Tactics and learnings in protesting a homophobic church. The protest at Trinity Church Bishop Arts.
Working to have tactics to better stop homophobic churches.
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This is beginning to get national exposure.
In the story about discrimination against us by Nextdoor, our informational post about Trinity Church is getting mentioned.
This is a developing story.
Nextdoor is headquartered in San Francisco and the San Francisco Human Rights Commission is going to issue a statement. We await the response of Nextdoor.
The Bay Area Reporter is the LGBT newspaper there.
We don't have a human rights commission in Dallas, but we do have excuses why we don't have one. I will put in the comments the article which Nextdoor banned.
https://www.ebar.com/story.php?ch=news&sc=national&id=331012
The scene
There were five of us for the first protest. I am taking the photo. The man in gray slacks and sweatshirt was a church member. The homophobic church is behind us.The sidewalk is public property. This protest was done with two days preparation. This is the intersection of Sunset and Bishop.
The following is myself and another of our team. I dressed in bright colors to make sure motorists would see us. As it was the Trinity Church sign itself made us visible. About an hour and a half later they realized it and turned off their sign. Though the street lighting was fairly good.
Introduction
The protest was 5 to 7pm. Sunday Nov. 12, 2023.
There were two goals.
[1] Alert the local community that this was a homophobic church. The community didn’t know.
[2] Develop more effective tactics with dealing with homophobic churches.
Goal 1 Results:
People in the neighborhood did notice us. Some cars slowed down to see what we were doing. Many people cheered us from their car as we passed by. Those people will mention the church in conversation over the coming weeks with neighbors.
We can’t say we have alerted the whole neighborhood, but we got the process started.
Also, our notice about the upcoming protest, and our first report about the church was shared to different LGBT and faminist groups. This report will be published and shared which will alert others.
There will need to be ongoing activities.
Goal 2 Results:
At the beginning of the protest I talked to the group about developing a new approch to dealing with homophobic churches. I said that I couldn’t guarentee that the new methods would work, but but we should give them a try. The current methods used have limited impact and if we develop better methods, the other LGBT groups around the world could learn and benefit.
So first I emphasized four things.
[1] No Biblical arguments justifying Gays. Biblical arguments make our right to exist contigent on involved theological arguments which won’t ever end. We are also making Christian acceptance required for us to exist and legitimize Christianity. The homophobic Christians have developed their homophobic Christian arguments and by debating the Bible, you are attempting to fight them on their terrain.
We live in a democracy and not a theocracy and we don’t care what some stray religious book might say.
[2] We don’t want to debate the logical consistency of Christianity or whether the Christian god exists. The Christians have faced arguments over the logical contradictions and whether God exists for 20 centuries now, and it doesn’t matter what argument there might be, for Christians they argue starting with their religion is right and then fit it with arguments and rationalizations to justify it or just say it is “faith,” which is another way of saying, “Because I said so.”
Atheist seem to do alot of this type of debating since they seem to be trying to get over their fundamentalist childhoods. This type of debating really doesn’t do us any good.
[3] We are not trying to save them from their beliefs. We are not trying to win them over. We are not trying to change their beliefs.
[4] Our goal is to psychologically disable them by having them confront the pathology behind their religion. They use their religion to fill their empty lives. We are not going to get them to just quite immediately, but we will plant the ideas in their head and let them germinate.
They use Jesus like fentanyl and giggly jiggly Jesus through everything.
The protest
They started to come out and there was engagement.
The group did well on points #1 and #2 very well. On point #3 not so well.
When the first church member came out, we will call him A, he proudly stated that he had had a drug problem and that Jesus saved him from drugs and that he and the other members of the church love us.
These churches are predators and they feed on people who can’t manage their own lives.
My response was, “So your faith is like duct tape holding you together”. Sarcastically I said, “How did I avoid being addicted without Jesus all my life.”
I wanted to focus on the church as a predator and its members as people who can’t manage their lives and use their religion as a duct tape.
Others came out, they said they loved us, LGBT are welcome at their church, they have LGBT friends, etc.
The group decided to approach it as if they were having a good faith discussion as they might with neighbors or family and started presenting the evidence. Person A, didn’t want to look at the evidence. He claimed that the link might lead to a virus on his phone etc.
