But, I think that individual organizations in which participation is voluntary should have a great deal of leeway in deciding what their requirements for membership or leadership should be. By definition any group whose membership is voluntary should be able to determine who gets in.
This freedom virtually guarantees that some group somewhere will restrict membership in a way that offends someone. But we don’t have the right to be free from being offended.
Let’s take churches for example. There are like 8 billion churches in the US. The beliefs of those span the spectrum from “God doesn’t exist”, to the leader of the church is God incarnate. To say that there is a church to fit everyone is an overstatement, and if you can’t find one to your liking then you can start your own.
Now here’s the question. If there’s a church that has well established and we’ll known guidelines for membership, and the members all agree with those guidelines, and if there are 4 million other churches within a 20 minute drive, should someone be able to force the church to accept a member who won’t agree to the same things as all the other members?
I know churches who required signed conduct agreements for certain positions and events. For example, they require that high school students and their parents sign an agreement that states that the students won’t bring alcohol or illegal drugs when they go to church camps. We’re talking 15-18 year olds in a state with a drinking age of 21. One year some kids broke the agreement and got sent home. Shockingly enough their parents got passed that their kids got sent home. Not that their kids broke the law, broke their agreement, or lied about it.
I’m sorry, but if you join a group that has established rules, and you refuse to abide by those rules, then I don’t have a problem if you get excluded. Especially if there is an equivalent group that has rules that accommodate your choices.
Again, call me crazy, but I don’t think I can unilaterally impose my choices on a group that is voluntary. Of course there is almost always a way to change or amend rules, but following the established process is different from using force or coercion to impose your will on others.
While I despise the Klan and everything that stand for, I couldn’t support using force or coercion to compel them to accept members. Of course, I can’t understand why anyone would try to force themselves into a voluntary group that opposes them,
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Of course, the reality is that no one is coercing (like, by weight of law, like the racists, misogynists and homophobes did for centuries against black, gay and women folk) groups to forcibly take someone into their midst as members.
Do you recognize that reality?
What we're saying, on the other hand, is YES, Good God YES! We should use our influence to shame the KKK to stop having the KKK's values... to shame conservative churches for having their oppressive, harmful values. There is nothing at all wrong in trying to help guide people away from oppression and THAT is what we're trying to do by pointing to hateful, oppressive churches like the one I cited on my blog and which appears to have at least in part inspired your post here.
What that church did is part of a millennia-long oppression of a minority group that has caused huge amounts of harm. At least in the progressive parts of the world, we recognize that harm now and are trying to help the oppressors see the light. Of course, we're concerned about them and hope they change, but our sympathies must always BEGIN with the oppressed.
Do you disagree?
Do you not understand that I’m not answering you questions until you get caught up.
But I do appreciate your complete and total misunderstanding of my point here.
The bottom line is that there’s no oppression or harm here. Hurt feelings maybe, but the bottom line is they knew the standards of the church and chose to ignore them.
"there's no oppression or harm here."
This is the mantra of oppressors over the millennia, so you are solidly on the side of the oppressors with this privileged, candy-assed response.
Just because YOU, a white privileged male who doesn't experience any real oppression, don't think gay folk have been/are being oppressed, doesn't mean it doesn't happen.
The thing is, dick-weed, YOU DON'T GET TO TELL gay folk when they're not being oppressed. You don't get to tell black folk when they are being oppressed. It's NOT YOUR CALL to make.
If you had held in your arms a loved one whose family had kicked them out of their house, after trying to send them to a "re-education camp" to "jesus the gay out of them...," If you haven't attended the funeral of someone abused to death or chased into suicide, if you have not stood by and with gay folk against the very actual, real harm and oppression they STILL face - including by fuckers like this hate-church - then you just don't have a God-damned clue.
Get out there and meet people and get involved in real conversations and LISTEN to folks tell you about the oppression and harm. Until then, just shut your mouth and quit defending oppression and oppressors.
Damned pervert.
