Dollars for Disobedience. . .

This was passed on to me.  It concerns the start of the agitation for recognition of gay and lesbians among Lutherans.  Turns out we can point to 1975, to the somewhat conservative American Lutheran Church (sometime fellowship partner with the Missouri Synod, for the real start of the movement now bearing so much fruit (though poisoned) within the ELCA...

You can read it all here...

Here is a sampling. . .

It took years for the nation's leading Lutheran denomination to welcome openly gay members and clergy. Here is a glimpse of the early process... In 1975, the nation was attempting to get over the Watergate scandal and the resignation of President Nixon the previous August. Within Lutheran circles, conservatives successfully whipped up the folks in the pews by hyping their own sense of scandal.

"Dollars for Disobedience" was the headline and the response to Pastor Siefkes’ successful advocacy for a small appropriation for startup of a tiny, fledgling group of Lutheran gays and lesbians. Conservative Lutheran publications were ablaze with criticism of the group and the American Lutheran Church (ALC): “For a major board of one of the country’s major denominations to identify through its budget an organization promoting the blatant transgression of the revealed word of God is a sign of sinking back to the level of official immorality that prevailed when Christianity emerged. Concerned members of the ALC will know how to express their outrage …”

Indeed, at the October 1974 National Conference of the ALC in Detroit, some had expressed themselves by repeatedly tearing down the banner directing delegates to “Gay Headquarters," the small booth staffed by a few LGBT Lutherans. Others were sympathetic to those staffers, including several who received emotional support for their own conflicts of sexual identity.

My words...


In other words, in about one generation the organizers of the GLBT movement have engineered a rather stunning turn around in popular opinion and have take captive one major Lutheran body in the US... Who would have thought it?!?  What was the fringe of Lutheranism in 1975 is now front and center -- either the dominant movement and power in some Lutheran bodies or one of the things that frustrates and nags at the leadership and public proclamation of those not overcome by the GLBT agenda...  And it all began rather innocuously....