Baptist preacher: Beat gender roles into your kids. Literally.

This literally made me sick to my stomach. No hyperbole, I physically choked on my bile over this.

Can we end this gender role shit now, please?! Seriously, here’s a guy who pretends to have better morality than the rest of us, advocating hitting kids for not acting like their societally prescribed gender roles. As though these kids are somehow evil for liking different things. As though liking wearing a dress means the boy is de facto gay, when this kid could be completely heterosexual otherwise. As though being gay is a bad thing to begin with.

This is just fractally wrong.

Update:
The preacher in question is Sean Harris, Senior Pastor of Berean Baptist Church in Fayetteville, NC. What say we express our outrage via Twitter?

Hat tip Joe.My.God.

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Baptist preacher: Beat gender roles into your kids. Literally.
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24 thoughts on “Baptist preacher: Beat gender roles into your kids. Literally.

  1. 2

    “Man up. Give him a good punch!”

    There is nothing more manly than hurting someone smaller than you are, someone who depends on you financially, psychologically and emotionally. I can’t wait to see my son so I can slap him around when he hugs and kisses me.

    This guy is disgusting, but it’s the congregation that makes me sick. All that “yeah!” and applause and laughter, without a single “Fuck you!”.

  2. 3

    My mother tried that; didn’t work. I still became a biologist, and I still hike and like snakes. The only real effect it had was 10 years of therapy, and an intense dislike of my mother. (and I’m heterosexual, so it really was just about “proper” gender roles!)

  3. 4

    Notice he uses nothing from the Bible to back him up? Good grief. This kind of teaching is just plain wrong. The only roles the bible says that a man should fit into is to being the leader of the household and a woman as his partner in Christ. Nothing about dresses vs. snakes or ditches.

  4. 5

    Notice he uses nothing from the Bible to back him up?

    He could have. Deuteronomy 22:5:

    The woman shall not wear that which pertaineth unto a man, neither shall a man put on a woman’s garment: for all that do so are abomination unto the LORD thy God.

  5. 6

    Repressed homosexuality is a hard thing to live with. I’ve met a lot of these guys and they’re all the same to different degrees. And yes, I know I’m not a psychologist, but I’ve lived and worked with ignorant rednecks for 65 years. I’m pretty sure I know what I’m talking about.

  6. 7

    That’s right down the road from my apartment! I hope his stupidity doesn’t spread. I’m close enough to get infected.

  7. 10

    This is a megachurch, with huge membership, live service streaming, background checks for volunteers, etc. That is what “mainstream” means.

    One marketing page says “Find out why you should attend Berean instead of one of the other 350 churches in the area”.

    Take a look at the “Meet the pastor” page; we find out what restaurants he likes, and what kind of cake. Of course he’s a former soldier. Tough guy. Have to be, to beat up on kids.

  8. 14

    “Break that wrist”? I think that passes beyond what most abusive parents consider appropriate. Of course, those people did actually kill their adopted daughter, so maybe there are really no limits.

  9. 15

    Did the preacher sound like Syndrome from The Incredibles to anyone else?

    I think that passes beyond what most abusive parents consider appropriate.

    This might be the lowest standard in the history of evaluation. What kind of scum are you if you can’t live up to the community moral standards of the child abusers?

    And digging into one branch of the fractal wrongness a bit – did you notice the nature of the gender roles he proposes to so brutally enforce? The nature of masculinity is apparently manual labor and violence, both as perpetrator and victim. The nature of femininity is just physical attractiveness. The words he uses are meant to invoke homosexuality, but gay kids will not be the only ones harmed.

    Imagine this violence-charged narrowness applied to, say, a quiet, bookish boy, or a girl who speaks out for fairness. His wrist is not limp, she is not butch, so are they allowed, is their character permitted? Now reverse the genders and imagine again: do you think a bookish girl, if she believed in the ideas and the better worlds she found in her books, could ever “smell like a girl” by the standards of this congregation? If the boy cries out for fairness against violence, against authority, against God, if he stands with all the courage in the world, has he “manned up”? He has not, she cannot, they are circumscribed.

    He is not cutting the world in half, or even in two unequal pieces, to give one part to men and the other part to women. He is drawing two tiny circles on the vast map that is humanity, and saying “You stand here, and you stand there, and if you move from your places I will hit you. Obey me, I speak for the LORD.”

  10. 16

    What a raging douchebag! Thanks for the tip; I found their FB page and asked them just how hard I need to punch my 4 year old boy (who often emulates his elder sister by wearing her stuff) but they just kept deleting my posts. Not very helpful at all, considering the potential consequences of, you know, punching him TOO hard. It seems that their website/email addresses were inundated with questions from other parents who also wanted to learn about their unique parenting advice. As the websites and emails have been shut down I suppose we’ll have to write him via snail mail.

  11. 17

    all around the world every religious persons claim that they are kind and there their religion is kind and peace…..if don’t accept that…..they kick you,torture you until you accept what they said is true….

  12. 18

    I’m really not sure where to begin. At the risk of sounding just like them, I find a net benefit in sending them all to the disintegration chamber.

  13. 19

    OK, when i heard it earlier today I was uncomfortable but managed all right.

    Then I learned that he has countered criticism by saying “Oh, I was just joking, can’t you people tell?” and for some reason that hit me much harder. I found myself choking back anger that I don’t even know how to express.

    (several, darker paragraphs deleted)

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