Religious Right Encounters the Constitution and Tosses its Collective Cookies

Last updated on September 25th, 2023 at 01:47 pm

Perkins-fire
Oh, they are at it again, yes they are. Fresh from the Kim Davis martyrdom, we have just seen Republicans try (and fail) to impose a 20-week abortion ban on American women, and Ben Carson state categorically (and in defiance of the United States Constitution) that a Muslim should not be president.

Not content, those who had not already jumped on the stupid bandwagon, hastened to follow. Tony Perkins, eager to reveal that he, too, has failed to read the Constitution, jumped in with Carson, claiming on his “Washington Watch” radio program that Islam doesn’t have First Amendment protections because it’s not really a religion:

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Religious freedom and our liberty is ordered liberty under the Constitution. And as Dr. Carson pointed out, and I know this is driving the left crazy, that Islam is not just a religion, Islam is an economic system, it is a judicial system, it is a compressive system which is incompatible with the Constitution. That’s what Dr. Carson said and he happens to be correct.

Of course, if Islam is not really a religion, then neither is Christianity. How is it, if Christianity is not a judicial system, that the Religious Right wants to control our lives with its own version of Sharia Law, called the Law of Moses? And if it is not an economic system, why do they subject us to endless David Barton monologues on the subject? Why claim Jesus was a capitalist, that capitalism was in his DNA?

As far as what is or is not a religion, Islam was understood by our Founding Fathers to be a religion, just as was Christianity. It is the world’s second-largest religion, in fact. And the Religious Right wants to delegitimize and disenfranchise it on the sole basis that it is not Christianity.

Never mind that we could argue Tony Perkins’ own religion is not Christianity either. Given the absence, you know, of anything resembling Christ.

But Perkins was far from the only one talking out of his backside.

Talk radio host Michael Savage says (and I’m paraphrasing here, but accurately, I think) that only psychopaths are tolerant. I know, right?

President Obama appointed a gay men to be Secretary of the Army, and of course, the Religious Right lost its cookies, heads exploded, and absolute mayhem ensued, along with the death of all common sense and reason.

Mike Huckabee already informed us all that “Homosexuality is not a job qualification,” but Savage went a step further and claimed on Friday,

You don’t understand that a person can be insane and not look crazy, you don’t understand the definition of psychopaths, do you? We have an openly mad president who is doing everything he can as quickly as he can to decimate everything that this country stood for, stands for and would stand for.

Savage isn’t making any sense. Apparently, gay men “decimate” what he stands for, which as we can all see, is an unreasoning hatred and bigotry of everyone not like himself (or as some are sure to suggest, everyone like himself, if you take my meaning).

And he wasn’t finished:

As Brian Tashman describes it on Right Wing Watch:

Savage, who recently wondered if seltzer water’s “little bubbles of carbon dioxide poisoned the brains” of liberals, also beseeched his listeners not to listen to “the communist, Maoist vermin in the media” composed of “left-wing America-haters, family-haters, God-haters, church-haters, family-haters, drug addicts almost every last one of them.”

“Almost every one of those psycho-leftists are on drugs.”

Haters gonna hate. And then claim everybody else is the hater. I think we know who the psychopath is. I can’t remember our articulate president ever talking like this.

Which leaves us Gary Cass of the Christian Anti-Defamation Commission, who, in defense of Kim Davis, says elected officials should refuse to obey “unlawful” orders from “an increasingly tyrannical, statist, secular government” – because those orders don’t come from God.

You would like to ask yourself what part of the United States Constitution Cass doesn’t understand, but you’d be wasting your time. Yeah, you don’t get this kind of stupidity every day. I’d direct Cass myself to the Constitution but he wouldn’t read it anyway, because it would violate his belief that it is something it is not.

Simply put, God doesn’t run the country. Never did. Never will. Can’t hold office, can’t vote. God isn’t in the Constitution.

Political power belongs to us, the people. And we don’t speak for God. We speak for ourselves, and chose the leaders we want – at least when Republicans aren’t rigging elections and turning our votes into votes for them.

Collectively, the Religious Right sounds like a bunch of little kids shrieking as they watch a horror movie. And that is what the United States Constitution is for them: a horror movie. A movie where everybody has equal rights, even people who follow other religions, even women, and even gays and lesbians oh my.

They so badly want the United States Constitution to be the Bible that they insist they are identical even when they’re nothing alike, even when the Founders expressly rejected religious tyranny in their writings, and warned of mixing religion and government. You wouldn’t think people could be this…well, dirt stupid…but they can, and they are.

It’s been hard on the Religious Right lately, and its getting harder with Bernie Sanders, and now the Pope, piling on. If you want them dry-heaving, you can do your part by choosing each day to be a good human being and showing a little tolerance of the diverse and pluralistic culture around you. They really hate that.

Really, we should be good people just because we should, but let’s face it, a little added incentive doesn’t hurt.



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