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By Gwendolyn Sterling, Cedar Rapids

Re: Issue 278, “The Sex Issue”

Actually, this letter isn’t regarding that issue so much as it’s pivoting to a topic of far less acceptance and agility.

Backtrack with me through time for just a minute:


It was a blustery Sunday last spring. I was jostling my book bag up 2nd Street SE in Cedar Rapids when I heard a crescendo of homogeneity cascade out the doors of Veritas Church. I’d bustled past the Veritas building before, and if not for the signage, I would have guessed it was some sort of Silicon Valley knockoff tech firm. Dash Coffee even has a pop-up shop inside!

Are you familiar with Veritas Church? Veritas, full of fresh-faced, wholesome minions imbued with the tinge of hipsterism that screams false inclusiveness. I think they even have a few self-described poets, scribes and artists among their ranks. Veritas, that nebulous congregation with a sheen of 21st-century progressiveness covering some rather dark views on redemption, sexual orientation and identity. Take, for instance, these excerpts from the recesses of their website:

As a result of sin, we deserve condemnation. We believe in the resurrection of the body, the final judgment, the eternal felicity of believers who are redeemed by the grace of Jesus Christ and the endless suffering of those who deny His authority.

Those lines aroused my suspicions, so I scoured the internet and caught a whiff of this doozy from this online sermon from the esteemed (perhaps just steamed) Dr. Alex Tuckness at the Iowa City location:

I’ve seen people use arguments where they observe homosexual sexual acts being committed by animals, and they say, “Look! That proves it’s natural. So, if it’s natural, it’s natural for us to do it, too. And if it’s natural, it’s good.” But that’s taking our fallen nature rather than our original nature that God gave us and making that the norm. All of us have desires that are wrong.

My God, indeed! Now, that excerpt was tucked between lines about patience, but I only made it through about a third of that sermon before I felt my asshole puckering in preparation for the coming of the Final Judgement.

I’m admittedly a lapsed Catholic with a bit of a party girl past — so I understand the fervor of guilt — and I suppose the time comes for all of us when we must square our affiliations with our convictions, but bless the Catholic church for at least being up front about it! Veritas is luring me in with buttery acceptance and artisanal lattes before bringing the hatchet down!

Give me the wolf over the fox any day!

I’ll have to take a pass on both the coffee and the condemnation. But for those in need of a lil’ spiritual dirtying, I’ll be leading a nightly non-denominational service of miscreants beneath the 12th Avenue bridge. We don’t have a French press, but we do pass the Juarez bottle with wanton abandon.


Yours in Hedonism,

Gwendolyn Sterling







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