Glenn Beck Says Opposition to Indiana’s RFRA Will Lead to Concentration Camps

Last updated on July 17th, 2023 at 06:06 pm

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All the things you’ve been hearing from conservatives like Indiana Governor Mike Pence, Ted Cruz, Jeb Bush, and Scott Walker, that religious tyranny is somehow religious freedom?

That’s the sane stuff. Trust me. The Religious Right is reacting as expected to opposition to Indiana’s embrace of religious tyranny – with lunacy and lies.

Some of the crazier stuff comes from one of the RFRA’s principle architects, Micah Clark, who on Monday said,

“The first thing you have to do is pray, because this is a spiritual war. There is no doubt about that, by the Twitter comments I get, by the email comments and threats from the opposition, some pornographic things that are out there and obscene things being said. This is a campaign of fear and lies and so this is a spiritual war that people must pray about.

It was, of course, fear and lies that created this heinous law in the first place. Fear and lies created by anti-gay activists like Clark on the Religious Right.

Crazy as the spiritual warfare shtick is, it is Glenn Beck who is taking the role of Bryan Fischer here, telling his listeners Tuesday that opposition to the so-called Religious Freedom Restoration Act will end with people being put in concentration camps.

Yes, here we go again.

“The gay activists will boycott,” he said, “will make it uncomfortable, they’ll smear them. They’ll just ratchet up the hate.”

I do believe “ratcheting up the hate” is just what we’ve seen happen with the passage of this bill, thanks to the proponents, not the opponents of this bill.

Watch courtesy of Right Wing Watch:

The so-called “gay activists” at this point include the Republican Mayor of Indianapolis, the cities of Seattle and San Francisco, the entire State of Connecticut, the NCAA, the Indiana Pacers, the NBA, and big corporations like Apple and Salesforce, and others.

But Beck wasn’t done. Issuing a mild rebuke to proponents of the law, he still laid the onus of concentration camps on its detractors:

We can’t legislate morality. I can’t believe I’m arguing the other side. You can’t legislate morality. This is why we have to heal our hearts. This is why we have to get to know each other. This is why we have to stand with each other. Because there’s a ton of gay people who listen to us. They know our hearts. I know their hearts. We don’t have a problem with each other.

Let’s stop forcing each other to do things. You don’t change anything. That ends up in concentration camps. You just start grinding and grinding and grinding away until you’re in separate worlds and nobody talks to each other and then, whoever has the power, round ’em up and kill ’em because those guys are the problem.

“That’s how it happens,” he concluded.

The thing is, gays aren’t trying to force anybody to do anything. They just wanted to be treated like everybody else. Nobody is trying to force Beck to marry a man, or to not marry a woman. The Religious Right has poisoned the waters with lie after lie about the dangers of marriage equality. When they are not inventing biological reasons, they are inventing medical reasons, or even, as Beck points out, moral justifications.

I should mention that Fischer himself claimed Monday that the RFRA does not discriminate, but rather protects Christians from discrimination:

This law is not something that provides for discrimination against gays. It is something that prevents discrimination against Christians … This thing is an anti-discrimination bill because it prohibits governmental discrimination against Christians in the state of Indiana.

He went on to make the absurd claim that this is all about “homosexual supremacy”:

Homosexual activists want special rights for homosexuals to trump every other single right that any American possess anywhere, at any time, in any place.

You would think, from listening to this nonsense, that it was gays who wanted a law allowing them to not serve Evangelicals, or a law that would deprive them of the right to marry opposite-sex partners.

From top to bottom, from start to finish, the RFRA has been about lies. It is based on lies, it is defended with lies.

If, as Phil Robertson says, “[Satan] is a liar and the Father of Lies,” and that liberals serve Satan, why is it that the Republicans – and Robertson himself – are the ones telling the lies?

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.