DATELINE–Dallas, Texas

“The Southern Baptist Convention is sex-obsessed” declared Brother Luther Martinez, Jr., a small town preacher from Brownsville, Texas.

Martinez’ provocative statement was issued yesterday at a press conference in Dallas, Texas, where just last week the Southern Baptist Convention called for Christians to boycott Disney in protest of the entertainment company’s so-called “homosexual agenda.”

Martinez, who attended the Convention as a “messenger” for the Iglesia de Maranatha in Brownsville, hopes to dissuade his fellow Baptists from boycotting Walt Disney Co. et al.

The planned boycott would extend to the multinational media company’s subsidiaries, including ABC, ESPN, A&E, Lifetime, the syndicated television show “Live! with Regis and Kathie Lee,” The Mighty Ducks NHL hockey team, and the medical journal “Skin and Allergy News.”

According to Martinez, the critical issue facing Baptists at the close of the millenium is not the threat from without, but the threat from within. The baby-faced preacher, a rising star in the Tejano Baptist establishment, believes the call for a boycott is a “media stunt” and not a “long-term solution for the troubles afflicting American families.” In an address delivered via satellite to his congregation in Brownsville he exhorted:

If my fellow ministers see sex everywhere, they must be looking pretty darn hard to find it. It’s time to get real, and get down to the Lord’s business. As we are told in the Book of Matthew, Chapter 21: When Jesus entered Jerusalem, he threw the money changers out of the temple, exclaiming “My house shall be called the house of prayer; but ye have made it a den of thieves.” I say the Southern Baptist Convention shall be called a house of prayer, but they have made it a den of sex-crazed hypocrites.

Martinez goes on to demand that Southern Baptists “drag their minds out of the gutter” and set to work addressing some “not so Mickey Mouse” issues such as poverty, hunger, racism and the growing alienation of America’s youth.

While Disney has been linked in the past to such unsavory subjects as psychedelic drugs, pedophilia and fascism, it is the company’s policy of offering insurance benefits to domestic partners of gay and lesbian employees that has gotten the Southern Baptist Convention all riled up.

Like last year’s attack on Jews-not-yet-for-Jesus and next year’s predicted offensive against financially independent women, the current campaign against homosexuals is yet another plodding attempt to garner media coverage for the Convention.

In the past, the “moral majority” and other fringe political parties have used like conventions and campaigns to get their narrow agendas publicized at no cost on the nightly news. During the Carter administration, the obsessive media coverage of televangelists like Jim Bakker, Oral Roberts and Pat Robertson catapulted a cadre of small-time demagogues to the national stage. Then, as now, sensationalist proclamations on family values could guarantee prime-time coverage, regardless of the seriousness or absurdity of the circumstances that brought them to the fore.

Martinez fears that last week’s Convention antics could jeopardize the righteous role of churches in America.

Regardless of a growing distaste for multinationals and their brazen disregard for any moral or national allegiances, mainstream America is increasingly suspicious of the Baptists’ perennial preoccupation with homosexual sex practices.

It is expected that in the coming year Southern Baptists will finish the job they started last week by calling for a nationwide boycott of hairdressers, restaurants with table service, domestic airlines, Broadway musicals and the City and County of San Francisco.

In the his closing remarks at the press conference outside of the Dallas Convention Center, Martinez lifted his fellow Baptists up to the Lord in prayer:

Lord, we know that the time is come to clean Your house. And as it is written in the Holy Book, we set out to turn the money changers out of the temple. In our hearts we know that our work begins with the money changers–the banks, the stock brokerages, the multinational corporations. Sex is small change in heavenly accounting. For as it is revealed unto us in I Timothy, Chapter Six, it is not LOVE that is the root of all evil; nay, it is the love of MONEY that is the root of all evil.