Focus on the Fundies: Xtian bookstore chain refuses magazine with female pastors

A bookstore chain owned by the far-right Southern Baptist Convention has carried a magazine called GospelToday for many years, but recently refused to distribute an issue depicting female pastors on its cover, because of the denomination's rule that only men can be pastors in its churches.

It wasn't that the magazine was saying the five female ministers were, or should be, pastors at Southern Baptist churches, or that the SBC should change its rules. The denomination simply didn't want customers at its bookstores to be exposed to the fact that other denominations -- just as conservative, no doubt, in most matters -- allowed women to become pastors. Such is the paranoid attitude that typifies fundamentalists and totalitarians everywhere as they try frantically to keep control of people.

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