Tag: gun control

Brent Leatherwood, President of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, the convention’s political lobbying organization, has thrown the support of the ERLC behind proposed red flag gun control laws in his home state of Tennessee. Under a bill proposed by Governor Bill Lee and supported by Leatherwood, courts would have the ability to remove firearms from the possession of those deemed “extreme risk,” a mechanism that violates individual gun owner rights by infringing on constitutional due process.

Leatherwood has three children who attend Covenant School, the site of the recent shooting by trans-identifying Audrey Hale, a sexually deviant mentally ill woman whose mental illness led her to play dress up as a man, all the while insisting that society play along and accept her delusion. While authorities have not released all of Hale’s manifesto, as it doesn’t fit the gun-control narrative of the mainstream media, it is clear that Hale, a former student of Covenant, chose the school as the target site for her murderous deeds because she despised conservative Christians who opposed the LGBTQ agenda and was familiar with the site as a gun-free zone. Just weeks before the shooting, the state of Tennessee passed a wide-ranging law bill banning puberty blockers for children, genital mutilating surgeries for children, and drag shows for children. 

The personal proximity of the shooting to Leatherwood’s family seems to have affected his judgment, as the ERLC has not typically taken up anti-second Amendment causes. In a three-page letter addressed to the lieutenant governor and the entire legislative body, Leatherwood implied that the large number of Southern Baptists in Tennessee, which comprise 1/5 of the state’s population, were behind the law, accusing those who oppose the red flag law of using “weapons of partisan warfare.” The letter fails to address the clear pro-LGBT motive in the shooting.

Leatherwood is fixated on creating a law that would have likely done nothing to stop the incident at Covenant, as the shooter had no criminal record, and there is no indication that anyone ever reported concerns about her behavior, the mechanism by which red flag laws remove firearms from one’s possession. 

Red flag laws are dangerous in concept because they judge whether a person is allowed to exercise second amendment rights based on whether a judge thinks the individual is a risk. What happens when leftist-appointed judges allow anonymous “concerned citizens” with political motives to report that they are concerned about “right-wing” Christians possessing firearms? Red flag laws put mechanisms in place that could potentially be used to disarm entire groups of people for purely ideological reasons. 

In today’s society, trans-identifying people, a group that would have been identified as mentally disordered by the psychological community thirty years ago, are a protected class of people. Ironically, while conservative groups and the ERLC have made modest pushes to promote laws that fight against LGTQ indoctrination of children, there is no push to call a spade a spade and legally label trans-identifying individuals as mentally ill or an extreme risk to society. Instead, society continues to cater to sexual deviancy, special interest groups that openly defy God through their perversion. Under the current status quo, a red flag law would likely do little to protect against a mentally ill trans-identifying person because anti-discrimination law and advocacy groups would use their identity and protected status to defend their second amendment rights. 

The ERLC’s embrace of red flag gun control laws is just one of a large series of leftward shifts that include the embrace of “whole life abortion incrementalism,” the investment of time and resources in creating legal briefs to defend the building of mosques, the embrace of “love year neighbor” church-closing COVID propaganda, and the use of gender ideology from Revoice founder Nate Collins. Brent Leatherwood was touted as a more conservative replacement for former ERLC head Russell Moore, but the organization appears to maintain its trajectory toward embracing leftist policy positions with Leatherwood at the helm.