Our group pulled up onlines videos and stuff to show the other church members. The church members resorted to trying to detach the Bishop Arts branch from the Cedar Hills branch as if the Cedar Hill branch might be homophobic and the Bishop Arts branch wasn’t.
Two of our signs weren’t facing the intersection.
Our group was now engaged in trying to convince people who knew full well that their church believed that homosexuality was contrary to their Christian god’s will that their church was homophobic. Our group was being played.
The agenda showing the pathology of the church’s behaviors fell by the way side initially. They were able to see what information we had gathered, how we knew their agenda, how we understood it.
Don’t talk to them as if they are arguing in good faith.
We did recover from our mistake. I called out loudly that, “Your love is toxic love.” I talked of stealth homophobia. I mentioned that their faith was “Love the sinner, hate the sin,” as a con, and that they were attempting to mislead us.
I talked to some of the members individually. The pastor started to barge in and speak very loudly to block me talking to group members. I made a mistake, I told the pastor to, “Shut the fuck up.” Immediately the agenda was how she was victimized by my words, even though she had been actively disrupting my conversation. It dosen’t matter that she was the aggressor, I had made a mistake.
We need to have self-discipline at protests.
We still didn’t bring up their pathological motivations, but their attempt to represent themselves in certain ways collapsed and at that point they went into the church.
This comment was posted this morning on our report about the church. This member is affirming their homophobia and also how Dallas Gay Liberation believed their homophobia was constructed.
The protest was very successful in several ways.
[1] We were able to collapse their denials of homophobia.
[2] By not debating the Bible and not debating Christianity we were able to move to a more advanced approached. The church was forced to try denying their homophobia.
[3] The group learned how they had been manipulated.
So we made a lot of progress.
Did we accomplish everything we wanted to do or achieve, no, but we made a lot of progress. It is going to take some effort and practice to change our approach. We tend to have habits which are hard to leave behind.
We now have five people who are now understanding at a more advanced level how to respond to these homophobic Christians. I was given a lot more to think about.
It will take time to develop arguments and statements that are very brief, but get them to start thinking about the pathological basis of their Christianity.
It seems they called the police.
The police talked to us. They weren’t confrontational, just wanted us to know that the sidewalk was public and the area beyond the sidewalk wasn’t.
Why would they attempt to deny hostility towards Gays?
More and more homophobic churches are not forthcoming about their homophobia. There strategy is to pull people into their church and get them emotionally committed to the church before having them accept homophobia. If people know that the church is homophobic at the onset, they will not get involved with that church.
Also, these church’s product is a euphoric narcotic of sort where they are giggly happy and being angry hostile against Gays isn’t giggly happy.
This is a weak point that we need to learn to utilize. Wanting to deny our existence needs to be explained in a way that they can’t remain giggly happy with their fentanyl Jesus.
Why are we doing this?
They are developing an following in Dallas and in the Bishop Arts District area. They are building an anti-Gay constituency in Dallas. Also, Gay vulnerable people who are having problems get pulled into churches like this, not realizing what they have been pulled into until they are manipulated to accept homophobic Christianity.
The toleration of a homophobic church near a large concentration of LGBT also signals a community that has a low self-worth and not willing to defend itself.
To tolerate this church in the Bishop Arts area is to testify that our humanity has no worth.
Plans
We will continue to do protests and alert the community. We chose the time based on what we thought was the major event of the week and when there would be significant traffic at the intersection of Sunset and Bishop to see our protest.
However, it might be better if we were on the streets protesting at their Jesus Burgers events, where they serve hamburgers on Fridays from 7 to 10pm. I am also thinking of writing the restaurants in the area to have a counter food offering.
For this Instagram post the text is:
The gospel is blazing through Bishop Arts! See you tonight at Jesus Burgers! May the city of Dallas and beyond experience the presence and power of the Holy Spirit.
7-10pm
334 Sunset Avenue
Dallas, TX
Come for amazing burgers and have interesting conversations! Let’s spread the love of Jesus!
Probably no one realizes that these burgers come with a serving of homophobia.
Our future plans will be to make sure people know they do come with a serving of homophobia.
they live by the 10 commandments, none of those commandments say anything about being gay or trans. There is a commandment about loving your neighbor, and one about taking gods name in vain like, assuming god wants you to hate some shit even though the beatitudes exist. Blessed are the peacemakers, ect.