is this emergent's next stop?

A few weeks ago on his blog, emergent Tony Jones came out saying that the church should approve and recognize glbt lifestyles.

I wonder if this will be where emergents are going to go next?

The Other Side of Disgust

Daniel Bergner isn’t the devil’s advocate, but he is a pervert’s apologist. This author and contributor to the New York Times Magazine has a new book titled “The Other Side of Desire” which argues it is unfair to judge bizarre, harmful, and disgusting sexual attractions as bizarre, harmful, and disgusting.


Bergner’s book focuses on four real-life fetishists: a husband with a secret foot fetish, a man with an attraction to amputees, a vicious female sadist, and a man who longs for sex with his 12-year-old stepdaughter. Book reviews and interviews suggest he hasn’t written a book to judge the fetishists, but rather to judge the society that would rush to condemn their drives and behaviors.

What these people call “moral ambiguity” leads inexorably to moral paralysis. Its champions in our popular culture aren’t trying to redefine the boundaries as much as destroy them. They may look like playful pundits who just want to talk graphically about sex for fun and profit. But they’re constructing a funhouse with mirrors so distorted that the people inside will be lost without any guideposts for an escape.


The commercial possibilities for Bergner’s exploitation of perversion may be never-ending. Gottlieb concluded: “On one level, this book has all the elements of a top-rated HBO series – provocatively graphic sex, humorous dialogue, and moral ambiguity.”

The problem for those like Jones now is--where do they draw the line, and why? As they have abandoned biblical absolutes, where do they say "This crosses the line"? And what if someone wants to cross that line?

I doubt it will be long before emergents start talking about "stories" of those who practice those kinds of sexual perversions, throwing in words like "oppressions" and "misunderstanding", claiming those have been "judged" and "condemned" and need rather to be "heard" in the midst of the pomo/emergent "conversation", essentially spinning them as the victims and those who says practices are sick and wrong as being "oppressors" simply interested in "power".