Blog Archives
Preaching Hate
Preachers have been really hard on the gays lately. Our featured asshole today is Curtis Knapp. He’s pastor of New Hope Baptist Church in Seneca, Kansas, and made headlines with his sermon Sunday in which he said this on what to do with those pesky homosexuals:
They should be put to death. That’s what happened in Israel. That’s why homosexuality wouldn’t have grown in Israel. It tends to limit conversations. It tends to limit people coming out of the closet.
So, you’re saying we should go out and start killing them? No. I’m saying the government should. They won’t, but they should.
Just so we’re clear here, this man is saying he wants a government mass-murder program. To nobody’s surprise, this caused a bit of a shitstorm. But he’s not backing down.
“We punish pedophilia. We punish incest. We punish polygamy and various things,” Knapp told KTKA. “It’s only homosexuality that is lifted out as an exemption.”
Knapp argued that his sermon was rooted in Biblical verse.
“‘If there is a man who lies with a male as those who lie with a woman, both of them have committed a detestable act,’” he quoted from Leviticus 20:12. “‘They shall surely be put to death.’”
Just to keep things confusing, in the King James Bible that should be 20:13, Leviticus 20:12 is about not having sex with your daughter in law. I thought this was a typo until I got confused by some old language and noticed that it is 20:12 in the New International Version.
Anyway, I disagree with the “good” pastor, I can come up with a few more exemptions from that very book. Read the rest of this entry
Let’s force doctors to lie to their patients!
Seriously, Kansas, what gives? The abortion/breast cancer link is nonexistent, it isn’t real. Are you so ethically bankrupt that you just don’t care?
If you don’t feel like clicking, the linked article is about a Kansas bill that would change tax code to make abortions more expensive and force doctors to tell the lie that a link has been found between abortion and breast cancer.
I can sort of understand how people could be so opposed to abortion, if I imagine that a blastocyst is a complete person and a woman isn’t, then clearly abortion would be murder. (I’m not sure what to call a miscarriage in that scenario.) But I really can’t understand the dishonesty, the willingness to lie for this cause. That feels like the act of someone who doesn’t really care about truth or reality, but has simply picked a side and is out to “win” no matter what.
And I am totally, utterly baffled by the sheer volume of hate directed at Planned Parenthood, one of the few organizations I’m aware of that seems to make the world a better place to live in with no downside I can see. Is this because the propaganda and misinformation is effective? I hear crazy conspiracy theories like PP provides false information and faulty birth control so that women will get pregnant and then PP will lie and hard-sell them into getting abortions so that PP can make huge profits from taxpayer’s money!
This scenario is so divorced from reality that I can only assume the people who believe it don’t think very hard about it and also have never actually set foot inside a Planned Parenthood building. And also haven’t noticed that it’s illegal to use government funds for abortions, for some damn reason.
Since this post has wandered into the area, I’ll take a moment to talk about what Planned Parenthood actually does. They provide sex education, STD testing and treatment, contraception, prenatal care, and a wide variety of general and reproductive health services for women and men, and also people who aren’t so easily defined. Including, yes, abortion.
They take good care of people, and it’s really hard for me to see that as a bad thing.
The Adventures of Leo Tarvi 