I accidentally stumbled upon this crap nugget and lost so hard I couldn't even take solace in the fact that it was a three year old WND article.
So I was thinking about this article, and one thing that really stood out to me (aside from the whole deliberately-refusing-to-understand-how-causality-works thing, which is a given) was this one phrase in particular:
"The already troubled youngster is often the one drawn to homosexuality or
gender compromise"
"
gender compromise" is a very interesting turn of phrase. Entire books could be written expositing that phrase (for example, the conservo-christo-american mindset that has made "compromise" into a dirty word, when the word, literally meaning "to promise together," seems like it ought to tie right in with the "mutual submission" that is supposed to be (but historically has often not been) at the center of Christianity). But what struck me about it was how much it remound me of something else I had seen online a day or two earlier:
This page on the christianbooksandthings.net online store (which you will probably also lose to, especially if you look around at the rest of their products). KKK T-shirts. A Confederate flag with the caption "It's LOVE, not HATE." A blue collar teddy bear and an American flag with the caption "I Love my HERITAGE." A children's shirt reading "Klan Kids Kare," "White and Proud," and "Love Jesus, Love Your Heritage." And the one that I was specifically remound of, "W.F.R.I.: Women For Racial Integrity."
Preserving "racial integrity."
Combatting "gender compromise."
Making sure that the walls that divide us stay as high and as unambiguous as possible; that we are inescapably defined by our manmade labels.
Is the concept of gender roles really any different from that of racial roles? The idea that God made us male and female with the intention of setting up two completely separate, completely defined roles for us to take, thereby predetermining the whole course of one's life -- either you're born with testes / a penis / a Y chromosome (pick one or all), and therefore must be a natural leader and marry a woman and be her guide; or you're born with ovaries / a vagina / no Y chromosomes (again, no consensus on how many of these properties must converge in order for a person to be considered one gender or the other), and therefore must submit to your father, husband, or pastor, depending on the stage of life you're in, and can never have any position of authority over males (or even over yourself, really), and have to love kids and have as many of them as possible (or more). Never mind that not everyone fits neatly into one of those two categories even looking purely at physical, objective reality. Never mind the multiple positive examples in the Bible of women in leadership positions -- Deborah, Phoebe, Huldah, Priscilla, and Junia are the first that come to mind. We can't let there be any confusion between those two categories, or everything comes crashing down, because we wouldn't know who's supposed to submit to whom!
It wasn't all that long ago -- and it's even still around today in some corners -- that it was about racial roles too. People with a noticeable amount of melanin and/or African heritage (again, kinda fuzzy definitions) are the descendents of Ham, who were eternally cursed to be servants to the descendents of Japheth (who, conveniently, fathered all of Europe (well, the white parts)). People with less melanin / no provable African ancestry / enough money to hush up any traces of racial impurity were the sons of Japheth, and rightful owners of the sons of Ham (Never mind that race as we think of it does not really exist in a solidly definable scientific way). There must be no confusion between these categories -- that means no abandoning of your role, your responsibility, as either a slave or a master, and certainly no mixing of the races, because, again, if the distinction got muddled, how would we know who's supposed to submit?
I have a hard time reconciling that attitude with Galatians 3:28:
There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus. I don't believe Jesus came here so that we could more deeply entrench ourselves in our same old oppressive power struggles of gender against gender, race against race, nation against nation.
and i really need to stop staying up so late