detailed write up of the homophobia of the Southern Baptists Convention which can be copied and used by others. Though the author has in the title “Dallas,” reporting is on the Dallas Fort Worth area. Depending your locality, the geographic scope of your newsletter could be a whole state, such as for Wyoming, or just a borough in New York City. It could also just focus on a topic. I am just pulling an topics out of the air here, but maybe, homophobic Christianity in museums, comic books, cultural projects, diplomacy, among historians, or something else. The author suggests keeping in contact to online sources which can be updated and which would have reporting on what can be done. The author also suggests multiple connectivity, since censorship in social media can be capricious and persons fighting homophobic Christianity might find themselves disconnected from each other. The authors multiple points of connectivity are:
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https://gayatheistaction.substack.com/ https://gaytemple.substack.com/ https://www.facebook.com/groups/413814316746749 (Dallas Gay Liberation) https://www.facebook.com/groups/804043147621086 (Gay Atheist Action.) https://www.facebook.com/groups/488974146783225 (Gay Temple) https://twitter.com/ActionAtheist https://twitter.com/pagan_gay https://twitter.com/dallasgaylibera https://www.reddit.com/r/gay_atheist_action/ https://www.reddit.com/r/GayPagan/ You could consider using Linked Tree also. https://linktr.ee/ You don’t have to have as many online presences as the author, nor connect to all of these, but you should be online in at least three ways and connected to others in at least three ways and they to you in three separate ways. This way, if you suddenly get booted off a platform, you can tell your followers where you are, and they can spread the news. If your X (formerly Twitter) account is suspended, you can tell followers your new X account and they can spread the word. Having a Substack account and having followers subscribing to it, means you are connected even if you are booted off all social media. Finally, let the author know of your social media accounts and newsletters where you are fighting homophobic Christianity. The author can mention it in all the social media he has and in his Substack newsletters. One project we do need is to get organized at some level. Maybe monthly Zoom meetings. We can exchange information, identify areas needing attention, and coordinate. The author looks forward to reporting on your efforts around the world to fight homophobic Christianity.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR Edward H. Sebesta is an independent researcher awarded the Spirit of Freedom Medal by the African American Civil War Memorial in Washington, D.C. and an activist cultural geographer developing methods to fight for landscape reparations.
University Press Books He is co-editor of “Neo-Confederacy: A Critical Introduction,” Univ. of Texas Press, 2008; “The Confederate and Neo-Confederate Reader,” Univ. Press of Miss. 2010; and is the author of chapter about the Civil War and Reconstruction in the notorious Texas teaching standards in “Politics and the History Curriculum: The Struggle over Standards in Texas and the Nation,” published by Palgrave Macmillan. He is the co-author of, “Dallas’ Confederate memorials scream ‘white supremacy’,” Dallas Morning News, 8/4/2017, launching a campaign which brought them down. https://www.dallasnews.com/opinion/commentary/2017/08/04/dallas-confederatememorials-scream-white-supremacy/ He has been working on the issue of landscape reparations and deracializing the landscape and was part of the successful campaign to rename part of Lamar St. to Botham Jean Blvd. as reported in the Dallas Observer. https://www.dallasobserver.com/news/dallas-botham-jean-boulevard-lamar-street-11922314 https://www.dallasobserver.com/news/should-a-dallas-street-be-named-after-santosrodriguez-12090562 https://www.dallasobserver.com/news/renaming-belo-garden-wont-rid-dallas-of-racistsymbolism-12038049 Current academic projects: He is working on a book chapter on the Dallas 1936 Texas Centennial with Euan Hague of DePaul University. The chapter has been accepted by editor. Additionally he is working on a biography of Dallas congress person Hatton W. Sumners who was most responsible for anti-lynching legislation not being passed in the 20th century. His activism for the LGBT goes back to the 1970s when he was a leader in an activist group which integrated the Gay bars in San Francisco which were discriminating against Asians. “A look back at S.F.’s ’80s-era gay Asian activism,” Nichi Bei Weekly, June 20, 2019, No. 340, page
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6. With the Confederate monuments down, he is back fighting homophobia. He led the Lesbian Gay Associated Engineers and Scientists which worked to breakdown stereotypes of that Lesbians and Gays weren’t in engineering and sciences with an advertisement in the Scientific American and coverage in the San Jose Mercury.
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