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Admitting Evangelicals Don’t Understand Gay People, Baptist Leader Denounces ‘Ex-Gay’ Therapy

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The President of the Southern Baptists’ Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission today said evangelical Christian don’t understand what it’s like to be gay, and denounced so-called “ex-gay” therapy.

During a session at the Southern Baptist Convention‘s Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission conference on homosexuality and marriage today, ERLC president Russell Moore announced that evangelical Christians don’t understand gay people. Dr, Moore went on to denounce harmful “ex-gay” or “reparative” therapy, calling them “severely counterproductive.”

“The utopian idea if you come to Christ and if you go through our program, you’re going to be immediately set free from attraction or anything you’re struggling with, I don’t think that’s a Christian idea,” Moore told journalists, according to a report today by Sarah Pulliam Bailey at Religion News Service. “Faithfulness to Christ means obedience to Christ. It does not necessarily mean that someone’s attractions are going to change.”

Moore said evangelicals had an “inadequate view” of what same-sex attraction looks like.

“The Bible doesn’t promise us freedom from temptation,” Moore said. “The Bible promises us the power of the spirit to walk through temptation.”

“The idea that one is simply the sum of one’s sexual identity is something that is psychologically harmful ultimately,” Moore said. “And I think also we have a situation where gay and lesbian people have been treated really, really badly.”

Moore said the ERLC is working with parents of those who are gay and lesbian.

“The response is not shunning, putting them out on the street,” he said. “The answer is loving your child.”

In a separate session, Moore interviewed Rosaria Butterfield, who says she was in lesbian relationships for a decade before identifying as a Christian. She went from being a professor at Syracuse to a homeschooling mother married to a North Carolina pastor.

It’s unclear that Dr. Moore’s comments will foster any change in the 16 million member body of the Southern Baptist Convention, whose followers are historically among the most anti-gay in the nation. It would also be characteristic for other evangelicals to denounce this apparent attempt to soften the Church’s stance on LGBT people.

Moore’s predecessor, Dr. Richard Land, continues to be one of the most virulently anti-gay activists in the nation.

And just this morning, The New Civil Rights Movement published video of a conference speaker claiming Matthew Shepard’s hate crime murder was not a hate crime at all.

 

Image via ERLC

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FOX NEWS FAKE NEWS

Fox News Host Goes on Angry Rant ‘Undermining’ Vaccines – and Mocking Dems to Do It

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While a few Fox News hosts on Monday sprinkled bits of begrudging encouragement or support for Americans to get vaccinated, one Fox News host Tuesday morning was fully on board with attacking the COVID-19 vaccine.

“What is this to also say the vaccine is not nearly as effective against this delta variant, as they say if you look at what’s happening in Britain, they say 70% of the new cases are fully vaccinated people with the Pfizer vaccine, nobody talks about that,” host Brian Kilmeade said angrily on “Fox & Friends.”

Kilmeade is spreading false information.

The British Government on Monday announced that 60% of coronavirus patients requiring hospitalization were not vaccinated. NCRM could find nothing to support Kilmeade’s claim that “70% of the new cases are fully vaccinated people with the Pfizer vaccine,” which may be why “nobody talks about that.”

It is true that as greater numbers of people get vaccinated more vaccinated people will contract the coronavirus, as Britain’s chief scientific adviser, Sir Patrick Vallance said Monday.

“As a higher proportion of the population is double vaccinated, it’s inevitable that those 10% of that very large number remain at risk and will therefore be amongst the people who both catch the infection and end up in hospital.”

In the UK 68% of all adults are fully vaccinated, and 88% have had one shot.

Kilmeade was using the news that several Texas Democrats who traveled to D.C. subsequently tested positive for coronavirus. He mocked them for being on “Beta O’Rourke’s private jet that his foundation financed,” and implied that because they tested positive the vaccines don’t work, which is false, and don’t work as well against the highly-contagious delta variant, which is even more reason to get vaccinated.

