The Cathedral of Hope — an LGBTQ+-affirming United Church of Christ in Dallas, Texas — has made a concerted effort to defend the queer community from “persecution,” as the state government targets drag queens and transgender people.
The church recently held a service where they blessed drag queens and pledged to “stand for justice, proclaim love, and protect the rights of all people.”
While about three dozen protestors stood outside of the church hurling slurs and threats, approximately 850 people attended the service.
“Anyone check the weather today?!” one protester screamed. “’Cause it might rain fire and brimstone on this church and burn every homo inside!”
But for the ugliness on display outside, the congregation filled the building with love and “radical inclusivity.”
“We recognize that all people are made in the loving image of God, no matter who they are, how they dress, express themselves, or who they love,” the pastor intoned during the service. “We celebrate this divine diversity and commit to lifting up the voices of the LGBTQ+ community and creating spaces where everyone can thrive.”
As one worship leader noted as the pastor gave communion, “Drag queens are often targets of hate and violence.” The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, in particular, were singled out for particular honor due to their lifesaving work during the AIDS epidemic.
“These Sisters were at the bedsides of men dying of AIDS,” Rev. Dr. Neil G. Thomas said. “They bring humor, they bring activism, they provide and bring a level of spirituality that many of us have had taken away from us. Despite the humor, they take their spiritual work very seriously.”
The service was a response to recently passed legislation meant to make a drag a crime. The law, passed by Republicans, has been challenged in court by civil rights groups and blocked repeatedly by federal courts.
The law punishes drag performers and venues with a $10,000 fine if they allow a minor to see a “sexually explicit” performance. Such a performance is defined as one in which “a male performer [is] exhibiting as a female, or a female performer exhibiting as a male, who uses clothing, makeup, or other similar physical markers and who sings, lip syncs, dances, or otherwise performs before an audience.”
Lawyers from the Texas Attorney General’s office argued that because the law didn’t specifically mention drag, it wasn’t discriminatory to drag performances. However, in June, Gov. Greg Abbott (R) shared a story about the law’s passage that contained the headline, “Texas Governor Signs Law Banning Drag Performances in Public,” and added the comment, “That’s right.” Many state politicians who supported the law also publicly stated that it was meant to target drag, specifically.
But would the law apply to churches? That’s unclear.
“My kid was here,” the lead pastor said. “I don’t have the right to choose to bring my kid to church when there are drag queens?”
You have to be a real fucking idiot if you think the bible tells you to hate others. Jesus’s whole fucking message was love everyone no matter what. He literally walked with lepers and washed others feet. Fuck these people (the Texans they are defying)
Edit: clarification on who to fuck
The Bible contains quite a bit of hating others... God is a real piece of shit in the old testament. What did Job do to deserve what he got? Why did he tell Abraham to kill his own son for a goof? The book literally justifies slavery.
According to the book, Jesus is God, so..........
Yeah, but like fuck the Old Testament. That shit is just stories. The New Testament is where I feel the actual messages are. That’s just my belief others can feel differently I don’t care. However, I do care if you use your religion to expose hate and violence. Be better, love everyone regardless of what they are. You can not enjoy their company or not want to associate with them, but lift them up always. I don’t know if I worded that last bit properly 😅
Ok, just pointing out that your beliefs are not consistent with your holy book.
By what criteria are you able to justify ignoring parts of the book and not others? Is it not the inerrant word of God? Didn't Jesus say that he didn't come to abolish the law, but to fulfill it? He made it very clear that you can't just throw away the OT.
You seem to have good values, just don't see the reason any kind of unscientific claims about the supernatural need to be a part of it. Just unnecessary baggage.
Jesus consistently preached basically in opposition to those obscure Old Testament hate filled passages. Look in the other comment chain for the Matthew verse. To expand on what I said, I don’t think all of the OT is garbage, but I do think most of it is up to personal interpretation to a point. If you get to a point your interpretations are hateful you’ve fucked up.
