It is no secret that anti-gay Republicans are gaga over a shirtless man riding a horse, symbolically – and ironically – trampling gays people underfoot as he leads Russia, in the words of Stephen Colbert, into a brighter future. That man is Russia’s President, Vladimir Putin. Imagine the outcry if President Barack Obama rode a horse while wearing no shirt.
Our problem is less with Putin’s fashion-sense or homoerotic subtext, than with the nonsensical nature of Republican arguments in favor of what the Russian strong-man is doing in the name of that cross dangling on his pasty, sagging, and no doubt once-manly hetero-chest.
Here’s the problem: Jesus never talked about gay people. They simply never came up in conversation. Rich people, however, did. Jesus did not say gay people weren’t going to heaven but he did say rich people had as much chance of getting there as a camel does going through the eye of a needle: in other words, zero, nada, zilch. But according to Putin and his American supporters, it’s not the wealthy and corrupt that are a problem but gay people. No surprise since many of the people saying this are wealthy and corrupt (or aspire to be wealthy and corrupt).
As Right Wing Watch reports, Laurie Higgings of the American Family Association-affiliated Illinois Family Institute, loves herself some Putin and she thinks America needs an anti-gay law like Russia’s, because, obviously, Jesus would have wanted one. I mean, I don’t know what her justification is. If Jesus wasn’t worried about gay people, why is she?
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The bone she is chewing on is the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network (GLSEN). And she says the folks of GLSEN are censoring anti-gay views and has some sort of “totalitarian” control over public schools in the United States. She is also upset that “Google’s recent ‘doodle’ announces to the world that Google is gaga over homosexuality-affirming propaganda for minors. Google’s doodle pokes a virtual rainbow-colored flag in the eye of Russian president Vladimir Putin for signing into law a bill that protects minors from homosexuality-affirming propaganda.”
Because affirming the right of people to love each other and be left alone is so much worse than affirming the right of other people to abuse people physically, like this footage reveals is happening in Russia:
Now of course, Scott Lively, another Putin fanboy, is claiming that this footage is “deceptive Machiavellian ‘gay’ propaganda” and that gay people are the ones behind the violence in Russia. This video, he says, is obviously staged. You know, like when the Jews staged all those photos of them being beat up by Nazi stormtroopers.
Laurie Higgins is more concerned that children not think two mommies is okay than she is with people being brutally beaten because they aren’t like her:
The fanciful notion that having “two mommies” is ontologically and morally indistinguishable from having a mother and a father is not a fact. Presenting that non-fact to, for example, five-year-olds in government schools is propaganda. And presenting this non-fact to children is not a loving act even if it “feels” good to “educators” who don’t think about or discuss the issue deeply.
“Ontologically and morally indistinguishable” – let’s think about that for a moment. Ontology, in philosophy, concerns itself with the nature of being – including whether or not there is a god, whether universals exist, etc., and is a branch of metaphysics, which is all about the larger picture of the nature of reality.
Higgins wields the word ontology like a baseball bat, not surprising perhaps for a member of a group that believes more in a weaponized Jesus and less in the savior they claim to follow. Certainly Higgins could use some saving – from herself. As the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy points out, “Besides it not being so clear what it is to commit yourself to an answer to an ontological question, it also isn’t so clear what an ontological question really is, and thus what it is that ontology is supposed to accomplish.”
Oh dear. Well, Higgins knows what she wants to accomplish, and that’s the demonization of gay people. So same-sex couples are morally inferior mixed-sex, or “traditional” couples, which biblically weren’t really couples since they included multiple wives and wives + concubines + slave girls, and the odd guy King David thought had pretty eyes.
But she says gay people are ontologically and morally inferior and by gosh, being an aberrant Christian she doesn’t have to back up her assertions with facts. Her statements have the force of God behind them, and God himself apparently really hates gay people, even though he didn’t have a lot to say about them in the Old Testament either – though he did really hate people who didn’t stone their unruly children or who shaved their beards and cut their hair and women, who, like Higgins, who don’t know their role (aren’t properly submissive).
And Higgins is just furious that teachers and schools reject her falsified and invented science and teach tolerance and inclusion rather than bigotry and exclusion:
Exposing minors to homosexuality-affirming propaganda is nowhere more troubling than in our public schools where neither children nor teachers are encouraged to study in depth all sides of issues related to homosexuality. Quite the contrary. Curricula and supplementary resources and activities are controlled by “progressive” dogma, the kind of dogma promulgated by the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network (GLSEN). (Privately, “progressive” teachers actually scoff at the suggestion that there are sides other than theirs worthy of study.)
What follows should make you laugh, coming from a member of a religion that controlled the beliefs of others for some 2,000 years:
“Agents of change,” secure in their tenured positions in public schools, share a certain esprit de corps with totalitarian regimes. They all hatch plans sub rosa to control the beliefs of others. Unfortunately, those victims—I mean, students—happen to be other people’s minor children.
She laments that,
Until our publicly subsidized educators relinquish their white-knuckled grip on curricula with their de facto enforcement of censorship, perhaps we need an anti-propagandizing-to-minors law.
What Higgins really wants is for the “Church” to get its white-knuckled grip on public schools and education in this country. The idea that pluralism and diversity could be tolerated really harshes her buzz. She has her weaponized Jesus and by God she wants to use him to beat all and sundry about the head and shoulders in the Old Testament sense. Like those people in the video above are free to do. Her real issue, when we get right down to it, comes down to the fact that people like her aren’t free to do the same here, for aberrochristian thugs to freely pound gays on street corners like Nazi thugs once pounded Jews on German street corners.
That’s the America people like Higgins want.
Once more I will explain to people like Higgins the kind of future they are really creating with their intolerance, and it won’t be the one they think they are getting. . A.H. Armstrong relates for us the legacy of Christian intolerance:
The choice of the way of intolerance by the authorities of Church and empire in the late fourth century has had some very serious and lasting consequences. The last vestiges of its practical effects, in the form of the imposition of at least petty and vexatious disabilities on forms of religion not approved by the local ecclesiastical establishment, lasted in some European countries well into my lifetime. And theoretical approval of this sort of intolerance has often long outlasted the power to apply it in practice. After all, as late as 1945 many approved Roman Catholic theologians in England, and the Roman authorities, objected to a statement on religious freedom very close to Vatican II’s declaration on that subject. In general, I do not think that any Christian body has ever abandoned the power to persecute and repress while it actually had it. The acceptance of religious tolerance and freedom as good in themselves has normally been the belated, though sometimes sincere and whole-hearted, recognition and acceptance of a fait accompli. This long persistence of Theodosian intolerance in practice and its still longer persistence in theory has certainly been a cause, though not the only cause, of that unique phenomenon of our time, the decline not only of Christianity but all forms of religious belief and the growth of a totally irreligious and unspiritual materialism.
Armstrong concludes that “the triumph of Christianity carried in it, as perhaps all such triumphs do, the seeds of future defeat. The Church in the fourth century took what it wanted and has been paying for it, in one way or another, ever since.”[1]
References:
[1] A.H. Armstrong, “The Way and the Ways: Religious Tolerance and Intolerance in the Fourth Century A.D.” Vigiliae Christianae 38 (1984), 1-2.
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.
