The Creation Museum recently hosted a “Date Night” for FamilyLife’s conference in Cincinnati, OH. While usually I’d consider animatronic dinosaurs the true pinnacle of romance, the whole Biblical literalism thing sort of ruins the mood for me. But one journalist decided to check it out with friends, and posted about his experience on reddit:
I write for an alt-weekly, and in the interest of journalistic science went to northern Kentucky’s Creation Museum for their couples’ Date Night, which basically consisted of a talk by museum founder Ken Ham, a buffet dinner, a musical performance by a country music guitarist and truckloads of cognitive dissonance.
Our party consisted of myself, my girlfriend Shanna and our friend Brandon, who was to be accompanied by our friend Joe, who was himself running late. As a coterie of security guards checked the three of us in, they wanted to know where Brandon’s date what kind of car she would be driving so they could keep a look out for her.
“Uh,” I said, “his partner’s name is Joe.” (I don’t know why I said it that way, it just came out. Joe and Brandon are heterosexual)
Needless to say, the security guard reacted with shock.
“Joe?” he said. “This is a Christian environment, and we can’t allow them to attend. It will disrupt the evening for everyone.”
When pressed, the guard reiterated that you can’t be a Christian if you’re gay.
“Can you tell me what exactly is Christian about being gay?” the officer rhetorically asked. Nothing, obviously.
Now, this is an anonymous post on reddit, so you have to take it with a grain of salt. Hopefully the author will link to his official write up for his job when it’s published. EDIT: His article can be found here. But it’s certainly not the first time we’ve heard this sort of sentiment coming from some Christians. You can’t be Christian if you’re gay, and your disgusting gayness is going to ruin the night for all these nice, godly people.
I don’t know if the guards were from the Creation Museum or Family Life. The Creation Museum’s website states “Answers in Genesis and the Creation Museum are not affiliated with FamilyLife.” Until we know, this isn’t exactly great PR for them when they’re trying to get tax payer money to fund their new theme park, Ark Encounter.
I’m sure the Creation Museum will release a statement right away saying that all homosexuals are welcome to their museum and apologize for the situation.
I wish I could say I was surprised, but before I became an atheist I spent my college years as a member of campus ministry that was quite fundamentalist. Some are better at P.R. than this, but at their core this is the way most of them think.
Just to critique religion somewhat on its own terms here… maybe there’s nothing Christian about being gay… I’d have to say there’s probably nothing Christian about being straight, either, and certainly nothing Christian about persecuting people for, well, any reason.Unless you define based on the behaviour of people in this sort of group, in which case Christianity is basically defined by intolerance and persecution.Anyone who thinks they have “the Truth” is either crazy or criminal, if you ask me, but that’s a bit harsh of me as well.
Just like Muslims in the Middle East, when asked directly about their extreme views, they will respond with “Oh, we love all people!’ but amongst themselves, when they don’t think others are listening, they show their true colors.
You are unfortunately correct, Sir. When I’m around other DWG (Dopey White Guys) who don’t know me that well things get … awkward. For example, I’ve had to say, “Let me tell you why that doctored image of the watermellon patch on White House lawn is racist.”
I still don’t get why gay people want to be Christians or even priests.
Are you more puzzled over this than you are over anyone else wanting to be Christian or a priest?
“While I’d usually consider animatronic dinosaurs the true pinnacle of romance…” This made my day. Me too, Jen, me too. And yeah, disappointed but not surprised, as usual.
It also took most of the guesswork out of my Valentine’s Day plans WHOA NOW
“his partner’s name is Joe.” I probably would have said this on purpose to ruffle some Christian feathers, but the end result is still the same. So, did they get in okay?
What exactly is Christian about being named Ken? They should throw that guy out. ;)
” (I don’t know why I said it that way, it just came out. Joe and Brandon are heterosexual) “I hate this. Why do people feel the need to clarify? Do we care whether Joe or Brandon is gay? Does it affect the story at all? As long we keep up this idea that we must make sure no one thinks we are gay, because that would be terrible, we allow others to think that it is acceptable to treat gay people with less respect.
So, Kentucky Christians, you can go to the Creation ‘Museum’ and soon its other new ministry, Ark Encounters, and you can rest assured that you won’t see any gay couples — however you can run into a guy who was found not guilty by reason of insanity after shooting his ex’s husband three times on his first out-of-state visit in 11 years. Does that make you feel better?Ted Herrlichtedhohio@gmail.comhttp://sciencestandards.blogsp…
Please listen to God’s comments. He made them long ago, but they apparently are still valid. (;You can find this quote at http://www.searchgodsword.org/… by copy and pasting.) “For this reason God gave them over to degrading passions; for their women exchanged the natural function for that which is unnatural, and in the same way also the men abandoned the natural function of the woman and burned in their desire toward one another, men with men committing indecent acts and receiving in their own persons the due penalty of their error”
It does affect the story slightly if the guards are discriminating against people for things that aren’t even true. If the person telling the story thought there was something wrong with being gay, they wouldn’t have been outraged enough to post the story in the first place. Go save your moral outrage for someone who deserves it.
