Here’s an example for your Monday morning of what constitutes thoughtful social and religious commentary from the uber-patriarchal, neo-Reformed boys in Moscow. The context is whether or not a florist’s refusal to provide flowers for a gay wedding is, indeed, a bold stand for the faith. Here’s the comment that has me already fired up at before 7:30 a.m. It was made half an hour ago by an erstwhile acolyte of the Bloviating One, Douglas Wilson.
“Why is there any difference between two consenting homosexuals and a consenting pimp and cash cow hooker?”
My response:
G, your breathtakingly ugly reference to prostituted women is astonishing in its callousness and hate, even for you, someone whose disdain of women is generally as profound as his disdain for logic and reasoning. This is bad; you managed to set even lower a moral and rhetorical bar that already had been, in my mind, set almost impossibly low.
In an argument that began with your gratitude for what you call the florist’s courage, which you offensively referred to as “balls,” in refusing to sell wedding flowers to a same-sex couple, you blithely ignore one commenter’s respectful and intelligent argument against your conclusion and arrive, with false triumph, at an insult to prostituted women first, and then to same-sex couples.
The phrase “cash cow hookers,” whose literal meaning is muddled at best but whose true meaning reveals you to be a misogynist of the highest, or lowest, order, is your way of describing real women, including women I know and love, who have been forced into a life whose horrors you cannot begin to understand and whose nourishment is found in the robust heterosexually perverse desires you refuse to question.
You know nothing of the reality of a prostituted woman. You manage to describe the male who abuses her, the pimp, with nothing other than the word “consenting,” ignoring the irony of the woman’s servitude to him, and then describe the woman with language that, in three words, reveals you to be an ignorant and crude, misogynistic and homophobic buffoon. I’ve known you to be an immature lickspittle evidently incapable of generating independent argument, and I’m well aware that you doggedly, irrationally, persist in equating homosexuality with pedophilia. I’m well accustomed to the moral and logical paucity of your arguments; indeed, I’ve prayed that you receive pastoral counsel from someone other than the lockstep sycophants surrounding Doug Wilson.
Still, nothing I know about my having interacted with you prepared me for the revelation that you, a former seminarian and a deacon in your church, hold poor, marginalized, and exploited women in such hideous contempt. I rebuke you as harshly as I do because you are a Christian, or claim to be, whereas your ugliness here is specifically directed to people, already harmed, already hurting, you declare cannot be. You owe every prostituted and exited woman an apology, and you owe gay couples an apology as well — not because you support the florist, but because you echo the argument, blistering in its offensiveness, that same-sex intimacy is analogous to pedophilia.
Your heart is hard and your words, vile. You will equivocate and prevaricate and try to explain what “cash cow hooker” REALLY means. Spare yourself the effort, son. Your words harm not only the people to whom you direct them. They harm YOU, confirming the smug toxicity of your religious culture and distancing you from the work of the Holy Spirit.
Repent. You are way too far on a very wrong track. And do not make the mistake that you are merely dismissing me when you dismiss this. You have the Lover of the marginalized, the ones in whom we see and know Christ, to answer to. I pray for you as you do. Your “balls” have distanced you from your soul.