Conservative Babylon

If Pastor Sean Harris with his command to break your four-year-old’s arm to keep away Teh Gay isn’t hateful enough, there’s always Ronnie Baity, pastor of Berean Baptist Church, Winston-Salem, North Carolina, and head of anti-gay activist organization “Return America”:

“For 300 years, we had laws that would prosecute that lifestyle. We’re not smarter in the last few years than we’ve been in 300 years. We’ve gone down the wrong path.”

And how have homosexuals been prosecuted over the past 300 years — since, say, 1712?

First, let’s go back bit further in time; homosexuality was prosecuted as a capital crime long before 1712. Burning at the stake (that’s where the word “faggot” eventually came from), as well as numerous other creative forms of torture-murder for “sodomites,” was common practice in “Christian” Europe a scant few centuries after the establishment of the church as central authority, and continued unabated for the next couple of millennia.

“Attitudes toward homosexuality, eunouchos and third-gender citizens in general declined rapidly throughout Europe under Christian rule,” writes Amara Das Wilhelm. “In 389 A.D., Rome took away the right of eunouchos to make or benefit from wills. A year later, an imperial Roman decree criminalized sex between men with a prescribed penalty of death by burning. Although widely ignored at first, the new law stigmatized homosexuals and pushed them underground and behind closed doors. In 538 and 544 A.D., Justinian I enacted further laws against homosexuality in the East Roman or Byzantine Empire. Two centuries later, the Visigothic Code was established in West Roman Europe ordering the castration or death of anyone found guilty of sodomy.”

Ron Baity’s Greatest Hits Lies

• Implies that gay people are worse than maggots;

• Compares gay people to murderers;

• Wants to “save” gay people so they will “quit being homos”;

• Claims accepting gay people would make society “more filthy”;

• Claims gay people are embracing a “learned lifestyle,” regardless of what science says;

• Claims gay people are not “normal”;

• Claims gay people are promoting “perversion” in schools; says kids who join pro-LGBT clubs should “set down in the middle of next week”;

• Says the LGBT community wants to use their “lifestyles” to “recruit” others towards the “urban renewal program” experienced by Sodom & Gomorrah, since gay peoples’ “pleasure in doing evil” is “the one sin in the Bible that causes God to act swiftly”;

• Says gays and gay marriage are signing America’s “death warrant”;

• Says pedophilia and bestiality are next;

• Says we were smarter when homosexuality was prosecuted;

• Says of LGBT activists: “Since they cannot produce they must recruit young people to their perverted, warped agenda. One cannot think of anything more nauseating, debased, lewd and immoral than recruiting precious young people into such shameful conduct.”;

• Claims that if “a generation endorses same-sex marriage, a generation will be the last generation on the face of the Earth”

— Video and more:
GLAAD Commentator Accountability Project

Little (actually, nothing) changed for centuries — all thanks to Christianity. “In 1463,” writes Wilhelm, “a man was convicted by the Court of Holland for homosexuality (sodomy) and burned at the stake. A year later, his partner was whipped down the streets of The Hague and had his hair burnt off his head. In Christian Europe, the execution of homosexual men slowly increased from the fifteenth century until ending in the early 1800s. Nearly a thousand sodomy trials were conducted in Holland (now the Netherlands) from 1730 to 1811 and between 1730 and 1732 alone, seventy-five ‘sodomites’ were sentenced to death. Convicted homosexuals were systematically garroted (strangled with a cord) either privately within the cellars of city halls or publicly on scaffolds in front of large audiences. Deaths by hanging, burning at the stake, breaking on a wheel and drowning in a barrel of water were also some of the recorded methods used. Determined to exterminate sodomy ‘from top to bottom,’ the Court of Holland conducted one of the harshest campaigns against homosexuality in early modern Europe.

“Curiously, however” — and unfortunately for hysterical homophobes like Pastor Baity — “the harsh penalties against sodomy in Holland and other parts of Europe did little to extinguish the ‘crime.’”

