Brian Tamaki, and the gay earthquakes? Discuss. Well, I say it’s time we turned this debate on its head, and showed the beleaguered bishop a little understanding. After all, being a prophet is a tough gig. You pore over the ancient scriptures totting up sins, and then come up with the doomsday news that Armageddon is set down for — let’s say — this morning.
And it doesn’t happen. The earth isn’t consumed by fire. There is neither nuclear conflagration, nor a plague on perverts. When it can’t even rain frogs, the prophet looks like a sad sack. Then out of the blue, amidst all this propheting failure, Bishop Tamaki, head of Destiny Church, scores one between the posts.
A fortnight back the Bishop delivered his sermon predicting earthquakes. He reminded us quakes had punished the anti-Christs of Christchurch. Quoting Leviticus, the Bible’s book on the science of sinning, the Bishop explained the earth convulses and "spews itself up" when it can no longer bear the weight of sexual perversion. So watch, he said, more quakes be coming.
The morning after his prophesy we copped our just deserts — a 7.8 that laid waste to dens of iniquity from Kaikoura to Wellington. What timing! Quelle succès! [What success!] One imagines breakfast at the Tamakis as the news came though.
"Gosh darling, what a corker prophesy. That’ll show the sinners."
"Yes dear, they’ll be quaking in their boots. And now we must obey the First Media Commandment, and post my sermon on Facebook. Would it be too much to ask you to pass the marmalade?"
Perhaps the Bishop spent the day crouched by his phone waiting for the congratulatory calls. The thanks he actually received was a torrent of condemnation, and 120,000 people signing a petition to take away the church’s tax-free status because it was an "anti-gay hate group".
But to get serious — it’s one thing to ridicule the weirder examples of old-time religion, but quite another to demand its believers be punished financially. This is a new intolerance, which won’t let parts of the Christian faith espouse the silly bits. The only surprise about Bishop Tamaki’s ancient fundamentalist predictions, was that he fluked a good date to deliver them. The proper response was a yawning "so what?"
Christianity has coupled sin and sexual morality with catastrophe since the apostles were in short togas. The fruitier views of Bishop Tamaki are eerily similar to those the baby boomer was taught (and mainly forgot) in 1960s Bible Classes. If we lived in today’s United States, 25.4% of our countrymen would still be "evangelical" Christians.
It’s old news that a large chunk of Christianity doesn’t accept gay sexuality. Their views range from mild distaste to outrage. But like gays, football fans and cucumber growers — that is, like you and me — Old Time Christians are as sincere in their prejudices as they are in their beliefs.
Bishop Tamaki wasn’t some mullah calling on people to kill infidels, or car-bomb sodomites. He was just a churchman regurgitating a fire and brimstone routine that’s been preached ten thousand times.
Destiny Church does decent social work. A petition to strip its charity tax breaks on the grounds it is an ‘‘anti-gay hate group’’ is a crude shot at smothering its old-fashioned views on morality.
The petition was mounted on a website called change.org. This year a feminist group used the same petitions website to bully a little Melbourne cinema into dumping a documentary called The Red Pill. The Fems said this Men’s Rights film was disgraceful because it interviewed "misogynists" and "haters" — men who were "pro-rape racists" from a "sexist cesspit".
It seems the first principle of drafting a ‘‘hate speech’’ complaint is that you angrily frame it in hate speech.
Urban Dictionary offers a very funny reflection on the verbal minefields that now surround free speech and victim groups. It defined political correctness as ‘‘a way we speak in American so that we don’t offend whining pussies’’. C’mon, you have to giggle.
Voltaire was defending the right to be a Brian Tamaki when he wrote in 1758: "I disapprove of what you say but I will defend to the death your right to say it."
Voltaire lived during a free-speaking age known as the Enlightenment. Are we now in censorious new times which will become remembered as the Endarkenment?
- John Lapsley is an Arrowtown writer.
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Comments
Whoa. A quantum leap to associate the anti Bishop Tamaki witch hunt with assertive Feminist opinion. You are not female, and neither am I. When it comes to "The Red Pill", at least the women critics have seen the masculinist propaganda.