Wednesday, July 3, 2013

#621: Penna Dexter


When you come across something called the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, you can be pretty sure its purpose is not to promote ethics or religious liberty. Penna Dexter is a member of  the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, and she used to be a cohost in the fundamentalist radio talkshow “Point of View” (host: Kerby Anderson). Dexter’s main concern – despite what she might, in fact, think herself – is not liberty.

Instead Dexter is extremely concerned about zeh Gays: “It's not politically correct to say so, but the greatest threat to America … today is the advancing homosexual agenda” (also here). The main problem with that statement is not that it is not politically correct; in any case, to remedy the gay situation, Dexter therefore calls on Americans like herself, who are concerned about “so many attempts to silence God's word,” to pave the way for political action with “fervent prayer,” and I suppose it would be a good thing if people like Dexter restricted themselves to prayer as a strategy but you suspect she won’t. She has also been caught blaming the suicide of homosexual teens on themselves.

Dexter’s other main schticks include the obliteration of the separation of church and state, in line with how she and people of her ilk understand “religious liberty” (i.e. not). After all, the First Amendment, the way Dexter has read it (hardly) just means that everyone has the right to be Christian. Then there is the usual anti-healthcare stuff, her admirably unambiguous position in the ongoing War on Christmas, climate change denialism (“Climate doom and gloom is a ruse to empower a world body and to spread the wealth,” case in point: “Climategate”), and exposing the liberal conspiracies that are the U.S education system, in particular universities (I won’t link to her articles on these issues; you’ll have to seek them out herself).

Diagnosis: Completely typical representative of the mass of batshit crazy nuts who makes up the Taliban alliance against reality. I suppose Dexter is not particularly influential, or particularly extreme; she is still a flailingly insane bigot, and as such dangerous.

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