Southern Baptists Vote to Expel Churches With Women Pastors

According to the Times, the right wing of the already quite conservative denomination is “pressing for ideological purity and arguing that female pastors are a precursor to acceptance of homosexuality and sexual immorality.” More than 2,000 male pastors have already signed a letter in support of the amendment, which threatens to cast out roughly 1,800 women leaders. Southern Baptists have long said as a statement of faith that women shouldn’t be pastors, but this is believed to be the first time they’ve taken collective action to expel churches over it, according to the Associated Press.

This is the same organization that kept a list of predatory pastors that was never shared to parishioners, nor to law enforcement, but also argues that they couldn’t have talked openly about that list because “each church is it’s own organization and it’s not our part to get involved.

Everything they say makes perfect sense if simply accept the unstated premise that people are not equal: straight men, and especially male pastors, cannot be held to the same standard of moral examination women and gay men are, and in turn “sexual immorality” cannot spring from the well of men doing predation only from the inherent sexuality of simply being a woman or queer.

Who gets to be a sexual free actor making individual choices, who can be granted understanding and grace, versus who is a sexual body that cannot be other than a fuckable thing? It’s a hard-set hierarchy, where the Type Of Person you are leavens the entire proposal of what is morality.