The Sermon on What Not to Mount

I will always admit I'm a recovering Catholic. But I did read the Bible growing up (all those years of Catholic school will do that to you), and even read the New Testament. Really liked the parts that said things like "Love your neighbor as yourself," and "How can you take the speck out of your neighbor's eye when there's a plank in yours?" and "Forgive seventy times seven," and "Do not judge lest ye be judged." Missed the parts that said "Homosexuality is a sin," "Abortion is evil," and "Beating up gays and bombing Planned Parenthood is righteous, for in God's eyes the ends justify the means."

So it surprises me when I read in the Washington Blade (link from Crooks & Liars) that Baptists must have a very different holy book than Catholics do:

An influential D.C. minister is under fire by local gay activists following an anti-gay sermon in which he claimed that, “lesbianism is about to take over our community.”

Rev. Willie Wilson delivered the remarks at Union Temple Baptist Church in Southeast D.C., where he is pastor. Wilson is a former mayoral candidate and serves as executive director of the Millions More Movement march, an effort to commemorate the 10th anniversary of the Million Man March.

What exactly did he say? Things like this:

We live in a time when our brothers have been so put down, can’t get a job, lot of the sisters making more money than brothers. And it’s creating problems in families. That’s one of the reasons our families’ breaking up. And that’s one of the reasons many of our women are becoming lesbians. You got to be careful when you say you don’t need no man. I can make it by myself. Well, if you don’t need a man, what’s left?

I'm so sad to learn Amy is going to leave me any day now for some woman.

Wilson, not to be confused with the triple-hitting-machine from the Kansas City Royals, but maybe having something to do with the Edgar Allen Poe William Wilson who "partook very much of positive hatred," went on to say:

Lesbianism is about to take over our community. I’m talking about young girls. My son in high school last year, trying to go to the prom, he said, ‘Dad, I ain’t got nobody to take to the prom because all the girls in my class are gay. There ain’t but two of them straight and both of them are ugly. I ain’t got nobody to take to the prom.’

He didn't explain to his son the girls just pretend they're gay as an excuse not to date the child of a loon. It is good to see, however, that the high school only has lipstick lesbians and left the poor ugly girls out of the club--it would be horrible if any stereotyping was going on.

And Wilson ends with this lovely analogy, bringing together shop class and sex in ways unheard of since the Bob Vila This Old Kama Sutra audiotape went out-of-print (have you tried the ball-peen hammer?):

Can’t make no connection with a screw and another screw. The Bible says God made them male and female. The Hebrew word "neged," which means complementary nature — there is something unique to man and unique to woman and it takes those two things to complement each other. You can’t make a connection with two screws. It takes a screw and a nut!

At least he got something right--it certainly takes a nut. Now if only he would just go screw.