it all makes sense... sort of

After reading and thinking about Intelligent Design and peer review and Christianity and gay rights, I stumbled across this article by Jim Brown of Agape Press:

(AgapePress) - A Christian group is asking an Assemblies of God Bible college in Pennsylvania to drop a frequent guest chapel speaker because of his heretical beliefs. But the school's president is defending his decision to invite a man who holds to universalist theology and an unbiblical view of homosexuality.

Dr. Don Meyer says he is not backing down from his decision to once again welcome Dr. Tony Campolo to preach in chapel today (Tuesday) at Valley Forge Christian College, a small four-year college located northwest of Philadelphia. Campolo, a well-known media commentator on religious, social and political matters, often preaches with his wife in homosexual-affirming churches, where he has stated that the homosexual "did not choose homosexuality," but is rather "a victim either of biological accident or someone else's folly."

Campolo is also founder of the Evangelical Association for the Promotion of Education, an inner-city ministry that combines evangelism and social justice in public schools, universities, orphanages, literacy centers, and tutoring programs. But Michael Marcavage, director of the Philadelphia-based group Repent America, says Valley Forge Christian College is ignoring the scriptural command to mark and avoid false teachers.

In what teachers call an "aha!" moment, it all came together.

Intelligent Design proponents, the majority of whom are Christians and hold to a fairly literal interpretation of the Bible, view science and religion through the same lens. Doctrinally speaking, someone with radical ideas is a "heretic," not to be reasoned with, but to be shunned, by "scriptural command." If you tend to think of scientists as a cabal of dogmatists, holding fast to the Word of Naturalist Truth, then any response from said cabal is not a matter of reason but of repression, not of critique but of counterattack. It's projection in the classic sense: IDers feel that way about religious heresy, so they assume that scientists must naturally feel as strongly about unorthodox theories.

I doubt I'm the first to formulate the comparison, but it finally sank in upon seeing the absurd treatment of Dr. Campolo, who is a famed speaker, a good man, and a bright fellow to boot.

Amazingly, Campolo's view on homosexuality isn't even terribly progressive; blaming gay behavior on genetic mistakes or molestation (what I assume he means by "someone else's folly") still plays to the standard Christian line that homosexuality is "unnatural."