So discriminating against things that aren’t true is worse than discriminating against true things?
It does highlight how homophobic the guards are if even the possibility of homosexuality is enough to offend them.
Oh! Here we go! What exactly is Christian about being gay? “Well, I think camping out in the desert with 12 other guys would be *fantastic*!” “Oh honey, who else could take just a couple of ingredients and feed a whole field of people?” “I wouldn’t let my Mom serve water to wedding guests either!” “One of my besties is a hooker toooo!”
To further critique it in its own terms here, you could ask what Jesus did when confronted with the despised and outcaste of his society. Did he tell those hookers and tax collectors to get bent and refuse to admit them into his fellowship?And if it were me, and I had nothing much else to do for the evening, I’d ask that guard for chapter-and-verse about homosexuality and then quote the Hebrew or Greek back to him and explain why it doesn’t actually say what he thinks it says. I can go on about that long past the point where everyone’s sick of the discussion.
Because being gay is a (probably) inborn characteristic that has feck-all to do with a person’s opinions, views, beliefs, or any other aspect of their personality?
And that’s not without even getting started on all the kissing Jesus was doing with his 12 “best friends”.
Yeah, I get that being gay is not a cure for being stupid. What I don’t get is the “No Homers” mentality – why do they want so badly to be in a club that doesn’t want them? You don’t see blacks lining up to join the Klan, as far as I know.
Yes. Christians are pretty above board about hating gays, so I honestly don’t get the attraction.Of course, Christians hate women, too, and at it’s core hates just about everyone, but they don’t advertise it as hard as they do the gay-hate.
Well, the Ham makes up for it. Very Christian Ham is.
There are Christian groups who aren’t really homophobic at all, except in the subtle ways that are pretty much endemic throughout. Several churches within the Anglican communion are very frustrated over organisational homophobias being forced on them.To be frank, your generalisations are pretty flagrant and intellectually offensive (not directly offensive to me, not being Christian, but I find the intellectual aspects offensive to intellectual rigour); you can say that all Christians are fantasists, if you like, from a simple atheist standpoint. It is disingenuous at best to paint all Christians in the same way like that.
I just don’t know why you would *want* to be christian if you’re gay/bi/trans. Self loathing much? Why be a part of a religion that thinks you’re an abomination or unnatural? Even if the church you attend is accepting of lgbt people.. the bible you follow.. the *god* you worship? Not so much. Similarly, I don’t understand how women can be Christian..
You can be xtian and gay. Because xtian means believing in and following jepus. But you can’t be religious and gay where the OT is believed to be a part of the system. But hen you can ask the same question as ‘What is xtian about being female’. Being non-white, non-male, and n0n-hetro have no real part in being xtian without a lot of delusional mind twisting. And you can exchange religious-jew, and IsLame in place of xtian, they are all the same BS.
When I went to the Creation Museum with PZ & Co., Hambone sent us a long advance list of “Thou shalt nots,” stuff that would cause our immediate expulsion from Pinhead Eden. One of the items was “No homosexual activity.” It’s apparently one of their pet obsessions, though I have to wonder just what counts as “homosexual activity.” From this experience, it looks like sitting next to another member of the same sex is close enough to horrify them.
There are Christians, including churches, that don’t really hold to the Old Testament – and there are academic doubts about the New Testament homophobic and misogynistic bits (various bits of the epistles of Paul, I believe). Plus, a person is, objectively, welcome to take as little from the bible they like, as long as they don’t claim that the bits they do take are incontrovertible, literal holy writ.And how can one talk about how welcoming the god involved is if you don’t think that the deity in question is real? Surely, if you take a pluralistic and atheist viewpoint, each person worships the god they think they worship, who has the characteristics the worshipper thinks they have – because it’s all in their head any way.
Dinosaurs, seriously? What about fuolornis fire dragons?
I, too, have wondered this for a long time. Christianity follows the Bible, whether literally or “metaphorically”. They accept the Ten Commandments, therefore they must accept the other laws set forth in the Old Testament, including homosexuality being a sin (curiously enough, however, only for men).
