Sometimes Matt Barber’s anti-gay diatribes are so over the top, you have to wonder if he’s just trolling for a reaction. His latest, titled “A Prayer for Marriage,” is a mean-spirited doozy.
Barber slams loving gay couples and parents in the most dismissive terms he can muster, imploring, “Lord have mercy on those precious babes, acquired like so much chattel, as selfish adults set up to play house.”
He decries marriage equality as a “sterile, shameful, feculent mockery of Your masterful design for our fruitful multiplication.”
He says anti-gay activists “battle the powers and principalities who pull temporal puppets by marionette strings aflame from the pits of hell.”
Like many anti-gay rants from Religious Right leaders, Barber’s “prayer” reeks with shirt-rending shame for America and American Christians for not having done enough to stop the advance of LGBT equality.
Sodom crumbles about as we gaze palmward, distracted and glassy-eyed, at shimmering digital confections.
They pound at our temple doors, demanding to know our heavenly hosts.
Yet naught we do.
Save cower.
Your bride has been unfaithful, Lord Jesus. As it was in the days of Noah, we tempt our Lord God.
We entreat Your mercies, but merit Your wrath…
Forgive us, Lord Jesus. We, Your bride, repent of our own part in this national sin. Forgive us for undermining this gift You have given – for succumbing to the devilish devices of divorce, infidelity and spousal neglect.
For our selfish ambition.
For making unholy, holy matrimony.
Embolden us.
Strengthen us.
Guide and direct us.
Mortify this national sin, oh God.
End it.
Kill it.
Barber rails against Supreme Court justices for debating “that which is closed for debate,” and complained, “At least four of the nine appear poised to defy Your Supreme Authority.”
And like so many other Religious Right leaders who have been beating the drums for massive resistance to a possible marriage equality ruling, Barber declares that such a ruling would place the government “at enmity with God” and subject Christians to persecution.
And we, Your faithful, will be marked subversive.
But waiver we shan’t.
Where the contrived “laws” of man are at odds with Your transcendent truths – with Your Law – it is You, oh Lord, to Whom we pledge obedience.
We will not comply with an unjust ruling.
And we will face persecution.
And we will count it all joy.
Because You are sovereign.
And victory is Yours.
