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In California Special Rights for Christians And No Rights for LGBTs

By: Hrafnkell HaraldssonAug. 1st, 2011more from Hrafnkell Haraldsson

Larry Jacobs - World Congress of Families

Let’s try to get this straight: it’s perfectly permissible to re-write America’s history to be more “conservative-friendly” through revisionism and outright deletion and invention of facts and people, but it’s Nazism to require schools to be open and honest about the issue of LGBT Americans?

This is the claim being made by religious right activists in the wake of California’s SB 48‘s passage. Right Wing Watch reports that Larry Jacobs, the Vice President and Managing Director of the right-wing World Congress of Families, “told the American Family Association’s OneNewsNow that LGBT-inclusive law represents ‘a Nazi state or a communist type way of dealing with an issue.’”

In other words, because California won’t adopt the bigoted and intolerant position insisted upon by the religious right, it is a Nazi state.

What Larry Jacobs wants is what James Madison most feared: the “excesses of democracy.” Madison wanted the Constitution to form a bulwark between the people and the majority; he recognized that a majority could easily strip a minority of their rights and the Constitution is supposed to ensure this does not happen. Proposition 8 is a case in point: a majority voted that a minority does not have the same rights as they do. Even though that didn’t work – it was unconstitutional – Jacobs wants to try it again.

I imagine Jacobs would not be so eager for a public vote if the vote was about the legality of Christianity. He would certainly be appealing to James Madison and the Constitution then.

Meanwhile, he has no problem voting away other peoples’ rights.

“When people have [voted], and Governor Brown knows that he has an issue that would fail when put to a popular vote, of course, they just go around the people,” Jacobs explains. “They essentially implement their will. And, of course, in a democracy, that’s not the way things are supposed to work. It’s certainly something that forces our children to be indoctrinated in a certain way. It’s like a Nazi state or a communist type of way of dealing with an issue.”

Jacobs seems completely unaware of the virtual avalanche of Tea Party and fundamentalist-inspired legislation passed in state after state (and in the U.S. House) without appeal to the people. He has no problem with legislation passed in this manner as long as it says what he wants it to say. He doesn’t even complain about the suspension of democracy in Michigan.

Of course, he is also completely unaware of the definition of hypocrisy. Not that honesty has ever meant much to the so-called party of ultimate Truth. The means have always been justified by the ends in fundamentalism. Jacobs should give lectures about how only through deceit can we arrive at Truth.

And of course, he has to repeat the tired old lies about how the law will force homosexuality on children, as though it’s a how-to course, an issue we have dealt with here before.

“What the homosexual movement has done with … SB 48 [and] in general, in calling for equality, what they’re calling for is special rights,” the pro-family group spokesman notes. “We don’t have special things in education to teach people to change history based on a particular Christian worldview or Muslim worldview, but they go beyond that.”

As always, we see the claim that giving everybody equal rights is actually granting special rights. This is a laughable claim but it is repeated at every opportunity. Meanwhile, Jacobs and his fellow bigots and hypocrites continue to argue for exceptions for Christianity in the law. They continue to expunge unhelpful facts and people from our history books, to ban those and other books unfriendly or not congenial to a Christian worldview, and to insist on the imposition of their own particular view of the Earth’s origins to the exclusion of all other creationist possibilities (Christianity’s own “creationist” story is 100% derivative and based on far older pagan myths). If that is not a case of “special rights” I don’t know what is.

 

In California Special Rights for Christians And No Rights for LGBTs was written by Hrafnkell Haraldsson for PoliticusUSA.
© PoliticusUSA, Aug. 1st, 2011. All Rights Reserved

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