I know I don't post political often, but I've been hitting a dry spell lately and this story is too good to pass.
Church's Anti-Gay Message Creates Big Uproar in Small Community
I don't watch the local news. I live in a moderately-sized town in the middle of Wisconsin, and there have been more than a few times where tractor pulls and barn raisings have made the news. Slow news days come easily like milking a cow.
I was walking through the living room, grabbing my waterbottle, when I the story caught my eye.
Basically, a church in some small town that I've never heard of put some anti-gay signs out. "When homosexuality is mentioned in the Bible it is always condemned" and "Homosexuals don't need affirmation, they need redemption." Oh, those Baptists.
"The goal of the sign was to provoke discussion and make a statement," the discussion being how to get those damn homos to shut up and stop existing, and the statement being, presumably, that homos are bad people who should go away.
The signs came down, due to community outrage. Apparently, it's not "en vogue" to be making those sort of statements. The local news cameras came to watch the pastor take down the signs, and let him make comments about future signs--"In the future, I'll be talking a lot more about the choices people make about their relationships with GOD."
This story really wouldn't have been that interesting, except that the city is small. Ant-farm small. Like, my Classical Mythology class I took last semester had more students than this city had residents.
Wisconsin gets a bad rap a lot of the time, we're all fat beer-guzzling cheese-feasting small town hicks with gun racks on their pickups, but if a some redneck city up north with more bars that people, a city too small for an elementary school, can cause a ruckus over gay rights to the point where the pastor feared for the life of his family, well, maybe there's some hope after all.
