Aside from supporting the bullying of children who dare to be born with emotions and feelings he doesn’t approve of, Lyle Shelton is an idiot and an intellectual coward, frightened of things he has little reason to fear. And like other forms of cowardice, this fear leads him to take actions that rational people wouldn’t. His ridiculous comparisons linking marriage equality and Safe Schools Program with the rise of Nazism showed just how hysterically out of touch he is. I said last year that I believed leaders within the church were going to drive away a lot of people and create greater antipathy towards their faith with some of their actions in the marriage equality debate. In truth I can’t believe it is even a debate, but Shelton and his organisation take that to a whole next level.
It is important to separate Shelton and the ACL (this is such as appropriate acronym as whether you are talking about knees or politics, anytime you mention the ACL, people wince in sympathy) from the majority of reasonable Australian Christians they profess to represent. As such it is an unhelpful, though tempting, to respond to Shelton’s regular offensive bigotry with broad attacks on Christianity. It is hard to convince anyone of anything by making them defensive. It is also not really fair. Just as I don’t hold Muslims accountable for the words and deeds of Islamic extremists, we give have to give Christians the same courtesy. Being a faith that values …, it is unsurprising that a large number (53% of respondents in a recent Galaxy Research Survey) of Christians actually support marriage equality anyway. This isn’t a problem of religion. It’s a problem of irrational fear and pig-headedness by key personnel. Don’t take it out on other Christians.
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