God hates f*gs--and little Amish girls?

Little did I realize last week when I wrote on the subject of the school shooting in Weston, Wisconsin that the very same day would witness an even more horrific crime. In the little village of Quarrysville, PA, Charles Carl Roberts entered a one-room schoolhouse of 10 little Amish girls and proceeded to kill six of them before taking his own life. The killer claimed that he had molested little girls 20 years ago when he was a boy and “dreamed of doing it again.”

Because the Amish are a people who have chosen a separatist way of life, refusing the use of such modern things as automobiles and electricity, it is unlikely that any fancy electronic security system would have helped save the girls’ lives. And, as we have discussed last week, the one individual to blame is Charles Carl Roberts, and he surely is being held to account by his maker. In a statement typical of mankind since the garden of Eden, the murderer blamed God: his prematurely born daughter Elise died after living only 20 minutes in 1997, which filled him with hatred toward himself and God. Consequently, other families should apparently know the feeling of pain at losing a daughter.

Soon afterwards, the “who’s to blame” crowd came out of the woodwork. The Violence Policy Network, a gun-control group, writes on its web site,

In the wake of three high-profile school shootings in one week, the last committed by an apparently law-abiding gun owner until he pulled the trigger executing five Amish schoolgirls, America will once again go through the now-predictable exercise of trying to identify any single, possible factor for these gun deaths--except for the guns themselves.

A mother of four from Georgia, Laura Mallory, used the recent spate of shootings to resume her crusade against Harry Potter.

Referring to the recent rash of deadly assaults at schools, Mallory said books that promote evil - as she claims the Potter ones do - help foster the kind of culture where school shootings happen. That would not happen if students instead read the Bible, Mallory said.

But perhaps the most outrageous “analysis” came from Topeka’s Westboro Baptist Church, a group that has garnered headlines for its picketing and protests at the funerals for servicemen who lost their lives in Iraq. Oh, no, they’re not Democrats or part of the cut and run peace crowd. Check out their web site, and all will be clear. America is a “f*g” nation, and every death on 9-11 was deserved and every serviceman’s death is deserved because of our national tolerance of homosexuality.

The Westboro Baptist group scheduled a picket for the funeral of the little Amish girls, but were diverted by a unique offer from conservative radio talk show host Mike Gallagher. Mr. Gallagher discovered that the Westboro people wanted “to be heard,” so he gave them an hour of time on his radio show in exchange for their promise to cancel their picket of the service. You can read Gallagher’s explanation here, as well as criticism of his offer that compares what he did to appeasing terrorists. I think the author may have a point. If it were a jihadist group going to “protest” American servicemen’s funerals and saying that they deserved to die for fighting for gay rights, and Gallagher offered radio time in exchange for their promise not to picket, we’d say that he was giving in to terrorists’ demands.

What does this have to do with little Amish girls? In a companion website called “God hates America,” Westboro Baptist writes,

The Amish children from Pennsylvania are even now in hell. Stop spreading the lie that they were innocent. They were just as degenerate and deserving of hell as the pervert who killed them. You get what you deserve, America! You raised these murderous beasts and perverted their minds, and now you act surprised? As long as you people try to stop us, you will be punished, just as Pharaoh was punished when he would not let God's people go (Ex. 12:30). Gov. Ed Rendell brought this down on you, get mad at him, not us!

It’s embarrassing that this group identifies itself as Christian. I’d be even more ashamed if I were a Baptist. It’s embarrassing because many people will associate the legitimate preaching of God’s law against homosexuality with the hateful message of Westboro Baptist. Preachers need to be bold yet tactful. One can be correct theologically (yes, God hates sin; yes, God hates homosexuality and adultery; yes, the Amish girls were no less sinners than any other human) and never save a single soul. Westboro Baptist is not a Christian church because they do not preach the law in the service of the Gospel. In other words, they do not reveal to a sinner their sinful condition in the hope of leading him to his Savior and ultimately to heaven. They have replaced the mission Christ gave to save souls with one of their own fabrication, namely, to hate f*gs with self-righteous fury.