WorldNetDaily: Fundies' flawed Katrina theology

In his column today, Kyle Williams takes "fundamentalists" to task for suggesting, as some apparently did, that God sent Hurricane Katrina to New Orleans to forestall a major convention, if you will, of homosexual activists.

No, Kyle. God didn't do any pre-emptive strike. God doesn't do things that way. If anything, God struck New Orleans as a punishment for being the most corrupt city in America. New Orleans was Party Town USA, especially on the occasion called Mardi Gras (literally, Fat Tuesday), where partygoers routinely would do things they'd never want printed in the papers under their own names. (Maybe that's why the Masked Ball was so popular.) Worse yet, the citizens of New Orleans kept electing Mayor after Mayor and Council after Council who tapped from the city till. New Orleans didn't get the "Big Easy" nickname for nothing. Easy as in easy virtue.

None of this is to suggest that, now that the big stroke has come, the rest of us should not help those people. Furthermore, Jesus Himself told us not to measure our place before God simply on not having had a tower fall on us--or one of our cities destroyed.

But Kyle, if you think that what happened to New Orleans was a mere coincidence, then you're wrong. And you are just as wrong to imply, as you do, that New Orleans' detractors somehow don't have their facts straight.

And if I were you, I'd lay off Michael Marcavage. He has a reason for acting as he does, and it goes back to his experience at Temple University. There, he protested the production of a play suggesting that Jesus and His Apostles might have been homosexuals. For that protest, University officials personally manhandled him, put him in a straitjacket, and hauled him kicking and screaming to the psych ward at Temple Hospital--where the shrinks released him with an attitude that maybe some other heads needed to be shrunk. Now maybe you think his head needed to be shrunk. Not unless we woke up in a Russia that once again calls itself a Soviet Union, he doesn't. OK, so he made a mistake in thinking that God hit New Orleans pre-emptively. But that doesn't make New Orleans' past sins any less real--nor does it make God any less Real.

Finally, compassion and reverence do not tell us to "keep quiet." Concerning some things, you don't dare "keep quiet." This especially includes attitudes and behaviors that make preparation difficult to impossible, and make an already bad situation ten times worse.