I don’t exactly think Jesus was supernatural, I believe he existed and that he was trying to teach the world a lesson that still holds true today. Whether he was a messiah or not is up to personal interpretation and I’m not gonna tell people they can’t believe that.
I think the New Testament is mostly garbage that is filled with stories/ideas that are very much up to personal Interpretation, exactly how I view the other Abrahamic faiths. Each of the Gospels has their own interpretation of Jesus and their own agenda to push.
Jesus absolutely never ever refuted or went against the Torah in the Gospels. People accused him of it, but that's only their interpretation of the law that he broke, not his own. He just didn't want people to be burdened needlessly by the law, that's all. Jewish sects of the time were fighting over semantics and interpretation of the Torah.
They fought about things like, what constituted working on the Sabbath? Could you go into your farm and pick some fruit on the Sabbath, or would that be a form of work. Some Jews would say 'fuck yes that's work bitch'. Jesus thought that YHWY created the sabbath to help and benefit humankind, and that it was silly to look at such small details while bigger details, like human suffering, went ignored.
Same as Christian sects do today, over the same kind of bullshit too.
I don't believe in anything supernatural at all. I think Jesus of nazareth was a nutter who thought his God was going to swoop in and make him king and get rid of the Roman's oppressing his homeland and people, but got executed as an enemy of the state. He also had some tasty views on rich people, so overall cool dude in my book. Fuck the Roman's.
Christianity started out as a Jewish sect by the way. Christianity became anti-jewish over time because they couldn't convince Jews that Jesus was the Messiah. Probably because the Jewish Messiah was supposed to be a grand warrior figure that was going to overthrow the Roman's and Jesus was executed by the Roman's in one of the most dehumanizing and humiliating ways they had. Its why gentiles were easier to convert than Jews, they didn't have explain that away.
You should read up on the historical Jesus, Bart Ehrman is my absolute favorite author on the New Testament and the Historical Jesus. Israel Finklestein has a delightful book on the historical side of the Hebrew Bible, I think the Great Courses Plus has a lecture series on that as well.
Here's a YouTube Playlist from Bart Ehrmans lecture series on the historical Jesus, it is missing the best episodes sadly, but still great. People can get the full thing on audible, it's so worth it.
Edit: I miss r/askbiblescholars so bad 😫 I miss you RIF
I think Jesus's whole thing was "hate the haters." He had great disdain for the religious authorities that were institutionalizing hate.
Did he? He flipped over some money lenders tables and he debated the religious leaders of the day. He may have disagreed with them but I challenge you (and I'm an atheist, I have no real horse in the race about supposedly divine beings) to find a place in the bible where jesus was described as hating anyone.
Matthew 23:13, 15, 23-26, 33
The entire chapter is a rant against them but I just picked out some of the more damning language against them.
You got any more of this? I know more than the lay person about the Bible but less than the ones who’ve read it most of their lives (or studied it). I love these verses!
Jesus issues some scathing condemnation against the Pharisees in that entire section of the book of Matthew. His messaging is pretty consistent all throughout the New Testament. It all boils down to loving others as you would love yourself, stop being greedy, and don't be a hypocrite. When Jesus was asked what is the greatest commandment in the law he replied simply:
“‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the first and greatest commandment'. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.”
--Matthew 22:36-40
So all these bible thumpers and evangelicals who constantly rant about hatred and condemnation have missed to first and second most important messages that Jesus shared.
This one isn't Jesus but John the Baptist but has a similar vibe:
John 7:25-54 has a kind of funny interaction between Jesus and the Pharisees. Basically Jesus is preaching and saying he is the Messiah. Some of the Pharisees flip out about this and send the temple guards to arrest him. The guards hear Jesus speaking and then come back without arresting him. Then the following conversation happens:
Another interaction between them:
Another one:
This is amusing.
https://www.benjaminlcorey.com/could-american-evangelicals-spot-the-antichrist-heres-the-biblical-predictions/
This is somewhat irrelevant, but I’m most struck with the “mint, dill and cumin”. Herbs sure are amazing. The history of cuisine is pretty interesting too.
