The religio-wingnuts are reacting as expected to opposition to Indiana’s embrace of religious tyranny – with lunacy and lies ...
All the things you’ve been hearing from conservatives like Indiana
Governor Mike Pence, Ted Cruz, Jeb Bush, and Scott Walker, that
religious tyranny is somehow religious freedom?
That’s the sane stuff. Trust me. The religio-wingnuts are reacting as expected to opposition to Indiana’s
embrace of religious tyranny – with lunacy and lies.
Some of the crazier stuff comes from one of the RFRA’s principle architects, Micah Clark, who on Monday said,
“The first thing you
have to do is pray, because this is a spiritual war. There is no doubt
about that, by the Twitter comments I get, by the email comments and
threats from the opposition, some pornographic things that are out there
and obscene things being said. This is a campaign of fear and lies and
so this is a spiritual war that people must pray about.
It was, of course, fear and lies that created this
heinous law in the first place. Fear and lies created by anti-gay
activists like Clark on the Religious Right.
Crazy as the spiritual warfare shtick is, it is Glenn Beck who is taking the role of Bryan Fischer here, telling his listeners
Tuesday that opposition to the so-called Religious Freedom Restoration
Act will end with people being put in concentration camps.
Yes, here we go again.
“The gay activists will boycott,” he said, “will make it uncomfortable, they’ll smear them. They’ll just ratchet up the hate.”
I do believe “ratcheting up the hate” is just what we’ve seen happen with the passage of this bill, thanks to the proponents, not the opponents of this bill.
The so-called “gay activists” at this point include
the Republican Mayor of Indianapolis, the cities of Seattle and San
Francisco, the entire State of Connecticut, the NCAA, the Indiana
Pacers, the NBA, and big corporations like Apple and Salesforce, and
others.
But Beck wasn’t done. Issuing a mild rebuke to
proponents of the law, he still laid the onus of concentration camps on
its detractors:
We can’t legislate
morality. I can’t believe I’m arguing the other side. You can’t
legislate morality. This is why we have to heal our hearts. This is why
we have to get to know each other. This is why we have to stand with
each other. Because there’s a ton of gay people who listen to us. They
know our hearts. I know their hearts. We don’t have a problem with each
other.
Let’s stop forcing each other to do things. You
don’t change anything. That ends up in concentration camps. You just
start grinding and grinding and grinding away until you’re in separate
worlds and nobody talks to each other and then, whoever has the power,
round ‘em up and kill ‘em because those guys are the problem.
“That’s how it happens,” he concluded.
The thing is, gays aren’t trying to force anybody to
do anything. They just wanted to be treated like everybody else. Nobody
is trying to force Beck to marry a man, or to not marry a woman. The
Religious Right has poisoned the waters with lie after lie about the
dangers of marriage equality. When they are not inventing biological
reasons, they are inventing medical reasons, or even, as Beck points
out, moral justifications.
I should mention that
Fischer himself claimed Monday that the RFRA does not discriminate, but rather protects christians from discrimination:
This law is not
something that provides for discrimination against gays. It is something
that prevents discrimination against christians … This thing is an
anti-discrimination bill because it prohibits governmental
discrimination against christians in the state of Indiana.
He went on to make the absurd claim that this is all about “homosexual supremacy”:
Homosexual activists
want special rights for homosexuals to trump every other single right
that any American possess anywhere, at any time, in any place.
You would think, from listening to this nonsense,
that it was gays who wanted a law allowing them to not serve evangelicals, or a law that would deprive them of the right to marry
opposite-sex partners.
From top to bottom, from start to finish, the RFRA has been about lies. It is based on lies, it is defended with lies.
If, as Phil Robertson says,
“[Satan] is a liar and the Father of Lies,” and that liberals serve
Satan, why is it that the Republicans – and Robertson himself – are the
ones telling the lies?