Nathaniel Frank executes a delicious smackdown on the World Vision spokespersons second attempt at an explanation: Eventually, after asking for more time, Colin emailed me this response: “World Vision United States calls its staff to a standard of abstinence outside marriage, fidelity within marriage, and upholds the Biblical covenant of marriage between a man and woman.” This simple reiteration of their policy was precisely the kind of vapid PR response I had told World Vision I was hoping to avoid. So I said so in an email: Cynthia: I appreciate you offering a reply. As Im sure you know in your heart, this is just the kind of vapid PR response I was hoping youd avoid. As this passage in the Bible may remind you, World Vision is not, in fact, upholding the Biblical covenant of marriage, as it chooses to allow divorced and remarried people to be employees, which the Bible clearly condemns as sinful. This is why any rational observer will conclude that the ban on married gay employees is a matter of World Vision selectively reading the Bible to rationalize anti-gay bias, a likely appeasement to anti-gay funders. I dont want to be unfair to you, as I am sure you are good people doing good works and just trying to do your jobs. But if you have no stronger explanation of the selective use of the Bible to discriminate against gays, Ill have no choice but to take the religious hypocrisy angle in my piece. I don’t enjoy hounding perfectly nice people about their organization’s rank hypocrisy. (OK, maybe a little.) But the constant use of the Bible to rationalize anti-gay discrimination while giving a pass to other crystal-clear biblical injunctions should be all the evidence anyone—including judges looking at so-called “religious freedom” laws—needs to conclude that bias, and not genuine religious faith, is at work. In this case, World Vision tried to take a positive step and ultimately bowed to angry pushback from evangelical leaders and other conservative Christians. It’s not clear which is worse—acting on your own bias or enabling others’ bias in order to protect your funding.
Posted on: Tue, 01 Apr 2014 23:50:13 +0000
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