Bottom line, they were likely RAISED in the church, accepted as loved ones and told that they belonged... UNTIL they dared to disagree with their opinion on one particular behavior (getting married to the person of their choice) and THEN that church and family rejected them and NOT ONLY rejected them, but told the woman that she was disgusting to God, and going to hell unless she consented to agree with them.
The arrogance is breathtaking... Pharisaical in nature. And it's dangerous. Such oppression using/abusing the power of "The Church" to try to force someone who was part of their family to agree with them... it is just an abuse of power and oppressive.
The bottom line is that YOU now should know that it oppressive, and yet you continue the oppression.
Get the hell out of this church of Christ, you deviant pervert.
You like that?
Don't you see, Craig? What that church did was a millennia-long preaching of God's word on the subject of homosexuality, in which the unambiguous teaching that it is an abomination is to be ignored because Dan and "progressives" like him know better than God how God wants us to live.
Those Dan refers to as "the oppressed", are of course the sinners who insist they are NOT living in sin, are NOT sinning when they indulge their passions and without any Scriptural support believe God changed His mind. Also oppressed by millennia-long "oppression"? Adulterers, thieves, the incestuous, murderers, liars, the bestial, heretics like Dan...so many people oppressed by the Will of God. It's horrible.
Dan,
Choosing not to abide by the rules of a group who's membership is 100% voluntary and being faced with the consequences of ones actions is not "oppression".
None of that matters. Just because they might have been (another assumption on your part) "raised in the church" doesn't given them some sort of special privilege to choose behavior contrary to the stated rules of the church. The reality is that the church did not reject "them", it rejected their behavior, and gave them every opportunity to rejoin that particular fellowship.
The bottom line is that they knew what they were doing, they knew what the response would be, they chose to go ahead, and the church followed through.
Being told that you can't do everything that you want to do with no consequences is not oppression. Especially since there are multiple other churches where they can be accepted.
I know you are all of a sudden not a big fan of analogies, but let's say that the couple in question were siblings. Or that one was 30 and the other 15. Or that they had been part of an arranged marriage. In all of those cases you wouldn't be making a stink about it being "oppressive".
Of course, you've completely ignored the topic of the post, in favor of more of your sopabox ranting.
Art,
That's the point. Even if this church is mistaken in it's position on homosexual behavior, it still has the right to be wrong. What's happened is that the pro gay folx have realized that they don't actually have an argument that is persuasive. They have no Biblical support for their position. They have no grace for folx who might be mistaken about this issue.
Since they don't have the ability to persuade they must resort to force,coercion, name calling, personal attacks, and the like.
Why does that surprise you, it's how they roll.
Doesn't surprise me at all, and Dan and feo are two of the worst examples of all the tactics you've put forth. Note Dan's deceitful tactic of conflating the behavior with race. This is commonly used and never less of a willful, intentional lie by doing it over and over and over again. To this, in his racism, adds "white privilege", as if our race is in any way a factor with regard to our position on accurate and faithful Christian teaching about the sinfulness of homosexuality, or on any group's right to set their own rules and deal with rule breakers according to those rules.
The great irony of it all...because Dan LOVES irony...is that with all his babbling against the Bible as a rule book, he imposes his own rules, which he pretends is a matter of "grace and justice" and is far more intolerant of those who do not abide his notions of "grace and justice"...which as I just said is in fact his favored rules of Scripture that he insists isn't a rule book.
So I say again, that any who engage in sin or illegal activity feel oppressed by the church or law enforcement that has the audacity to uphold and enforce laws, standards and teachings against those activities. To demand that we should feel some special empathy for their feelings of oppression because we won't forever tolerate their illicit behaviors is a demand made in vain. Not gonna happen. The oppression under which they suffer that we truly find most compelling is the oppression of the sinful desires controlling them and dictating their lives to the point where they've put their salvation in jeopardy. These lesbians are examples of sinners who are not "struggling" with their sin, but embracing their sin and asserting their behavior is not sin. If they were simply backsliding now and then, they'd likely still be members of this good congregation that clearly proved its concern for them was not simply genuine, but Christian in its manifestations.
Dan's corruption rejects this reality.
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