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In this post, David J. Murphy specifically addresses one of the several “clobber verses” Christians use to hammer at the idea of marriage equality for same-sex couples. The verses in question are called “clobber verses” because they’re thought to be totally definitive and utterly unquestionable, with no wiggle room at all for alternative interpretations. To right-wing Christians, these verses mean 100% that the Bible condemns equal marriage. But what if these Christians are wrong? What if these verses aren’t talking about same-sex marriage or homosexuality at all?

Last month, a Professor of Communications at the New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary took his own life. A few days ago, his family revealed the shocking news that in his suicide note, John Gibson had noted that his name was on the Ashley Madison client list that had been released by “hacktivists” only six days earlier. Depressed and wracked with fear and remorse, he took his life rather than face his “loving” tribe once the news got out. John Gibson paid the ultimate price for his culture’s impossible demands and misplaced priorities.

The drumbeat of hypocritical defenses of bigots-for-Jesus for their fellow bigots-for-Jesus continues as Christians continue to lose grandly on every single social issue of our day. I’m noticing that the main theme in these defenses is that a bigot-for-Jesus can’t possiblely condone sin. Today I want to talk about this particular defense and why it fails so spectacularly.

The drumbeat of hypocritical defenses of bigots-for-Jesus for their fellow bigots-for-Jesus continues as Christians continue to lose grandly on every single social issue of our day. I’m noticing that the main theme in these defenses is that a bigot-for-Jesus can’t possiblely condone sin. Today I want to talk about this particular defense and why it fails so spectacularly.

Watching her, reading her words, I get the sense that she at least thinks she has genuinely and truly won something big–and her supporters largely seem to agree. She does not have the tight, smug tone of someone who is insisting she won even though she knows she’s been handed a crushing loss. I heard people talking exactly like this all the time in church, and I hear Christians talking like this every single day nowadays. I think she sincerely thinks she won something. But what does she believe she won?

Really, the only redeeming feature of these numerous and increasingly-disturbed-sounding predictions is that not only are they not going to happen, but that the people making them are going to have to come to grips with the fact that they made them–because their flocks may be very good indeed at forgetting false predictions, having had lots of practice by now, but the internet never forgets. We’re going to remember these wild-eyed, finger-pointing, spittle-flecked false predictions for a long time to come. And we’re going to be amused to realize something else.

Kim Davis, the bigot-for-Jesus County Clerk who refused to issue licenses because she thought equal marriage for LGBTQ people was ickie and made Jesus mad, has been thrown in jail for refusing to do her job as a duly elected official of her state. Today I want to talk about why I think she went to the lengths she did.

But sometimes, despite the huge safety net evangelicals have built up over decades to prevent exactly this occurrence, an idol falls.

But sometimes, despite the huge safety net evangelicals have built up over decades to prevent exactly this occurrence, an idol falls.

As I’ve been doing almost every day since the Ashley Madison scandal broke, I got up and ran a quick Google search for “pastor resigns ashley madison -stetzer”. The -stetzer part is because if you try to run a search without that qualifier, you’ll get a bunch of hand-wringing posts from multitudes of Christian sites (and rather mocking non-Christian ones, obviously) quoting Ed Stetzer, who recently came out with the rather startling prediction that today, Sunday August 30th 2015, 400 pastors would be resigning from their posts because they’d turned up on the customer database for the notorious adulterers’ playground.