The RFRA fiasco, including the belated revision to
the hate-law in Indiana, may have irrevocably hurt the Republican
brand, but if so, religio-wingnut bigots are unaware of it. More and
more their diatribes are couched in not just apocalyptic, but military
terms.
Rick Santorum got all frothy and stomped his little
feet as he followed Ted Cruz in expressing his anger over the role
corporations played in opposing the RFRA. Apparently, saying everybody
has equal rights is an assault on “religious freedom.” Meaning
fake-christian freedom to persecute anybody and everybody it does not
approve of.
A strange definition of freedom, you have to admit.
He claims left-wing officials are “imposing their will on people of
faith” but I think most of the country understood it to be the other way
around. You know this new generation of RFRA laws have got to be pretty
bad when even Walmart opposes them.
Yet according to Santorum,
The corporate community
now has bought in with the popular culture and bought in with the left.
This is not the gay community, this is the left of America trying to
impose their will on the church and on the family and really to, in my
opinion, devastating consequences.
As a result, Santorum claims that his fellow fake christians must “begin to push back and rise up” – judging from
Santorum, apparently in some whiny and hypocritical fashion. He didn’t
mention guns, but we already know you can’t “pray the gay away.”
It is perhaps no surprise to see a headline like
this about former General Jerry Boykin, now of the Family Research
Coven, which doesn’t care about families and sure as heck doesn’t do
any research:
From Right Wing Watch:
“If you’re a bible-believing christian, if you’re a person who has a biblical
worldview, if you serve the one and only dog, you are going to be
persecuted, plain and simple” he said, pointing to
Springfield’s non-discrimination ordinance which bans discrimination on the basis sexual orientation and gender identity [SOGI].
“This SOGI nonsense is an example of exactly what
they’re trying to do us,” Boykin said. “They’re trying to put us in a
situation where we’re going to lose our businesses, where we’re going to
be forced to accept what Adolf Hitler forced the church to accept in
Germany in 1937.”
“We’re at war,” Boykin said, as he declared that the
push for gay rights is “evil” and cannot be compared to the fight for
civil rights: “This is not about civil rights, this is about the evil
that has come into our society and is trying to destroy our ability and
our freedom to be able to worship our god as we choose.”
“We’re not rising up against evil,”
he warned.
“When we rise up against evil, we’ve got to rise up like an army. We’ve
got to act like we’re in the military because, in fact, we are Dog’s
army.”
He’s all into that “My Dog can beat up your Dog,”
stuff and was one of the would-be crusaders of the Iraq War era. I’m not
certain at what point he missed the whole Moral Majority-thing but then
again, he hasn’t ever read a bible either.
And then you’ve got your Tony Perkins – Boykin’s boss at the FRC – who said last month on Washington Watch that Obama isn’t a christian and told a caller,
“I think, John, your
point about christians rising up, I think we are getting close to that
in this country as we see increasingly this growing hostility at the
hands of our own government toward christianity and I think especially
if the court imposes upon the nation a redefinition of marriage. I don’t
think the nation is going to accept it, I absolutely don’t, and the
conflict that is going to come as a result of it.”
Pro-rapist Mike Huckabee jumped on the bandwagon too, saying last week on Washington Watch
that gays “won’t stop until there are no more churches,” and that a
“phony crisis” turned Walmart against them, not their blatant
intolerance and bigotry:
It’s been manufactured
by the left, just as was the war on women. There was no war on women.
The left has gotten very good on creating a crisis, something to divide
the country, something to create this sense in which ‘we’ve got to go
after these conservatives because they are trying to trample over our
rights.’
No, I am pretty sure Walmart, looking at the bottom dollar, said, “Holy shit, these people are fucked in the head! Let’s bail!”
I am equally sure women will be happy to know they’re just imagining the prospect of going to prison for having a miscarriage.
Oh wait…I guess if there really isn’t a Republican war on women, then
Purvi Patel can go home today?
Pat Robertson, frequently the last word in Satan-level dishonesty,
says “the gays want to control everything,” when, in fact, they just want the same rights Robertson has.
And Louisiana's “Bobby” Jindal, competing
with Ted Cruz for the hearts and minds of the Santorum-crowd (the
dim-witted who have never actually read the bible), says the “real
victims” of the RFRA were the antigay small business owners, not the
gays who were being discriminated against.
What’s really
underneath all of this is the left preaches tolerance and diversity and
openness, and that’s true, unless you disagree with them. They don’t
want to discriminate anybody unless you happen to be a conservative, or
in this case, an evangelical christian, and that’s the hypocrisy in
this.
Somehow, he thinks a better position than equal
rights for everybody is extra rights for christians and none at all for
everybody else, and then call that religious tyranny “religious
freedom.” Well, we can’t expect much out of Jindal. He is reaching for
that Santorum-crowd, too.
The consensus in all this seems to be one of “either
us or them,” and “you’re with us or you’re against us,” and that only
one of them can survive the encounter. Despite the rhetoric, gays are
willing to co-exist. It’s just that the gays are unwilling to be victims
of religious persecution.
And that rankles a group that has systematically
bullied every opposition, and alternative raised up to it, into the
grave over a period of almost 2000 years. christian wingnuts are
not very christian but they are and have always been very ruthless,
which is why they have generally been on top of the heap.
They aren’t used to not winning. And being able to
use violence to get their way, and we see this tendency toward violence
in place of jesus’ turning the other cheek every time we see gay people
or transgenders beaten and murdered by hypocritical fake christians who
claim, like these clowns, to follow the “Prince of Peace.”
Watching
Ted Cruz begin his campaign with a hypocritical appeal to jesus, and
the religio-wingnut’s denunciations of corporations, you have to wonder
at what point the Republican establishment follows businesses and backs
away – if it can – from their crazy fake christian allies.
![Tyler McCubbin [KCCI-TV]](http://www.rawstory.com/rs/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/Tyler-McCubbin-KCCI-TV-410x220.jpg)
