ENDA is Great but Do Not Count the Religious Loons Out

So now that the serial liar and religious loon Rand Paul has turned out to be a serial plagiarizer as well, plagiarizing not only speeches but chunks of his 2012 book Government Bullies, has lost his column at the Washington Times and landed a new job at Breitbart (where he belonged all along), you’d think we could relax, right?

I mean, it’s a start. Not only that but Illinois got marriage equality. I mean c’mon, CBS even apologized for lying to the American people about Benghazi. I think that’s a first, a mainstream media outlet apologizing for telling lies about Barack Obama.

And then ENDA (Employment Non-Discrimination Act) passed the U.S. Senate. It was introduced in 1994. It passed in 2013, almost twenty years later. That’s not only historic, it’s huge.

Was that the sky falling?

To get more stories like this, subscribe to our newsletter The Daily.

It’s been a good week for liberalism and liberty but, yeah, not so much. There are far too many enemies of liberty out there for liberals to relax their vigilance. Barring wholesale apoplexy on the right (I’m talking heads actually exploding), we won’t get to relax any time soon. We got more than a little of that with the passage of ENDA in the Senate, but, for example, the Washington Times undid the good it did by suspending Rand Paul’s column by responding to ENDA with an op-ed from hate group leader Tony Perkins.

That leaves us with a wash at the Washington Times. What’s the old adage, when one door closes another opens? The week saw a whole slew of conservative Christian lunacy, some of which we covered here (a recap can be found here). Just for starters, the Bryan Fischer wants a holy fumigation at the White House because they say its full of Hindu demons. I’m thinking it’s the Washington Times that needs a fumigation – a scientific fumigation to drive out demons of dishonesty.

If it is possible, Perkins is as big a liar as Rand Paul, and perhaps more so. Some of the most egregious examples of dishonesty come from the anti-equality lobby and the anti-environment lobby, after all.

Gabrial Arana wrote at the American Prospect yesterday that, “‘Religious liberty’ is the next big front in the culture wars.” He says that the Religious Right recognizes that it has lost the war against marriage equality and “The response from major religious organizations and thinkers” will be “Shifting focus from stopping the tide of social change to exempting themselves from it.”

I dunno. They don’t seem to be giving up all that easily, as Sarah Jones related here the other day. They seem willing to destroy their own party to make a point.

And, of course, this exemption is pretty broad. Already with ENDA – which exempts churches and religious groups – we saw an attempt to exempt for-profit organizations that are “religiously affiliated” because, you know, corporations are people and they have religion too. We would be left with a case of something becoming the law of the land and nobody being subject to it, which is absurd but then, the Religious Right thrives on the absurd.

Look at old Rafael Cruz, who claims to speak for God but who complains Obama thinks he is God, now claiming that God is pro-death penalty. Though, reading the Old Testament, you can’t disagree that God really does like making mountains of dead people.

Liberty really troubles the Religious Right, for all their talk about religious liberty. They really don’t get the concept. BuzzFeed reported a couple of days ago that “social conservatives are flummoxed” by “Senate GOP silence” on ENDA. You see, only one Republican senator, Dan Coats of Indiana, “took to the floor to oppose it.”

Our old bigot Bryan Fischer was terribly offended at the idea of extending liberty to people other than heterosexual white Evangelicals (just as he is offended by the idea of universal suffrage) as is Rand Paul.

BuzzFeed reports Fischer’s response:

I’m mystified and deeply disappointed, because there are profound constitutional issues at stake here. The entire First Amendment is being put up for auction by this bill and it’s inexcusable that no Republican senators are willing to stand up and defend the Constitution.

This is actually kinda funny: Bryan Fischer, who says the First Amendment invites demons into the White House, now claims to be its defender. Dude, you can’t have it both ways. I know you’re seriously deranged, but the First Amendment was not written by Christians for Christians. The First Amendment embraces all religions, not only your own heresy of choice.

I believe they have been intimidated into silence by the bullies and bigots of Big Gay. They know if they speak out … they will be the target of vitriol, the target of animosity, and very likely, the target of hate.

I’m thinking Fischer and others (read their responses to ENDA at Right Wing Watch) need to re-read the Pledge of Allegiance they are so fond of defending and forcing us to recite:

I pledge allegiance to the Flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic for which it stands, one Nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

I wonder if they just sort of move their lips for the “liberty and justice for all” because if they do actually say it, they surely do not know what it means.

Photo from Outside the Belway

Hrafnkell Haraldsson

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.