Last Monday, Audrey Hale, a 28-year-old “trans-man,” for those keeping score, this is a woman who is laboring under the delusion that she is a man, blasted her way into Covenant School in Nashville, TN. She proceeded to murder six people — three staff members (Katherine Koonce, 60, headmistress; Mike Hill, 61, custodian; and Cynthia Peak, 61, substitute teacher) and three students (Evelyn Dieckhaus, 9;  William Kinney, 9; and Hallie Scruggs, 9) — before Nashville police officers killed her as she was firing on police outside the school.

Like most school shootings, gun-grabbers have glommed onto this as an excuse to limit firearms ownership. Never mind that the murderer bought all of her firearms legally, and unless we’re going to forbid transgenders from owning firearms (and I’m open to that argument), there were no visible warning signs of her homicidal intention.

Unlike other school shootings, what is drawing media sympathy is not the victims; it is the perpetrator (Mainstream Media Finds the ‘Real’ Victims of Nashville Mass Shooting in Predictable Turn). Excuses have been made for her murderous rampage (I cover this in my post A Wyoming Democrat Encouraging Murder to Support ‘Trans Rights’ Reveals a Violent Political Movement). Madonna added a tour stop in Nashville right after the shooting to support the “trans community” (Madonna Adds Tour Stop in Tennessee to Protest Anti-Grooming Legislation).

One of the most bizarre things to have happened after the murders did not occur in Nashville; it happened in Fargo, North Dakota.

Micah Louwagie, pronouns they/them, is a “married” (spouse’s profile is “[ They/Them/Theirs ] / ELCA Seminarian / Writer & Artist / Nonbinary Queer) trans-man who is the pastor of the 100-member St. Mark’s Lutheran Church (ELCA, of course, not Wisconsin or Missouri Synods) in Fargo. In her sermon on Palm Sunday, Louwagie compared the Nashville shooter to Jesus Christ.

This synopsis is from the New York Post:

“Some folks have tried to focus on eradicating trans people as a solution, because they have been waiting, just waiting for an opportunity such as this. They’ve been waiting for a reason, any reason to stoke their hatred,” Louwagie said.

The pastor goes on to deride “allies” who abandon and “betray” transgender persons, like Jesus’s disciples who fled when he was arrested.

“Marginalized folks, those of us with the least amount of privilege and power, they need those who have more privilege and power than they do to physically place their bodies between them and the people, powers and institutions that are literally killing them,” Louwagie urges.

The liberal pastor goes on to compare the Pharisees’ treatment of Jesus to politicians who make laws against drag shows and transgender players in sports.

“Those leaders were looking for any excuse, valid or not, to crucify Jesus and they found that reason…It’s baffling to me that someone’s existence can be so threatening, that people decide they need to be controlled, that they need laws made against them, or even worse, that the people that they find so threatening should die,” Louwagie remarked.

…

“Jesus did not die so violence could be perpetuated in God’s name. Jesus did not die for access to guns,” Louwagie says.

Incredibly, no one in the congregation protested. Of course, the crowd could’ve been struck dumb by the blatant heresy of what they heard.

Unfortunately, this kind of idiocy is not rare. The ELCA and some other mainline denominations have long ago surrendered to modernity and rejected any part of Christian tradition and religious practice that can’t be reconciled to secularism. Using our Savior as a sockpuppet to endorse all sorts of modernist madness has become standard fare on the left.

To equate a murderer with the Son of God is little short of bizarre. Okay, it isn’t short of bizarre at all; it is patently bizarre. Even the comparison of normal people to the Pharisees in Louwagie’s diatribe is nonsense. Transgenderism, like active homosexuality, places a person in open revolt against God. It is determining based on your feelings that you are not as you were created to be and that you should adopt a disordered concept of human sexuality.

What Louwagie characterizes as “hatred,” is actually love.

The opposite of love is not hate. The opposite of love is indifference; it is the attitude that lets a person afflicted with substance abuse, sexual promiscuity, gender confusion, etc., continue on a path that leads to nowhere good in this world or the next because “you be you and who am I to judge.” It is permitting children to surgically mutilate themselves or be groomed into an unnatural and unhealthy sexuality by authority figures in their lives. The true act of love is confronting, challenging, and educating those people, both perpetrators and victims, on how we are called to behave, not to make us feel good about ourselves or to score political points, but for the sake of the salvation of lost souls.

That last line, “Jesus did not die so violence could be perpetuated in God’s name,” is unintentionally ironic. No violence was perpetuated in God’s name in Nashville. Rather, just the opposite. A troubled young woman in thrall to a violent ideology and indoctrinated in hate for normal people decided to attack a Christian school. Audrey Hale’s hatred was focused on God and a direct rejection of her duties as a child of God to conform to the divine order of things. Having a disordered person masquerading as a pastor twist the Gospel to defend the indefensible shows how far into paganism our culture has plummeted.

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