Rev. Charles Worley - For the Love of Christ

The Reverend Charles Worley, Pastor of Providence Road Baptist Church in Maiden, North Carolina; which is about 40 miles from my house; has caused quite a stir with his call for concentration camps for homosexuals. If you haven’t heard this story yet, you should. It is a direct refutation of the attitude that “it can’t happen here.” The reaction of the 300, or so, members of Providence Baptist Church is proof positive that it can. If you haven’t seen the video just listen for the “Amens” as the Reverend calls for a 150 mile long fence, with Lesbians on one side and “the queers and homosexuals in another; and have that fence electrified so they can’t get out…… Feed ‘em , and you know what? In a few years they’ll die. Do you know why? They can’t reproduce.” Ah, good Reverend, were it only that simple.

You see, the Reverend’s plan would not work as he thinks. It would become necessary for the camps to remain in continual operation to kill off any newborns from the heterosexual population who might later identify as homosexual. Apparently this would be just fine with the Reverend and his congregation, all of whom; I would assume; are anti-abortion. I have to wonder what would happen the first time that one of the congregant’s children showed signs of homosexuality. I suppose that then it would be okay to kill your own child; years after that child has been born. So, by this logic, abortion of an un-born fetus would still be wrong, but killing your own kid later would be acceptable.  Can you even believe that we are having this conversation in 2012?  You better believe it, because we are.

I am reminded of the scene in one of my favorite films, “Judgment at Nuremberg”, when the German defense attorney reads the following words concerning sterilization of the incompetent; “It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind... Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”

Chilling as these words are, they were spoken by Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes in his decision of Buck v. Bell in 1927. That case concerned itself with one young woman who was sterilized by the state against her will. That these words were flung back in our own faces during the Nuremberg Trials by the German defense attorney was almost comical. Not only had we pre-dated the Nazi’s with our embrace of the sterilization program  of which they stood accused, we actually re-started the program here in North Carolina the year following the Nuremberg trials, in 1948! That program was not discontinued here until 1964, and the state of North Carolina is just now making financial reparations to surviving victims of that cruel injustice.

So don’t say it "can’t happen here". It can; and will; unless we all stand up and loudly denounce the bigots who seek to divide us. Right now, the rumblings of the past are only 40 miles from my door.