Aye. #BlackChurch twitter. The pastor Trump is meeting with Sat is the one who lays on top of men to ordain them? https://t.co/C0Cc6ObkyN
— Tia Oso (@Tia_Oso) September 1, 2016
I've been debating whether to bring this up. I don't know if it's possible for me to bring it up without seeming homophobic or culturally insensitive. That's not my intention. Okay, here goes: At 2:39 in the video below, Bishop Jackson lies on top of one of the men he's ordaining, who's facedown on the floor of the church, under a sheet and a cloth. At 4:44, he does the same with the other man.
Maybe it's because I'm a lapsed Catholic, but I'm suspicious of physical contact betwen religious authorities and those who are subordinate to them. It comes off to me as an abuse of power. (Fully conensual contact between adults? That's different. Feel free, even if you are a man of the cloth. The morality of that is between you and a God I don't believe in.)
I just don't know what's indended by the bishop, who's married and has nine kids.
A few years ago, this was news in some circles:
Bishop Wayne T. Jackson of Impact Ministries International in Detroit is upset that video of a consecration ceremony in which he is seen laying on two men has been taken out of context. Social media commenters have viciously criticized it as perverse and members of the cloth have assailed his actions as unholy.More:
Yet the popular Detroit pastor refuses to stop the practice....
The two men, newly tapped bishops who were being consecrated in the video, have not been identified. One church member, Henry Haddad, backed his pastor, arguing that The Bible does not specify how to consecrate a bishop and that he knows one of the men who took part in the controversial ceremony. “If he thought there was anything perverse about it, he would have gotten up and addressed it,” Haddad said.
Nicole Haddad, another church member added, “that was a service of covering. That’s what that was all about. I’ve seen it throughout my whole 28 years of being here. So it’s nothing new of me.”
... As Bishop Jackson explains it, what people saw on the video, from the sheet covering to the laying on the men, represents the death and burial of the old person and the rising into the new office of Bishop. Also, the ceremony was performed before more than a thousand people and that it was live-streamed to millions more. It was not done in hiding, the pastor added.
The Detroit religious leader says that the way in which he conducts the ceremony is similar to the ordination of Catholic priests.No, I don't think so.
Well, there it is. Draw your own conclusions -- about him, and about me for posting this.
And now I'm going to go secular humanist and leave you with some art by Barbara Kruger:
