Jim Wallis throws gays under the bus [View All]

[onager]

What? How can this be? Why wasn't this posted here in R/T? Where every possible "news story" about religion and the lack thereof gets posted daily?

I used the search engine and did find the story posted in GD, but not by any of our Learned R/T Theologians...the ones who manage to find all those news stories about atheists trying to buy advertising or file legal cases or commit other rude and unnecessary acts against the minority of believers.

But nobody posted about how Saint Jim Wallis, often held up here in R/T as the very paragon of lib'rul Xianity, refused to run a gay-friendly ad? And on Mother's Day, no less. (Maybe some DU'ers conveniently ignore a key line in Wallis' resume - "evangelical.")

I'll admit, I only heard about this recently myself. But I'm neither a lib'rul Xian nor a gay person. And when I did hear about it, on an atheist blog, simply Googling "jim wallis gay ad" brought up the whole firestorm:

In a written statement, Sojourners said, “I’m afraid we’ll have to decline. Sojourners position is to avoid taking sides on this issue. In that care (sic), the decision to accept advertising may give the appearance of taking sides.”

Taking sides? What are the sides here? That young children who have same-gender parents are not welcome in our churches? That “welcome, everyone” (the only two words spoken in the ad) is a controversial greeting from our pulpits? That the stares the young boy and his moms get while walking down the aisle are justified? I can’t imagine Sojourners turning down an ad that called for welcome of poor children into our churches. So why is this boy different?

I called the folks at Sojourners and asked what the problem was, what the “sides” in question might be. The first response was that Sojourners has not taken a stance on gay marriage (the ad is not about gay marriage); or on ordination of homosexuals (the ad is about welcome, not ordination); that the decision, made by “the folks in executive” (why such a high level decision?) was made quickly because of the Mother’s Day deadline. The rationale kept shifting. The reasoning made no sense.

I served as Director of Communication in the United Church of Christ in 2004 when CBS and NBC refused to air the “bouncer” commercial. It was déjà vu all over again: shifting rationales, trying to claim the ad was about something that it was not about, administrative excuses. The statements from Sojourners were the very same arguments we heard at the UCC. This was bad enough coming from network execs in New York, but from Sojourners?


http://www.religiondispatches.org/archive/politics/4583/lgbt_%E2%80%9Cwelcome%E2%80%9D_ad_rejected_by_sojourners%2C_nation%27s_premier_progressive_christian_org/