But let’s assume Pastor Baity is referring only to prosecution of homosexuality in the Americas. He would need to know that the “first English statute against homosexuality was placed on the books by Parliament in 1533, under Henry VIII. This law, which made it a capital felony for any person to ‘commit the detestable and abominable vice of buggery with mankind or beast,’ was several times reenacted and repealed, and finally reinstated under Elizabeth in 1563 in a form that remained unchanged until 1861, when the death penalty was dropped for life imprisonment.” — Louis Crompton, “Homosexuals and the Death Penalty in Colonial America,” University of Nebraska – Lincoln (1976)

This is important, since: “In America, the five pre-Revolutionary southern colonies, following the lead of Virginia, either regarded the English law as in force without incorporating it into their statutes or else, as in the case of South Carolina, adopted it verbatim. In the north, however, a special Puritan code developed that uniquely distinguished America’s legal style (though not, in this case, the substance of the law) from that of England. It was the spirit of Calvin’s Geneva, not of Westminster, that prevailed in the Puritan colonies as far as capital laws were concerned. Nowhere does this self-identification of the Puritans, in legal matters, with the Jews of the Old Testament show more clearly than in the opening lines of the preamble to Connecticut’s Laws of 1672… The first American ‘code,’ if it can be called that, was a simple list of ‘Capitall offences lyable to death’ drawn up in Plymouth Colony in [1636]. These included treason, murder, witchcraft, arson, sodomy, rape, buggery (here denoting bestiality), and adultery.”

In 1641, the Bay Colony adopted “its famous Body of Laws and Liberties, which punished 12 capital crimes, among them sodomy. Once again, this legislation, which set a precedent in its language for several other states, made clear the Puritan determination to form a Bible Commonwealth and to bring their laws into line with the Old Testament. The Bay Colony, in making sodomy a capital crime, did not follow the English statute but instead adopted the language of Leviticus 20: 13. Section 8 of the 1641 laws was thus a word-for-word translation of a Hebrew law more than 2,000 years old: ‘If any man lyeth with mankinde as he lyeth with a woman, both of them have committed abhomination, they both shall surely be put to death’ (Whitmore, 1890, p. 55). Astonishingly, this phraseology was to remain on the books of at least one American state — Connecticut — until some 46 years after the Declaration of Independence.”

Forty-six years after the Declaration of Independence (1776) would bring us to 1822, or about the time the European Inquisitions ended once and for all — and Spain, Portugal, and “a majority of Latin American nations” did what the United States failed to do until 2003: decriminalize sodomy. In North America, Canada was still flogging men for homosexual behavior, while the fledgling United States had all but switched from the state-sanctioned murder of homosexuals to merely awarding them long, long prison sentences.

So, giving Pastor Ronnie the benefit of the doubt (which is far more than he deserves), if he doesn’t mean to advocate death to gays, then he’d better adjust his calendar and 0go back only, oh, 180 years… in this country, anyway. But the fact remains: He went back 300 years. There’s no other way to read this than: Ronnie Baity wants gays dead.

Which does not, mind you, make Ronnie Baity a hypocrite in any way, shape or form. He’s a hypocrite because he lies. See the sidebar (“Ron Baity’s Greatest Hits Lies”) for just a handful of examples.

And if he’s not lying, then he’s quite gullible, too lazy or incapable of cracking open a history book, and/or just not very smart — or he really doesn’t know right from wrong, or a fact from a lie — any or all of which means his judgment about any issue simply cannot be trusted, and he is no more qualified to pastor a church with any degree of integrity than a guinea pig.

Well, that’s not really fair — guinea pigs aren’t generally known for mounting hate campaigns against other guinea pigs on orders from an invisible Guinea Pig in the Sky. So, we apologize to guinea pigs.

Related posts (automatically generated):

1. UMC Pastor Arthur Schirmer’ s First Wife’s Death Re-Classified Homicide (And Guess Who May Be Looking at His Second Murder Charge?)
2. The Hypocrisy Files: North Carolina Amendment 1
3. Finally, We Might Learn Just How Big A Rat Ronnie Really Was
4. My Name Is John Joe Thomas. I Stoned To Death A 70-Year-Old Developmentally-Disabled Man Who Left Me Everything In His Will, And Then I Claimed The “Gay Panic” Defense. And I’m A Mormon.
5. Heidi Thompson: “Persecuted” Because Theft Should Be OK When You Steal for God (And To Smite Teh Gays)

2 Responses to “N.C. Amendment 1 Pastor Ronnie Baity Longs for the Days When Gays Were Put to Death”