On Monday Kilmeade insisted no one had any right to insist people get vaccinated and said it is not the job of the federal government to protect Americans, which is also false.

Media Matters’ Director of Media Intelligence Lis Power posted this video of Kilmeade from Tuesday morning:

 

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'GROSSLY UNQUALIFIED'

‘Ethically Questionable’: McCarthy Blasted for Stooping to ‘Disturbing’ Depths With Jan. 6 Probe Picks

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MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” panelists bashed the five Republican picks to take part in the House investigation of the Jan. 6 insurrection.

House minority leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) chose five GOP lawmakers — Reps. Kelly Armstrong (R-ND), Jim Banks (R-IN), Rodney Davis (R-IL), Jim Jordan (R-OH) and Troy Nehls (R-TX) — to serve on the investigative committee, and panelist listed a host of reasons they were unqualified to serve.

“Three of the picks [voted against certifying Joe Biden’s electoral win], and they did so after the insurrection,” said Associated Press reporter Jonathan Lemire. “The vote came after the rioters breached the Capitol, so it’s a clear signal here from Republican leader Kevin McCarthy as to which direction he wants to take the hearings. Sure, two of the members there didn’t do that — they didn’t vote to decertify, they did go along with the democratic process and acknowledge that Joe Biden was indeed elected president.”

Jordan stands out as particularly unsuited to the task, Lemire said.

“Jim Jordan, as we know, is one of former President Trump’s most vocal defenders and has been willing to say untruths in order to defend the president, and we know he still speaks to the former president frequently,” Lemire said. “So there’s no sense that the House speaker Nancy Pelosi will object to these picks, but we will learn more in the next day or so if that were to be the case. But I think there are real fears among Democrats this is going to be a sideshow. This is going to be more of the same from Republicans, that they will continue to latch onto the ‘big lie,’ that they will need to contest the election that there were voter irregularities, and continue to downplay what happened on Jan. 6, to try to whitewash the riot that day in order to move forward with their eyes on the midterms next fall.”

Another committee nominee was previously fired as a small-town police officer for multiple violations, including destruction of evidence.

“If Speaker Pelosi is looking for one member she may want to think about not approving, it’s Congressman Troy Nehls,” said MSNBC contributor Kurt Bardella. “This was somebody fired from the Richmond police department in Texas for not handling evidence the right way. When he was fired, the person in charge of that, who made that decision, his commanding officer sent him a letter with more than 20 documented infractions of breaching and breaking with quality. If you are not qualified to be a police department member in Texas how are you qualified to serve on an investigative committee, where you could have access to sensitive and classified information about a domestic terrorist event in the United States of America?”

“This is somebody grossly unqualified, ethically questionable and demonstrated, when given the choice to make the right decision, moral decision or his own personal interest decision that’s the side he goes for,” Bardella added. “So for Kevin McCarthy to appoint somebody to this committee with this history, who has been fired from law enforcement before, is disturbing.”

 

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Michigan Catholic School Says Making Students Wear Masks Would Be a Direct Affront to God

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The U.S. Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals will take arguments on Wednesday on whether a Michigan mask rule violates the Constitution.

The Resurrection School in Lansing, a Catholic elementary school, argues the mandate is unconstitutional.

“The school says such a rule would violate ‘sincerely held religious beliefs’ because they say humans were made in the image of God, and masks shield that image from being seen,” Michigan Radio reports. “They also allege requiring masks poses a health or learning problem for students who have allergies, difficulty breathing, or trouble being understood when they talk through a face covering.”

There is not currently a statewide mask mandate in Michigan, although that hasn’t stopped the school from continuing to pursue its case.

On Monday, a Trump-appointed federal judge ruled a university can mandate vaccinations in another case testing the ability of educational institutions to respond to the pandemic.

 

Image by Labpluto123 via Wikimedia and a CC license

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