In a Facebook posting on Tuesday, gay Baptist preacher Paul Raushenbush announced he was “done” when it comes to “accommodating religious hatred towards queer lives,” including from “’respectable’ religious denominations.”
“How utterly pathetic that it took 49 lives slaughtered for me to pack up my ’thank you for your point of view on why queer lives are not fully human’ table and close shop,” Mr. Raushenbush, a senior official at a New York seminary, said, referring to those killed in Sunday morning’s terrorist attack on an Orlando gay nightclub.
“For too long I have tolerated ’Setting a big tent’ and ’Allowing many points of view’ and ’Dialogue”’when talking about LGBT people as if our lives are up for debate and as if the jury is still out on our humanity, our dignity, or our being made beautifully in God’s image,” he added. “F—k ’love the sinner, hate the sin’. All I hear in these conversations now is death.”
Two days earlier in a sermon, Mr. Raushenbush used similarly profane language as he expressed his anger.
“Our revolution happened at a nightclub — Stonewall — where queers of all genders rose up and said we aren’t f—king taking this shit anymore. I’m remembering that as I consider the death that overtook the dancers at the Orlando gay club called ’Pulse,’” Mr. Raushenbush said, according to a transcript on the Auburn Seminary website.
Mr. Raushenbush, an ordained American Baptist minister, also made reference to gay nightclubs in reverential terms.
SEE ALSO: Obama meets with grieving families after Orlando shooting
“Nightclubs have always been sacred spaces for queer people, places to gather and glitter, away from the judging glares of society,” he said in his June 12 guest sermon at Fort Washington Collegiate Church.
Recalling his days in seminary, Mr. Raushenbush reminisced that at gay nightclubs he and his friends “experienced community, transcendence, and joy as people of different races, genders, and sexualities [who] came together in a pulsing interconnected mass, lifting up our arms, creating sacred space with our feet, sweat, our lust, and our loves.”
A former religion editor for The Huffington Post, Mr. Raushenbush currently serves as the Senior Vice President for Public Engagement at Auburn Seminary in New York City, where he’s “responsible for conveying Auburn’s vision to a growing number of stakeholders and expanding Auburn’s presence on a national and global scale,” according to the seminary’s online press kit.
• Ken Shepherd can be reached at kshepherd@washingtontimes.com.
Please read our comment policy before commenting.