Last updated on August 6th, 2012 at 10:19 am
O for a day to go buy in which we don’t have fundamentalist Christianity’s ideas about “God” shoved down our throats! I guess we asked for it, in a way, by standing up for what is right instead of what somebody says “God” wants. Specifically, I am referring to the Democratic Party’s endorsement of marriage equality on the party platform for 2012.
If you’re ready for a morning laugh I’ll tell you what NOM president Brian Brown said about this: the Democratic Party “has been captured by extremists…like Barney Frank and Nancy Pelosi who are determined to redefine marriage” in America.
Talk about the pot calling the kettle black. If anybody knows about extremism it is NOM. Brown’s party, the Republican Party, has been in thrall to Christian extremists for decades and in thrall to Tea Party extremists since 2010. You begin to wonder of Republicans who they’re going to sell their souls to next.
To get more stories like this, subscribe to our newsletter The Daily.
Given the makeup of the GOP any Republican of every era before the 1990s is not only a leftist, but an extremist leftist, including Ronald Reagan, even if they steadfastly refuse to admit it.
Of course, Republicans don’t care about any of that – they’re facts after all and so therefore irrelevant to the discussion. If you bring up facts, they bring up Satan. You know in advance where that conversation is going to go.
What Republicans do care about is convincing themselves that the Democrats have sunk their own battleship.
Mike Huckabee – you remember the guy who said we all ought o be forced to listen to David Barton at gun-point – said that people are “not going to do is to sit back and assume that once a major political party and a president of the United States have now openly declared war on biblical marriage and the traditional concept of one man, one woman for life, they no longer are going to support that.”
We here so much from Christian fundamentalists about “traditional” marriage and “biblical” marriage but of course there is no such thing. There are all sorts of marriage in the Bible. For the authors of the Bible, anything that got a woman (or multiple women) into bed, even forcibly, was marriage. But then slavery is Biblical too, so go figure.
Choice is NOT biblical. No kind of choice. Do what you’re told.
That’s biblical.
And unsurprisingly that’s the GOP platform for 2012: know your role; do what you’re told.
Yesterday, OneNewsNow reported that Dr. Robert “Gay is Not OK” Jeffress of First Baptist Church Dallas told them that “the party is making the mistake that some civilizations have made in trying to ‘condone what God has condemned.’ He says it is a fact that homosexuality, like adultery and premarital sex, is contrary to God’s plan for human sexuality.”
He points out that the Bible and history both show how God deals with civilizations that reject His Word. The pastor goes on to acknowledge the criticism against his support for some Republican political candidates, but he asserts that he would vote for a Democrat over a Republican if the Democrat stood for godly principles.
“But here, once again, Democrats are showing their utter disdain for the traditional values of our country, but more importantly for the unchangeable principles of God’s word,” Jeffress declares.
This is what happens when people actually dare to think for themselves and reject the idea that one person’s religious beliefs should automatically be shared by them. Conservative Christians have never quite gotten over the idea that we should all have to be Christians too.
You might remember that Jeffress told Chris Matthews on Hardball last year, “But to your question, is there a higher authority than the Constitution for me as a Christian, as a Pastor, the answer is yes — it is the Bible.”
Bibles in hand, they tried everything in the old days, when everything was legal, like human bonfires and torture, trying to make the whole world Christian. It didn’t work. And even when they got people to be Christian they didn’t always end up being the “right kind” of Christian. So then conservative Christians are not only after heretics (wrong-thinkers), but Pagans (everybody else), trying to make us all think like they do.
Trying to make us all put the Bible above the Constitution.
If we reject their message for the message of the Constitution, that everybody is equal, we are automatically attacking them even if what we want is simply to be left alone to think for ourselves like the Constitution says.
That is what you’re seeing happen here. They can’t set fire to you anymore, or pour molten metal down your throat or torture you for Jesus. All they can do is rant and rave and spew, and they’ve gotten pretty good at all three with twenty centuries of practice, you betcha.
Like Jeffress, they threaten us with divine retribution. God will smite us all for daring to disagree with his self-proclaimed chosen people.
As a proud Heathen, I can only smile and say, “bring it on, baby”. Atheists will say “what God?” and progressive Christians will likely bristle at the idea of God being turned into a “whiny little bitch.”
And that is the beauty of the America fundamentalist Christians want to destroy. Thanks not to the Bible but to the Constitution they’re free to rant and rave and spew their hate-filled invective and sell anti-gay chicken and boycott Home Depot and JC Penney and GAP and Google and General Mills and Target for embracing all human beings and we’re free to point our fingers and laugh.
We’re also free, for now at least, to vote our consciences, to vote the Constitution as opposed to the Bible, and to stand up to hate and bigotry so that the promise of American can be fulfilled for all people, and not just the self-appointed few.
Hrafnkell Haraldsson, a social liberal with leanings toward centrist politics has degrees in history and philosophy. His interests include, besides history and philosophy, human rights issues, freedom of choice, religion, and the precarious dichotomy of freedom of speech and intolerance. He brings a slightly different perspective to his writing, being that he is neither a follower of an Abrahamic faith nor an atheist but a polytheist, a modern-day Heathen who follows the customs and traditions of his Norse ancestors. He maintains his own blog, A Heathen’s Day, which deals with Heathen and Pagan matters, and Mos Maiorum Foundation www.mosmaiorum.org, dedicated to ethnic religion. He has also contributed to NewsJunkiePost, GodsOwnParty and Pagan+Politics.
