Yesterday I was so busy being appalled over the SBC’s anti-trans resolution that I missed that their new president, Ronnie Floyd, is quite the anti-gay bigot.
GLAAD points out that Floyd has written a book with the particularly uncreative title, The Gay Agenda. “Gay agenda,” which is always in caps as “Gay Agenda,” all the more to scare the reader. Here’s an excerpt from the first page, to give you an idea of what we’re dealing with.
Subtlety is not the man’s strong suit. The paranoia, however, is strong with him.
See also, this 2003 sermon, also dug up by GLAAD, in which he laments the Lawrence v. Texas decision, because hey, throwing gay people in jail is just spiffy to Ronnie Floyd.
He also uses some of the harshest culture war language that I’ve heard, and growing up in the religious right, I’ve heard far more than my fair share of culture war talk.
“It appears now that everywhere you look, everything you read and everything you hear is about the gay lifestyle. Satan has taken his tool of homosexuality, a gross and evil sin, and done a con job on the American culture, making it seem like all is okay when you are gay. I hope you are aware that what was once subtle has now turned into the rage of a lion as brazen and threatening as anything in our culture. I must sound the trumpet loud and clear, praying that we do not run in retreat, but march in the truth of God valiantly. This is not a skirmish or a conflict or a disagreement, but it is a war. The war they have declared against our culture has an agenda and we need to be aware of it.”
–emphasis added
The worst part is where he empathizes with parents who lament that they rather their children be dead than be gay. Dead.
“I do rise to speak on this issue out of brokenness, realizing the many families in our own church who have lost family members to the homosexual lifestyle. I have seen them weep, grope and beg God for divine intervention. I have sat in a circle with them, their faces drooped, so burdened with something that is beyond words. I have had some say to me, ”Pastor Floyd, it would have been easier to have lost my child to death than to homosexuality. It is killing me.“"
–emphasis added
Floyd puts it in the mouths of others, but he has made it clear, he sees being gay as something that must be cured because it’s a fate worse than death.
Can you imagine being a gay kid growing up in a Southern Baptist church and hearing from the pulpit that if your parents find out who you really are, they’ll wish you dead? It’s beyond horrible.
I need to go find some pictures of cute puppies or something, the prospect of an SBC with Ronnie Floyd at the helm for the next few years is horrifying. I miss the days when all we got lectured about in the SBC was the evils of alcohol, tattoos, heavy metal, and Dungeons and Dragons.
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Image from crosschurch.com