Doug Wilson has decided that ballet is “a few parsecs beyond the utter frozen limit.” It’s gay.

Before I get into that, here’s a little background on my artistic education.

The walls in my childhood home showed my dad’s drawings. Steve Raley is a singer-songwriter. When I was a baby, he did his music theory homework with me on his lap, teaching me how to analyze orchestration by listening to recordings of pieces by Ravel and Bartok. Dad has also been a trucker, a pilot, and a small business owner. We lived in a nice mobile home.

My Grandpa, Vere Raley, was a farm kid who played football, and who somehow got connected with vocal coaches. He learned to sing Schubert from a German lieder specialist in Los Angeles, and won an opera competition in San Francisco. When he wasn’t singing, he broke his own horse and ran his ranch. His day often started on the tractor and ended in the recital hall.

My violin teacher was a guy named Cal Rainey, who puttered around with fiddles the way some guys work on motorcycles. My orchestra teacher was Leonard Duarte, whose fiery temper laid low more than one jock who was too cool for music. He had no difficulty staring down the PC police of that day, insisting that we would perform blatantly Christian works as part of the Western classical tradition. He also insisted that we learn the vocabulary of musical style, like appoggiatura and other gay stuff.

Yes, as a violinist in a public school, I had every slur against homosexuals thrown at me. And there was always a caring evangelical on hand to make sure I understood how weird I was. But I was nurtured by men who didn’t have a chip on their shoulder about their identity or art, and there were many Christians who encouraged my musical work. With that support, hurtful remarks from others didn’t strike as deeply as they might have.

Still, when it comes to Pastor Wilson’s rant against a dance performed at Redeemer Presbyterian in New York, I understand all too well what it is like for anyone, gay or straight, to be on the receiving end. Wilson writes:

“What is the problem with this [dance]? Summed up, it is that this performance is gayer than the kiwi queen at the Fire Island Fruit Festival. This performance is gayer than an HR memo at Google headquarters. How gay was it? It was gayer than an NPR tote bag full of rainbows. It was gayer than a unicorn parade through the Castro District. It was gayer than a lavender sparkly pen.”

Let’s leave aside the fact that Wilson worked pretty hard on those lines. Let’s ignore the charge of effeminacy against the dancers, whose physical strength in performance is obvious in their grace. Let’s also pass over the contempt Wilson expresses for entire classes of people. Let’s even withhold comment on his mockery of gays themselves. With a paragraph that flamboyant, Wilson is on his knees begging us to call him a bigot. He’s got more jokes, and he needs an excuse to use them. So why bother?

Instead, let’s focus on something very simple.

Silas Farley, the choreographer of the dance in question, is not gay. It took all of 45 seconds to discover his engagement to a woman in the New York City Ballet. I am sure that Phil Johnson, who found Wilson’s paragraph too scofftastic not to tweet, could have gotten the information even faster. Pastor Johnson is famous for his research prowess. What about the dancers in the video? Does it matter to these pastors, or to those who comment on their posts, whether the words they sling at the dancers are accurate?

Theological hotshots like Wilson, Johnson, and their fan base want to tell us about propriety in worship. But to them, apparently, an individual Christian like Farley is just cannon fodder in the culture wars. Their smear tactics show a breathtaking mixture of cunning and flippancy. I do not take sermons about aesthetics — or any subject — from slanderers.

I want to believe that Wilson can write posts that are not warped by belligerence. He has an intellect. But he seems to have left it behind flying too many parsecs into the frozen void of his obsessions.