Crackpots

The Green Knight links to the following report in Editor and Publisher:

The congregation of Davis Memorial Presbyterian Church in Elkins, W.Va., has voted to fire its minister after he wrote a column for the local daily, the Inter-Mountain, supporting gay rights.

"Gay and lesbian Christians are no different than the rest of us," the Rev. Jeff Falter wrote in a Feb. 26 article. "They deserve full equality in the church and in society, for they are my brothers and sisters, people for whom Christ died."

That’s about the most innocuous statement I can imagine a Christian minister making. It is, in fact, simply a recitation of the primary tenet of Christianity.

I am as flabbergasted (and disgusted) by the reaction to Rev. Falter’s statement as I am by the reaction to Nightline’s tribute to fallen soldiers. How anyone can read a political agenda in the recognition of soldiers who have died, simply by reading their names and showing their pictures, is totally beyond me.

The Right is getting increasingly bizarre. They have lost all perspective, including and especially on that which is, ostensibly, solidly within their purview: moral values and supporting the troops. There’s nothing moral about turning people who want to worship away from a church, or firing a minister who claims that Christ died for everyone, and there’s nothing supportive about politicizing the honoring and remembrance of fallen soldiers, or denouncing the reading of their names as anti-war propaganda. They waved bye-bye to the deep end long ago; we’re into certifiably, unrelentingly irrational territory now. Nothing can deter them from reacting with shocking vitriol to anyone who disagrees with them, in spite of their constant assertions that they are the true Christians, the true patriots.

It would be hilarious if ideological hatemongers just like them weren’t running the country.