Remember all those dire predictions from the wingnuts that if the military’s Don’t Ask Don’t Tell policy was repealed, it would lead to politically correct purges of chaplains whose religious tradition rejects homosexuality? Looks like the opposite is happening, at least in one case.
A long-serving Air Force chaplain has left the Southern Baptist Convention after the conservative denomination publicly questioned his attendance at a same-sex civil union ceremony at his base in New Jersey.
The chaplain, Col. Timothy Wagoner, is remaining on active duty and has affiliated with the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship, which holds more moderate views on homosexuality and some other issues than the Southern Baptists.
“I find very little that is more important and nothing that is more exhilarating than providing for the religious freedoms and spiritual care of all service members and their families – and will joyfully continue to do so,” Wagoner said Friday in an e-mail to The Associated Press.
Wagoner’s exit from the Southern Baptist Convention, which SBC leaders welcomed, is a direct fallout from the repeal a year ago of the “don’t ask, don’t tell’ policy that had prevented gays and lesbians from serving openly in the military.
Fascinating, isn’t it?
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MikeMa
August 1, 2012 at 12:46 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Fascinating, welcome and quite delightful.
eric
August 1, 2012 at 1:34 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
No doubt the SBC will blame this on rampant secularism or something. Which is not far from the truth; remove the social and political barriers to leaving a sect or professing ‘heretical’ beliefs, and lots of people will leave it/profess those beliefs.
John Pieret
August 1, 2012 at 2:21 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
As Peter Montgomery noted at Religion Dispatches, there were cries that repealing DADT would threaten the freedom of conscience of chaplains. Instead, it turns out, it is the SBC that is threatening their freedom of conscience.
http://www.religiondispatches.org/dispatches/petermontgomery/6240/who%E2%80%99s_threatening_military_chaplains%E2%80%99_religious_freedom_southern_baptists/
Childermass
August 1, 2012 at 11:54 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
I am actually surprised that any clergy that would even consider same-sex marriage or even civil unions would not have left the SBC many years ago.
kermit.
August 2, 2012 at 11:13 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Childermass: I am actually surprised that any clergy that would even consider same-sex marriage or even civil unions would not have left the SBC many years ago.
Sometimes, people grow up.
Also, some folks don’t really look at asocial injustice until they know somebody personally who suffers from it. They may be basically decent folks, but they don’t do “abstract” very well. They need faces and names before they act. Look at the response people get who get their stories in the MSM. Mr. Smith and Ms. Jones may not donate to the local animal shelter, safe house for abused women, or orphanage, but let them see the puppy dog eyes on TV and the wallet opens up…