Just when we thought it was safe for us gay guys to go out in public, Pastor Manning from New York is now reminding his co-religionists that gay people should be stoned to death, because “stoning is still the law.” In the same sermon (which he has posted on youtube), he refers to the notion that god is love as a teaching from Satan. I kid you not!

So his now-infamous church sign proclaims that “Jesus would stone homos,” and he’s calling on other Christians to return to this “biblically accurate” understanding. Never mind that when some pharisees wanted to stone an “adulterous woman” and quoted the law at him, that Jesus did not join them in stoning the woman, he simply said, “let he who has not sinned cast the first stone” and then he knelt down beside the woman and waited. Jesus seemed to pretty clearly be against stoning. Jesus also never once mentioned homosexual behavior, at all. And, of course, the scriptural passages most people point to condemning homosexuality are much less clearly about that in the original Hebrew and Greek.

But people like Pastor Manning don’t care about any of that.

This shouldn’t surprise us, since this is the guy who, just a couple weeks ago, proclaimed on his church sign, during his Sunday sermon (also posted on youtube), and on one his weekly podcast that “Obama has unleashed the white homo demons” to turn black men gay and steal them away from good black women. Then the next week he claimed in multiple interviews (and on his podcast and in his sermon) that Obama had ordered the media to ignore him.

I agreed with Elon James White (host of the radio series, “This Week in Blackness,” also a comedian and contributor to news blogs including Salon and the Huffington Post), that Pastor Manning’s crazy talk is dangerous for a variety of reasons. Among the ones I mentioned was fostering a hostile environment that contributed to the suicide of gay kids or kids people think might be gay.

I didn’t mentioned that the same hostile environment fuels hate crimes, because usually when one of us homos makes such a claim, the Christianists and their apologists accuse us of exaggerating and being intolerant. Then they insist that they never, ever condone violence. But the pastor has skipped from implying that people ought to assault and kill gays to just coming out and saying it.

Now, where are all those good, responsible rightwing “Christian” leaders who will come out and denounce his call for violence?

*sound of crickets*

Yeah, that’s what I thought…

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Note: Before any of you Not-All-Like-That Christians send me scolding comments that I shouldn’t give Christians a bad name because you aren’t all like that: please notice that I used the term “Christianist” in the first reference, and then I put quotations around the second reference. Also notice that I pointed to a Biblical story of what Jesus actually did when someone tried to get him to condone stoning. I am clearly aware that Christ’s actual message is not being accurately represented by Pastor Manning. You don’t need to tell us homos that. We aren’t giving Christians a bad name when we point out the crazy hate speech of people like Manning. Manning is giving Christians a bad name. You need to go confront him, not us.