That doesn't mean he hated them. He condemned their behavior and their hypocrisy. He called them out. That is not the same as hate.
Yeah, I knew someone would say this. He's calling a group of people that are trying to kill him a brood of vipers and damning them to hell. That reads to me as hate. If anyone other than Jesus was making those statements it would be interpreted by most people as hate.
Yes, under Christian theology Jesus doesn't hate people because that is the backbone of the entire belief system. But without that presupposition, Jesus's statements to the Pharisees sound a lot like hate.
Edit: But tbf, his hatred is probably directed towards the entire institution rather than the individual members. Like how people hate the police but may not necessarily hate every single police officer.
Thank you for citing the passages, but I similarly to the other commenter disagree that he is saying he hates them rather than their actions.
The word hate isn't in there. I might call a gang a "brood of vipers" but that wouldn't mean I necessarily hated them.
Lastly, and for what it's worth, I'm not clear if the "Seven Woes on the Teachers of the Law and the Pharisees" are meant to be quotes of Jesus or if they are Matthew.
Still, thank you for sharing something specific and not just hand waving.
He hated the shit out of that one fig tree that didn't give him a snack immediately. Cursed it.
I don't know. He didn't just "flip tables". In John 2:15, he "braided a whip out of cords" to drive them from the temple. However, in the original Greek, the word used for whip was "phragellion", which isn't an ordinary whip. This was the type of whip used in Gladiatorial combat by Romans, and was typically fashioned with weights or barbs at the ends of the falls. This was a whip designed explicitly to do harm, and no other whip in the Bible is described as a phragellion. Making such a whip is a deliberate, premeditated and time-consuming process. I would argue that this specific detail suggests that, while His actions are not directed by hatred, He still clearly intended to hurt the people defiling the temple and abusing their authority.
And these are the only people Jesus ever deliberately harms. Which is very telling.
You seem very confident in a lot of what is written in a very old translation of a hodpdge of work.
You are drawing a conclusion I do not from the same text.
It seems odd to me that a divinely inspired work could be so confusing or open to interpretation.
And given so very many passages where Jesus calls for love, why do you spend so much time justifying your interpretation that says Jesus hated a particular group?
There may be food for thought here for both of us.
Jesus as described in the New Testament was quite a badass. He fearlessly stood up to power, and fought against greed and hypocrisy. If more Christians followed his example that would be great.
Paul would disagree.
Paul can get fucked
Tell that to Christians. They venerate him and all of his bigotry.
Not all of us. I consider him a great candidate for Antichrist.
The Bible explicitly says in black and white that God hates gender-nonconforming people. Ditto that Christians need to shun gay men.
Cool that this church chooses to disregard their own religion to be inclusive, but I'm too old to do that kind of mental gymnastics any more.
I understand this is sarcasm but you should add a /s just in case lmao
It's not sarcasm. The bible says (not just the old testament, but the New testament as well) that homosexuals won't enter the kingdom of God, etc. Throw out the entire religion.
Pretty sure it never explicitly states this in either testaments. This link is my interpretation of those very vague passages people use to say this
https://www.hrc.org/resources/what-does-the-bible-say-about-homosexuality
Sorry I can’t remember how to embed the link.
Citation needed.
I mean it's all make believe anyway but I don't recall the Bible actually condemning homosexuality. It condemns perversion, as in molestation or sexual assault, but doesn't say anything about homosexuality to my knowledge.
The bible also makes clear that judging others is a ticket to hell, as only yhwh is to have that power.
If you try to live by copying the morality of a book on fairytales, you'll have a bad time.
Jesus said that, and Jesus (the white one anyway) is just a mascot.
Paul is who matters, and he judged the living shit out of everybody within correspondence range.