In case you didn’t already know that neither Pastor Manning nor Pastor Driscoll are even slightly acquainted with logic, the last couple week’s revelations will make it crystal clear.

I’m not even sure where to begin. Pastor Manning’s most recently posted youtube video explains how NASA’s Voyager spacecraft proves that homos are perverts, with a long digressive rant about rectums. Pastor Driscoll’s supporters have been trying to distance themselves from recently unearthed postings on the church’s forums in which Driscoll explained that god created each woman as a special home for a particular penis.

You can’t make this crazy stuff up!

These two particular lessons from these two guys have a lot in common. And this commonality is fundamental to both the misogynist and anti-gay philosophies that each espouse. Because in each rant, each pastor spends a disturbing amount of time describing the places where penises ought to be inserted, and places where they should not. I leave the question of why, over the years, these two have talked about that specific topic so much as an exercise for the reader.

Okay, first let’s go with Pastor Manning. James Manning is the pastor of the church in Harlem which I have blogged about before that is fond of putting offensive anti-gay messages on its church sign.

In his rant (this article has a link to the video), Manning claims that NASA’s Voyager space craft and Hubble telescope have looked deep into the universe and proven that “everything has an opposite.” Therefore, the “entire universe rebukes sodomy, it rebukes same-sex marriage, it rebukes man lying with man.”

Than he starts talking about rectums, and why life can’t be created in a rectum, and why Satan tricks people into thinking that they can create life in a rectum. You start wondering if this is a form of Tourette Syndrome where he has a neurological compulsion to say the word “rectum” every few seconds.

There was some more in there about why transexual people can’t be saved by Jesus because they can’t be brought into the church to be prayed over. Some bit about genitals and more talk about rectums. I tried to listen all the way through, but the stupid is so intense, it hurts. I don’t understand how his head doesn’t explode from the immense build-up of illogic.

In some ways, Pastor Mark Driscoll’s penis home talk seems almost quaint by comparison. Mark Driscoll is the lead pastor of a sort of franchise of megachurches that I’ve blogged about a few times before. All of the plagiarism scandals, questions about how money that was supposedly raised for helping the needy has gone unaccounted for, manipulating “sales” to push the pastor’s book onto the bestseller list, and many disturbing stories of harassment of members who questions the leaders, and so forth have apparently taken their toll on attendance and (more importantly) donations. Not only has the church itself been kicked out of at least one evangelical association, but they’re having to close down several branch churches for lack of funds.

And then a little blog called Wenatchee the Hatchet reposted a lot of discussions from an old church online forum, excerpts of which have since been republished on some Christian news sites. And now the church leadership has been contacting tech-savvy members to try to remove this information from the internet, along with contacting members and begging them to destroy any evidence of these discussions.

I could summarize, but why don’t I just let Pastor Mark’s words speak for themselves?

“The first thing to know about your penis is, that despite the way it may seem, it is not your penis. Ultimately, God created you and it is his penis. You are simply borrowing it for a while.

“While His penis is on loan you must admit that it is sort of just hanging out there very lonely as if it needed a home, sort of like a man wondering the streets looking for a house to live in. Knowing that His penis would need a home, God created a woman to be your wife and when you marry her and look down you will notice that your wife is shaped differently than you and makes a very nice home…

“Therefore, if you are single you must remember that your penis is homeless and needs a home. But, though you may believe your hand is shaped like a home, it is not. And, though women other than your wife may look like a home, to rest there would be breaking into another man’s home. And, if you look at a man it is quite obvious that what a homeless man does not need is another man without a home.” — (Pastor Mark Driscoll, originally posted under the pseudonym William Wallace II, but in an earlier incident Driscoll admitted WWII was himself).

When you remember that in more recent sermons Pastor Mark has referred to a man’s wife as a garden, and then later mentioned that if a man is unhappy with how his garden looks, to remember that “you are the gardener,” it’s not credible to deny that Pastor Mark and his entire theology is anti-women. This analogy isn’t just sexist and misogynist it’s also viciously stupid.

And he’s hardly the only one to claim that, for instance, the reason a guy shouldn’t engage in pre-marital sex is because any hypothetical woman the guy is having sex with is actually the property of her future husband who she may not have even met yet. It’s a pretty standard component not just of Christian fundamentalism but also a lot of other fundamentalist religions. It’s the belief that underlies honor killings and corrective rape, after all.

The saddest things about both of these men is that there are a number of people out there who follow them and give them money. I mean, seriously, is anything more juvenile than all of the time these two spend thinking about butts and boners?