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| Rev. Louis P. Sheldon, Leading homophobe and persecutor of the LGBTQ community, dies aged 85. |
Rev. Louis P. Sheldon, founder of the extreme homophobic Traditional Values Coalition, has died, aged 85. Few in the LGBTQ community will mourn his passing.
Preacher of hate, Rev. Sheldon has dedicated his life to promoting the bullying, alienation, demonization and stigmatising of homosexuals, based entirely on a passage in the Christian Bible that appears to forbid a man "laying with another man as with a woman" (something a gay man does not do, of course, unless anal sex with a women was the norm in Biblical times).
Thou shalt not lie with mankind, as with womankind: it is abomination. Leviticus 18:22
If a man lies with a male as with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination; they shall surely be put to death; their blood is upon them. Leviticus 20:13
Attempting to harness the fundamentalist susceptibility to conspiracy theories and victim complexes, Sheldon contended that there was a "Gay agenda" to not only promote gay rights but also to recruit children. Conflating homosexuality with paedophilia, Sheldon asserted that:
As homosexuals continue to make inroads into public schools, more children will be molested and indoctrinated into the world of homosexuality. Many of them will die in that world.
He was either oblivious of, or deliberately turned a blind eye to the fact that the overwhelming number of paedophiles convicted of the sexual abuse of minors have been people of Rev. Sheldon's religious persuasion and the facts that Christian churches have often acted as facilitators for the predation of paedophile priests and nuns on minors, supplying both the victims and the facilities for the abuses to take place, then helping to keep the perpetrators from justice and their victims from compensation and rehabilitation.
Sheldon seems not to have noticed the other arbitrary prohibitions in Leviticus, such as:
Thou shalt not avenge, nor bear any grudge against the children of thy people, but thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself: I am the LORD. Leviticus 19:18
Ye shall keep my statutes. Thou shalt not let thy cattle gender with a diverse kind: thou shalt not sow thy field with mingled seed: neither shall a garment mingled of linen and woollen come upon thee. Leviticus 19:19
Ye shall not round the corners of your heads, neither shalt thou mar the corners of thy beard. Leviticus 19:27
Ye shall not make any cuttings in your flesh for the dead, nor print any marks upon you: I am the LORD. Leviticus 19:28
For every one that curseth his father or his mother shall be surely put to death: he hath cursed his father or his mother; his blood shall be upon him. Leviticus 20:9
I wonder how many people who shave, wear mixed-fibre clothing or who have tattoos Rev. Sheldon condemned and stigmatised or how many people who cursed their mother or father he demanded be put to death. Like other conservative Christian extremists he seems to have cherry-picked sections of the Bible that gave him the best excuse for victimising other people because of something over which they have no control, just as their earlier victims had no control over the colour of their skin in the days when Christian racism was considered righteous. There's nothing quite like something that a person can do nothing about to form the basis for persecution if you need victims to give your life meaning, no matter how repugnant.
Unfortunately for him, Rev. Sheldon was born in the wrong time and place. In earlier times, or in less enlightened places such as Iran or Saudi Arabia he would have achieved more in terms of persecution of homosexuals. As it was, his life has been one of failure as state after state has extended the normally-accepted human rights of others to include people from the LGBTQ community, decriminalising homosexual sex, ending homophobic discrimination and legalising same-sex marriages, despite the virulent homophobia and hate of Conservative Christians.
People like Rev. Lois Sheldon are driving people away from the church and into non-affiliation with any organised religion, as a halfway house towards full Atheism and embracing inclusive secular humanism and rejecting the divisive and hate-filled extremism of fundamentalist cults.
Maybe if Louis P. Sheldon had been able to overcome the religious indoctrination of childhood and his psychotic, paranoid theophobia, he could have allowed himself to be a kinder, more inclusive human being. As it was he merely served to repeat the cycle of abuse and perpetuate the damage done to him in childhood by trying to damage others, believing it to be the righteous thing to do and the best way to appease the thug in the sky he imagined demanded it of him on pain of torment and suffering.
His death is a sad loss to his family but it stands as a testament to the damage religion can do to an individual and to society as a whole.
to society as a whole
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