Coming Out Strong

This might come in handy the next time you hear or see anything that seems a little bigoted (or a lot bigoted). It was made by Willie Hewes. I don’t know her but she knows her anti-gay rhetoric up and down, side to side, and diagonally. She also creates comics and writes a blog, you can check her out here. She inspired me to make a knock-off version of it of things I’ve heard around the Mennonite and Brethren churches and elsewhere (in addition to the ones she used here, which I’ve also heard plenty of times). Here’s my version (I posted it inside the mothership because I haven’t figured out how to make a table here yet).

Wouldn’t it be fun to print off a bunch of BINGO cards and take them to your next district/conference meeting or the denominational assemblies in Cleveland or San Jose and pass them out to your friends? Whovever gets 5 in a row first can shout “ANTI-GAY BINGO!” in the middle of the meeting. You could then take your card up to the moderator and ask for a prize. That would be a riot though maybe not everyone there would find it as amusing as I do.

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This also was first posted at YAR (young.anabaptistradicals.org), but I hope it will get some good discussion going here.

I’m going to do a spin-off from the speech I pointed you all to in my last post. So here is the conundrum. I grew up Mennonite. I went to a lovely, nurturing, happy, rural church (East Union Mennonite Church) where I was baptized at 16. I went to a Mennonite summer camp (Crooked Creek Christian Camp) for quite a few years and loved it. I went to many a Mennonite churchwide assemblies as my parents were youth leaders for many years and when I was in high school. I went to a Mennonite high school (Iowa Mennonite School) where I learned lovely things about Mennonite history and faith along with the English and Trig. I served for a year with Mennonite Central Committee (SALT) in South Africa. I spent four formative years at Goshen College. I highly value every one of these institutions as they have played a major part in my formation. Those institutions represent an integral part of almost my entire life. The problem arises when I realize that every single one of these institutions would discriminate against me if I were to want to work for them or even volunteer for them as an openly queer Mennonite.

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