Thing is, if you don’t believe in the Old Testament, then the New Testament is invalid, too. Jesus’s coming was supposedly prophesied in the OT, so tossing aside the OT pretty much makes Jesus’s appearance some random event.I could see sects of Christianity that are more like Buddhism in that they’re all about the teachings, and not about the worship, but they still worship Jesus as a god, and God as a god as well. Their God originates from the OT, so throwing it all out makes no sense.
The guard’s argument, as I understand it:1. (premise) You can’t be gay and Christian2. (therefore) Attendance by gay people would be disruptive to a Christian environment3. (premise) This (Creation Museum) is a Christian environment4. (premise) Brandon and Joe are gay5. (therefore) We can’t let them come in.What’s missing is the connection between 1 and 2. Is he saying that anyone non-Christian would be disruptive? Then why do they regularly admit known atheists?If I’d been there, I would have retorted that homosexuality was in accordance with the teachings of the Bible, I Samuel:
I think you’ll find the worst of them as prone to revealing their true colours in public as you’ve been.
Well said. The church of my grandparents once forced men to atone publically for the sin of growing a mustache. It will now recognize and perform marriages between two men or two women, and does not bar homosexuals to the cloth. Guess which practice got them removed from the Ecumencial Council of Canadian Churches?Then again, it’s also the church of our current prime minister, and he’s more outspoken in that regard than generations of prime ministers to whom it was a private matter, in something of a less progressive fashion. It doesn’t take all kinds, but we still wind up with them somehow.When people tell me what Christians are all about when it comes to homosexuals, I think of Mr. Rogers, who apparently didn’t get the same memo. I can think of plenty of reasons people would want to be on the same team as the man who assured them that “God loves you just as you are,” even those with cause to say, “Well, He sure has a funny way of showing it.”
How so? All Christianity ever promised for getting it right was a life of persecution. If you’re already getting that, what’s one more cross?
Sometimes I suspect that’s one reason why there’s such an effort to stamp out homosexuality: to avoid awkward questions about the old boys-only clubs. I guess you can ignore the elephant in the room with enough effort.
Oh man. This article made me laugh. So true. And yeah, I’m sure the Creation Museum will quickly jump to make homosexuals feel welcome at their center for brainwashing!I doubt though that many gays and lesbians in Kentucky are in existence, let alone interested in going to the Creation Museum to delude themselves. thanks blag hag for the good post!
I fail to see what’s contradictory about holding the New Testament as a ‘holy text’ and not following the Old Testament as well… as long as you’re treating the text as inspirational rather than holy writ (as some churches do) you can surely pick and choose as much as you like…The idea that the God in question originates from the OT, therefore the OT must be used, is only a theological argument, really, and is comparable to the idea that followers of Islam should also refer to the OT and NT.Everyone is free to choose their religious beliefs themselves; we might hope for internal consistency within any individual or group choice, the very fact that religion deals with the fundamentally inscrutable makes that a bit of a big ask.It’s certainly not good for someone, presumably (from context) an atheist (although no particular belief would make it better), to be telling other people what they are allowed (or what it makes sense for them) to believe.
If homosexuality is so bad, shouldn’t they stop eating shellfish and pork, too?
Ken Ham seems to have a jaw-dropping purity of single-minded irrational delusion. From http://www.answersingenesis.or… : “our emphasis is on Biblical authority. Believing in a relatively ‘young Earth’ […] is a consequence of accepting the authority of the Word [..] as an infallible revelation […].Recently, one of our associates sat down with a highly respected world-class Hebrew scholar and asked him this question: ‘If you started with the Bible alone, without considering any outside influences whatsoever, could you ever come up with millions or billions of years of history for the Earth and universe?’ The answer from this scholar? ‘Absolutely not!’Let’s be honest. Take out your Bible and look through it. You can’t find any hint at all for millions or billions of years.”So there’s a serious conflict there, which of course means that any evidence of millions or billions is just wrong. I mean, I’ve seen a lot of raving on all kinds of web sites and forums. But this is a clearly laid out manifesto, which says basically (my wording): “we fully understand there are conflicts between evidence in physical reality, and the writing in this book; and we firmly state that all such conflicts imply a failure in the evidence. And we aren’t really that interested in resolving *your* evidence problems. BTW If you don’t agree 100% you are undermining all christianity”.Not raving, just a clear, direct, firm, unapologetic self insertion of the head into the rectum.After that, a question like “What is christian about being gay?” doesn’t surprise. I guess there’s nothing in the book to support the idea that gay people can just walk around like regular folks, so, end of discussion. You are undermining us.BTW I found this yesterday, after googling “Age of earth”. Scary results — 6 0f top 10 say <10K years. One is wishy-washy, only 3 correct. AiG was in third spot. The wishy-washy one is a Canadian site (shamed to say) which… well that’s a whole other rant. Enough.