The Christian Post reports that anti-gay author Dr. Frank Turek is finding it just a little bit harder to sell his team-building consultancy services after publishing a book promoting discrimination against many of the employees and customers of his prospective clients.
Just months after being fired from Cisco Systems in California over an anti-gay marriage book, Christian consultant Dr. Frank Turek was also given the boot from Bank of America.
“I get a lot of flak for just actually agreeing with what a majority of Americans agree on and that is that marriage is between one man and one woman,” Turek said this past week on American Family Radio.
He’s being just a bit dishonest, of course. If all he were doing was defending the freedom to believe that marriage is between one man and one woman, then that would be fine. It’s a bigoted and ignorant opinion, but freedom of speech means that people are allowed to hold bigoted and ignorant opinions, as long as they don’t try to force their bigotry on others in a way that violates their civil and human rights. That last bit, however, is exactly what Dr. Turek and his fellow believers are trying to do, which is why he’s taking some heat for it.
Nor can Dr. Turek plead ignorance. He knows that there’s something inherently wrong with what he’s really trying to do, which is why he’s so careful to avoid any direct mention of it. Anti-gay Christians aren’t proud of their efforts to ban marriage. They’re ashamed enough to consistently try and disguise their actions, and to hide them behind deceptive euphemisms like “defending marriage.” Nobody is arguing, however, that men and women should not be allowed to marry, so there really isn’t any attack to defend against.
It’s good to hear that the charade is finally wearing thin in the business sector. Society thrives by substituting tolerance for our natural propensity for conflict and mutual harm. Attitudes like Dr. Turek’s aren’t merely bigoted, they’re anti-social and detrimental. If Dr. Turek wants to benefit from the advantages of living in a tolerant and harmonious society, he needs to quit trying to promote division and discrimination.
(By the way, Dr. Turek is one of 2 authors of the book I Don’t Have Enough FAITH to Be an ATHEIST, which I dissected in some detail over at Evangelical Realism. Blogging, sadly, has a bad habit of listing posts in reverse chronological order, so it’s a bit awkward to go through all the posts. If anybody knows of a plugin or something that would make it easier to read a series, I’d be happy to hear about it.)
Bigoted Christian Fundamentalists are not embarrassed by their personal worldview. They’re perplexed that we don’t share it, can’t imagine not being in the majority (because it makes sense to them so everybody should share their view, right), and are simply smart enough to try to keep it hidden from the rest of us in order to push their ideology. They truly believe that the rest of us will wake up and see the light if they simply explain to us the truth of their view of Jesus.
Evil people never believe that they’re evil.
I don’t know of a plugin, but having found your blog via freethoughtblogs and wandered over to Evangelical Realism from here, I can definitely see the problem. The manual and possibly tedious solution, which would nonetheless be tremendously valuable to new readers like me, would be to create an index or cross-referencing section, i.e. either a master page listing series with links to the parts, or a system where each article in a series has a link to the next part and to the first part. Slightly less onerous but, alas, still tedious for you as the maintainer, would be to create a unique tag per series; then we readers could at least get an overview with ease. Either way, of course, easier to implement early than retroactively…
A slightly easier solution is to update the old series by adding two links at the end of each installment, one link going forward to the next in the series, one going back to the first, so that people who discover them somewhere in the middle can go back and start at the beginning.
Great to hear that bigots can no longer hide, and are feeling the effects of their discrimination!
for just actually agreeing with what a majority of Americans agree on
This is questionable. Attitudes on this issue have really shifted, I wouldn’t be surprised if Turek is no longer in the majority on this one.
I clicked around in the Archives list and — whoa! — you were writing about that book for how many years? There’s “X-Files” entries for it in 2008, 2009, 2010… You cannot possibly expect people to work their way through all that, especially when you have to click “Read the rest of this entry” on every freakin’ entry.
Once upon a time I wrote a program to take the XML junk that Blogger creates when you “export” a blog, fish out the posts, and save them in chronological order as plain html, so I could make a book out of a vacation blog. But that was Blogger’s unique blurt; I have no idea what platform evangelical realism is on. If it’s blogger under that facade, I could send you the python code.
Over at Blurb.com they will as they put it, “slurp” a blog and make a book out of it. You might try that. But I don’t know as they let you pick & choose a range of posts to be “slurped” which you would need to get just the X-Files entries.
Doesn’t the majority agree with equality for same-sex couples anyway? I thought it was over 51% that agree that same-sex marriage should be allowed in the latest polling numbers.
Here’s a link to the start of the blog you mentioned:
http://blog.evangelicalrealism.com/category/idheftba/page/14/
I have it bookmarked. As I read through the blog, I’ll bookmark again.
Why didn’t I think of that? Thanks Michael!