It is really a twisted reality fundamentalist Christians inhabit. The Supreme Court’s DOMA decision, as can be imagined, has really sent them off the deep-edge.
You would think the sky was falling. As Adalia Woodbury pointed out here yesterday, it is not.
Take, for example, Tim Wildmon of the American Family Association, who went on American Family Radio to say that America was “shaking its fist at God Almighty.”
You might protest, as I would, that God is irrelevant according to the god-free United States Constitution but Wildmon is having none of that:
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We are deeply saddened by today’s decision to not only allow but encourage same-sex marriage in our country – a country that was founded on biblical principles.
Watch courtesy of Right Wing Watch:
I could see this. IF America had been founded on biblical principles. But it was not. Nowhere in the utterances of the Founding Fathers is such an intent detectable.
The AFA’s Bryan Fischer got all Glenn Beck-like. On HIS radio show, Fischer complained that bigots like him will become “second class citizens” and reduced to “lower tier, second-class, steerage status on the ship of state.” He claimed that “They’ve done to us exactly what they were falsely accusing us of doing to homosexuals.”
Watch courtesy of Right Wing Watch:
Of course, all this outrage is over not being allowed to treat gays and lesbians like second-class citizens.
It is amazing how happy they all were with the Supreme Court’s attack on the Voting Rights Act. That joy evaporated quickly with the DOMA ruling, and Liberty Counsel’s Matt Staver avowed that the Court had lost legitimacy (does that mean the Voting Rights Act ruling doesn’t count?).
Staver said yesterday,
Marriage predates government and civil authorities. No civil authority, including the Supreme Court, has the authority to redefine marriage. Marriage was not created by religion or government and is ontologically a union of one man and one woman.
This is just absurd. Clearly Staver has not bothered to read the Bible or he would see a variety of marriage-types. Nor did other cultures adhere strictly to the one woman + one man variety.
Mark Krikorian, the director of the Center for Immigration Studies (aka the Anti-Icky Brown People League) said the DOMA decision will lead to legalized polygamy, which ironically, WOULD be very biblical, since Jewish men could have more than one wife.
Staver went on to say that “deconstructing marriage will hurt children and society” and compared it to “the 1972 contraception decision involving unmarried couples and the so-called right to privacy on which the 1973 abortion decision in Roe v. Wade was constructed.”
The problem for these men is that nowhere does the United States Constitution give them any grounds for complaint let alone the hysterical outrage they are exhibiting.
Tony Perkins, who was overjoyed that icky brown people could be stripped of the voting franchise thanks to the earlier Supreme Court ruling, was less happy with the DOMA decision, which he said was a “major setback for marriage, for family, and for freedom.” But he cautioned that “our zip code has not yet been changed to Sodom and Gomorrah, at least not yet.”
Meaning Perkins has also not read the Bible, since God was angry at Sodom and Gomorrah not over same-sex relations but blasphemy and other crimes, but especially hospitality, and that’s according to Jesus himself (Matt. 10:14-15).
And it’s not just these religious extremists going off the deep end but Republican politicians too. Rep. Tim Huelskamp (R-KS) said he plans to re-introduce DOMA (I suppose on the same principle that Republicans continue to introduce motions to repeal Obamacare).
Rand Paul (R-KY) fears he said (appropriately enough) on the Glenn Beck show, that the fall of DOMA will lead to humans marrying non-humans.
And Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX). Gohmert held a press conference and said that the Supreme Court had gone “against the laws of nature and nature’s God.”
Watch courtesy of Right Wing Watch:
Would this be the same nature’s God that made thousands of animal species engage in homosexual behavior?
According to Gohmert we only see same-sex marriage at the end of a civilization but he also said that because we’ve gone against God that America will suffer the consequences.
I’m personally unclear if this means our civilization will collapse (marriage equality shows we’re at that point) or whether God will strike us all down because, as the band Bloodhound Gang once said, we “do it like they do on the Discovery Channel.”
It’s so typical of the history of so-called Judeo-Christian religion that a group of angry old men insist they get to decide what everybody else can and cannot do. Don’t take offense at this, Christians. It’s just a fact.
Unfortunately for this group of grumpy old men, we have the United States Constitution, which says we don’t have to do what they think because our Founding Fathers had the foresight to ban state-sponsored religion.
Sorry angry old men. All I can say is that it would help if you would actually read the United States Constitution and the Bible. Really, it would.
Go. Reflect. We’ll wait. And when you come back, we will all rock Soddom and Gomorrah. Keep your party hats handy.
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.
