Several days ago, I blogged about a young churchgoer in South Dakota, Dannika Nash, who had written an open letter to the churches to stop driving young church members away in droves by forcing them to choose between loving their gay friends and family members, and buying into the churches' draconian and unjust postures towards gay folks. As my posting notes, I learned of Nash's open letter through Fred Clark's wonderful Slacktivist blog.
Yesterday, Fred posted a follow-up posting--what Paul Harvey might have called the rest of the story. Here's what happened when Dannika Nash published her appeal to the churches to stop driving young churchgoers away by attacking the gays: she was sitting in a coffeshop with her boyfriend, her phone rang, and when she answered it, the director of the church camp at which she worked during the summer told her she was fired. He "politely, regretfully" dismissed her from her job.
And here's Fred's response:
If you’re going to be a moronic asshat, I suppose it’s better to do so “politely” and “regretfully,” but that doesn’t change the fact that the director of this church camp is a moronic asshat.
His first reaction to reading Nash’s explanation of why so many young people no longer feel welcome in the church was to pick up the telephone and personally inform a young person that she was no longer welcome in the church. Faced with Nash’s eloquent complaint that young people were figuratively being forced out of the church, his first reaction was to actually force a young person out of the church.
And that's about as pitch-perfect of a response to this church camp director's action as I can imagine.