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Over the years, I've heard hundreds of jokes, some of them even printable, based on the stereotypical traits of various religious adherents, from Mormons to Mennonites. But as a lapsed Baptist, I felt excluded until I ran into Jerry Swingle of Durango one night in a Gunnison saloon.
You want to hear a Baptist joke?
he asked. Of
course I did, since the only one I could remember came from
my father, a Baptist deacon, to the effect that if you put
two Baptists in a room and let them talk religion, you'll
get at least three theologies, four millennial sequences
and five eschatologies.
Why don't Baptists have sex in public while standing
up?
Swingle asked, and I pressed for the punchline.
Because it could lead to dancing,
he replied.
After the boycott resolution passed by the Southern Baptist Convention in Dallas last week, this joke could be revised:
Why don't Baptists let their kids go to skin
flicks?
Because it could lead to Disney movies.
I can understand boycotting products that result from processes you find morally reprehensible, although in Colorado, it's pretty hard to live without gasoline or diverted water.
But if the 15 million Southern Baptists in this country are henceforth going to engage in boycotts on moral grounds, they've certainly got some curious priorities.
The Disney Corporation may suffer from scores of ethical flaws, but so far as I know, it does not actively persecute Christians.
The same, alas, cannot be said of China, where the
government has been arresting Christians because they
attend unlicensed churches,
and there are credible
reports of torture and the like.
I've never heard that Disney even reprimanded its employees for going to church, let alone imprisoned and tortured them.
If there are good Baptist reasons for boycotting Disney, then there are excellent reasons for boycotting China and its ubiquitous exports, but the Baptists, so good at seeing the speck in Disney's eye, somehow missed the bridge timber sticking out of China's.
Or if the Baptists cared about the biblical injunction
that The laborer is worthy of his hire,
they might
propose a boycott of Nike and its $150 sneakers. Here's a
company that can find millions of endorsement dollars to
pay sporting celebrities who are already quite wealthy, but
has trouble paying more than a few dollars a day to the
Third-World workers who actually make its products.
This troubles at least one Protestant denomination, the United Methodists, who hold Nike stock and have asked the Nike corporate directors to investigate its labor prices.
The Baptist boycott of Disney is apparently based on two main factors:
1) The company offers benefits to partners of homosexual employees.
2) The company promotes degenerate and immoral
lifestyles with programs like Ellen.
As for the first, the Baptists might have real cause for complaint if Disney canceled benefits for heterosexual partners in favor of supporting extralegal unions.
But that's not the case. Instead, the company has extended its benefits to people that many other companies don't include, and it takes a truly jaundiced eye to see evil in generosity.
Regarding the second concern, the presentation of abominations to impressionable children, well, what of the Bible, which is often promoted by Baptists as good family reading?
There's Lot, the only virtuous man in Sodom, committing incest with his daughters. And Lot's uncle Abraham, father of the chosen people, offering his devoted wife, Sara, to the pharaoh of Egypt to get himself out of a jam. And Jacob, swindling his brother Esau out of his inheritance. And David, a man after God's own heart, arranging for the death of Uriah, the husband of Bathsheba, a woman he covets.
Nor should we forget horrors like the Spanish
Inquisition that were perpetrated by people who professed
to follow the Bible -- how many Ellen
broadcasts
would it take to match that?
The only obvious conclusion is that the Southern Baptists, like most of the rest of America, are on a selective-morality binge.
Outside the Baptist convention, it's fashionable to decry adultery while celebrating avarice and usury. Inside, boycott Disney for its minor vices, and ignore China, where the Baptists couldn't even hold services, let alone a convention.
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