Speaking of hate
The Presbyterian Layman Volume 32, Number 5, November 11, 1999
Birthed by former Presbyterian Church (USA) Moderator Herbert Valentine and President Clinton’s minister Philip Wogaman with $25,000 from the Democratic Party, a group called the Interfaith Alliance is promoting a “stop the hate” campaign among denominational bureaucracies. Hate, by this group’s definition, is any rhetoric expressing disapproval of homosexual activity, school busing, affirmative action or abortion. Criminal acts that are perpetrated against homosexuals, racial minorities, or abortionists are described – not so much as crimes in themselves – but as the effects of an underlying crime, hateful rhetoric.
National staff members in several mainline denominations have taken the bait. The Presbyterian version of this “stop the hate” campaign has appeared in the September/October issue of Church & Society, a publication of the National Ministries Division that is funded with mission dollars from our congregations. Here we are asked to believe that the real thugs who dragged James Byrd to his death are our own church members, those who oppose affirmative action policies and who seek alternatives to government schools by teaching their children at home or sending them to church-sponsored classrooms.
And who killed Matthew Shepard, described in the magazine as “a sensitive young college student and … a wholesome young man?” Church & Society suggests that the Presbyterian Church (USA) killed him when it enacted standards that deny ordination to persons who engage in sex outside of marriage. Author Chris Glaser says that Shepard’s killers were simply acting out the implications of church policies that “rob gays and lesbians of their spiritual inheritance and vocations.” Glaser says that in the wilderness of Wyoming, the two assassins “executed” the church’s “sentence” on Matthew Shepard.
One wonders how this Presbyterian publication can describe a person who picked up two strangers in a bar as “a wholesome young man.” Even Dan Savage, homosexual advice columnist for Out magazine, has asked “Where did Shepard think they were going? What did he think was going to happen once they got there?” And lesbian author Camille Paglia has asked her readers if anyone really believes Shepard “left the bar for cozy tea and conversation?” Paglia used this tragic event to warn her presumably homosexual audience of “the dangerous, centuries-old practice of gay men picking up grimy, testosterone-packed straight or semi-straight toughs.”
Paglia’s conclusion – at least as far as it goes – has some merit, but Church & Society is promoting another theme, the preposterous idea that ordination standards in the Presbyterian Church (USA) constitution encouraged this terrible murder. Make no mistake about it: the crime perpetrated upon Matthew Shepard was heinous. But so is this accusation.
And who killed abortionist Barnett Slepian? “The answer is clear,” says Church & Society writer Gilbert Schroerlucke. Church groups like our own General Assembly did this deed by enacting resolutions condemning partial-birth abortions. The author puts it this way: “Those who kill doctors and others are responding to the anti-abortion rhetoric perpetuated by both religious and nonreligious sources. This rhetoric creates a climate of moral permission for extreme acts.”
Presbyterian Church (USA) standards are born not of hate, as Church & Society would have us believe, but of love. Presbyterian General Assemblies offer moral guidance on the basis of God’s loving counsel in Scripture. The church establishes standards, not to kill people, but to guide us all into the way of abundant life.
We call on John Detterick, executive director of the General Assembly Council, to discipline those Church & Society staff members who have reviled this denomination’s standards. Our Presbyterian congregations did not kill James Byrd, Matthew Shepard and Barnett Slepian. For an official publication of our denomination to suggest that we did is reprehensible.