Letter to Mayor Johnson about Marketplace Chaplains
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I wrote Mayor Eric Johnson, with copies to all the Dallas City Council members about the Marketplace Chaplains, along with my online documentation, from which the Dallas City Council had speaker give the invocation four times this Summer and Fall 2022. I have reported on this group prior and I have the links about them at the end of this post.
This was the text of my letter to Mayor Johnson.
Nov. 28, 2022.
Mayor Eric Johnson, City of Dallas, 1500 Marilla St., Dallas, TX 75201
Dear Hon. Johnson:
Creepy isn’t a good image for a city. For a city for which there was a University of Chicago Press book published in 2015 about Dallas titled “Nut Country,” and a city that spent decades trying to live down the label, “city of hate,” I would think that it would be important to avoid things that tend to reinforce the image of Dallas as having things slithering around in its politics. My academic career on research and reporting on the neo-Confederates owes its origin to my being in Dallas with its local neo-Confederates.
The two enclosed reports on Marketplace Chaplains are online at:
The letter had links to these two posts.
In my view it is an organization which opportunistically uses employee distress to evangelize. In reading the reasons given by Marketplace Chaplains as to why an employer should retain their services, I was reminded of James Henley Thornwell’s sermon, “The Rights and the Duties of Masters,” preached at the dedication of a church for the religious instruction of slaves, in Columbia, South Carolina, 1850 in which the theme was that religious instruction made slaves more manageable.
You can read it at this link:
https://archive.org/details/rightsandduties00thorgoog
I think it is disingenuous to fly pride flags outside city hall during June, but at the same time be enabling groups like this by giving them prestige, credibility, and publicity as invocators at Dallas City Council meetings.
Let’s not have any nonsense trying to make this an issue of religious freedom. I am not asking the City of Dallas to arrest or suppress them; I am asking that they not be promoted. You would never have a member of the Nation of Islam or someone from one of the factions of Hebrew Israelites in Dallas give an invocation, but it seems that is acceptable to have a member of a religious group which has an anti-Gay agenda to give an invocation.
I am curious to know if any member of the LGBT+ religious groups have ever been invited to give an invocation. Also, I am curious if there have ever been any invocators who weren’t part of the Judeo-Christian tradition, and further if there have been any invocators that weren’t one of the three major Abrahamic faiths.
In regards to Marketplace Chaplains I don’t think it really required my research papers to suspect what their agenda might be. I think that the Dallas City Council members need to ask some questions when they are selecting someone to give an invocation.
Surely in the City of Dallas there are some religious persons that don’t have an agenda against Gay people, or some other group.
Going forward, those selecting a member of the Marketplace Chaplains to give an invocation are enemies of the Gay community and the LGBT+ communities. Hopefully members of Marketplace Chaplains and other anti-Gay groups will not be invited to give invocations at Dallas City Council meetings.
Sincerely yours,
Edward H. Sebesta
CC: Chad West, Jesse Moreno, Casey Thomas II, Carolyn King Arnold, Jaime Resendez, Omar Narvaez, Adam Bazaldua, Tennell Atkins, Paula Blackmon, Adam McGough, Jaynie Schultz, Cara Mendelsohn, Gay Donnell Willis, Paul E. Ridley.
Results
The report in the Dallas Observer gives strong invocation that the policies for the selection of the invocation speakers is going to be changed.
This was a project started in June continuing to the end of November. Six months, 25 weeks roughly. It wasn’t a super amount of work. Probably an hour a week. Is it a world changing thing, no, but it does reduce governement support for homophobic religions and it does establish a policy that anti-Gay groups aren’t tolerated by City Hall and that we really mean it.
Further, other cities in the Dallas Fort-Worth are likely to consider their policies about invocation speakers.
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