Cruelty and cowardice from South Carolina Christians on Pride Month
Horry County Council recently decided to remedy ignorance with cowardice. But it’s hard to tell if it really was cowardice or just plain old-fashioned cruelty, conservative Christian-style.
June is Pride Month, a celebration and recognition of the LGBTQ community. It wasn’t a declaration demanding that Myrtle Beach-area churches treat that community as equals – though Christ-centered churches should have long been doing that without prompting from anyone else because it’s the right thing to do – not even a demand to treat them with a basic level of respect. It wasn’t calling for a temporary suspension of laws and giving gays and lesbians and trans people special rights while muzzling conservative pastors from damning them all to Hell from their pulpits. It required absolutely nothing of conservative Christians, did not take anything sacred from them.
And yet, it was too much for conservative pastors who bullied scared-feckless council members into reversing a sensible resolution, simply recognizing the presence of people who deserve to be treated with dignity as much as anyone else no matter how red the 7th Congressional district or South Carolina becomes.
Council rubberstamped the Pride resolution, as it usually does. That’s as it should be. Such resolutions, including one for “National Public Works Week,” aren’t controversial. They don’t require a tax increase. They aren’t rezonings of sensitive areas for development. For the most part, they are passed to recognize and uplift members of our community, which is why Council did not debate Pride Month – because there was no reason to.
Conservative pastors in the area were alarmed – alarmed! – that council had decided to treat members of the LGBTQ community like the fellow human beings they are, created in the image in God like the rest of us, showed them a bit of decency in an area all too often hostile towards them. Like Jesus would do, like Jesus repeatedly demonstrated throughout the Bible conservative Christians claim to live by. The greatest commandment isn’t to preach Hell and damnation but to love our neighbors as we love ourselves, to treat them as we’d want to be treated.
Apparently, that’s too much to ask of conservative Christians who were supposedly poised to overrun council meetings to ensure members of the LGBTQ community aren’t treated like the rest of us.
This is what Johnny Vaught, a council member who recently failed in an attempt to become council chairman, told The Sun News:
“We had no idea and that’s our fault, we had no idea it was the LGBTQ (resolution). And everyone else picked up on it and they were going to fill the chamber with members raising hell if we didn’t do something about it.”
Members like Vaught quickly caved at the thought of just the possibility, not even waiting to see if the threat of angry conservative Christians speaking angrily at a council meeting would materialize. It’s cowardice in the extreme. And it’s cruelty, unnecessary, ugly – ungodly.
The Rev. Mack Hutson of Pleasant Hill Baptist Church in Conway led the charge against the resolution, telling The Sun News: “Everybody I had talked to was totally against it. The gay community (are) not the only people who live in Horry County.”
No word on whether Hutson was against the “National Public Works Week” resolution, too, given that the good folks who work in public works departments are not the only people who live in Horry County. Given his logic, council should never again recognize Breast Cancer Awareness Month or Black History Month because, you know, women with breast cancer and black people aren’t the only people who live here, either.
Christians should neither be cowardly nor cruel. In this case, they managed to be both.