Baptist Home Chooses Secular Mammon Over Freakazoids

Losing big discrimination lawsuits will tend to do that.



From Dylan Lovan at the AP:

A Baptist agency that is Kentucky's largest private provider of services for abused children is considering opening its doors to gay employees, which would put it at odds with the conservative churches that lend financial support.

Sunrise Children's Services President Bill Smithwick said the proposal is tied to the agency's securing of state and federal funding. Sunrise receives about $1 million annually from Baptist churches, but about 85 percent of its $27 million budget comes from state and federal money.

"Sunrise cannot sustain itself without the partnership of state and federal and fundraising dollars," Smithwick said.

Last year, the agency settled a decade-long lawsuit brought by a former lesbian employee who claimed she was fired due to religious discrimination.

Kentucky Baptist Convention executive director Paul Chitwood said if Sunrise does begin hiring gay people, the convention's churches could move to withdraw their funding and sever ties with the agency.

"For them to surrender such a core distinction of the Christian faith would be for them, in essence, to just become another secular agency that contracts with the state for child care," Chitwood said. "If Sunrise wants to become that, that's the choice of the board, but that's not what Kentucky Baptists have invested in since the beginning of Sunrise."

What Kentucky Baptists invested in was a freakazoid indoctrination center that stole secular tax dollars from the workers of the Commonwealth.

Kentucky's contract child welfare system is infested with such agencies: residential facilities and foster homes for abused, neglected and disruptive children that make allegiance to an invisible sky wizard a condition of decent treatment and eventual release.

Sunrise - formerly named Baptist Homes for Children - was just the only one stupid enough to make its discrimination public enough to embarrass the state. Firing a gay staffer - who was only "outed" after a photograph of her and her partner at the gay rights parade was published in the paper - also put Sunrise in direct violation of Jefferson County's Fairness Ordinance.

Don't think this puts the freakazoids on the defensive or reduces one iota the state-sponsored religious indoctrination at Sunrise and dozens of other agencies.

It won't even put a dent in anti-gay discrimination.  I'll believe there are openly-gay staffers at Sunrise when I see them marching in a gay rights parade.