Religious Right Leaders Threaten to “Rise Up” If they Don’t Get to Persecute Gays

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The RFRA fiasco, including the belated revision to the hate-law in Indiana, may have irrevocably hurt the Republican brand, but if so, Religious Right bigots are unaware of it. More and more their diatribes are couched in not just apocalyptic, but military terms.

Rick Santorum got all frothy and stomped his little feet as he followed Ted Cruz in expressing his anger over the role corporations played in opposing the RFRA. Apparently, saying everybody has equal rights is an assault on “religious freedom.” Meaning fake-Christian freedom to persecute anybody and everybody it does not approve of.

A strange definition of freedom, you have to admit. He claims left-wing officials are “imposing their will on people of faith” but I think most of the country understood it to be the other way around. You know this new generation of RFRA laws have got to be pretty bad when even Walmart opposes them.

Yet according to Santorum,

The corporate community now has bought in with the popular culture and bought in with the left. This is not the gay community, this is the left of America trying to impose their will on the church and on the family and really to, in my opinion, devastating consequences.

As a result, Santorum claims that his fellow fake Christians must “begin to push back and rise up” – judging from Santorum, apparently in some whiny and hypocritical fashion. He didn’t mention guns, but we already know you can’t “pray the gay away.”

It is perhaps no surprise to see a headline like this about former General Jerry Boykin, now of the Family Research Council, which doesn’t care about families and sure as heck doesn’t do any research:

Jerry Boykin Calls Upon ‘God’s Army’ To Rise Up And Fight The ‘Evil’ Of Gay Rights

From Right Wing Watch:

“If you’re a Bible-believing Christian, if you’re a person who has a biblical worldview, if you serve the one and only God, you are going to be persecuted, plain and simple” he said, pointing to Springfield’s non-discrimination ordinance which bans discrimination on the basis sexual orientation and gender identity [SOGI].

“This SOGI nonsense is an example of exactly what they’re trying to do us,” Boykin said. “They’re trying to put us in a situation where we’re going to lose our businesses, where we’re going to be forced to accept what Adolf Hitler forced the church to accept in Germany in 1937.”

“We’re at war,” Boykin said, as he declared that the push for gay rights is “evil” and cannot be compared to the fight for civil rights: “This is not about civil rights, this is about the evil that has come into our society and is trying to destroy our ability and our freedom to be able to worship our god as we choose.”

“We’re not rising up against evil,” he warned. “When we rise up against evil, we’ve got to rise up like an army. We’ve got to act like we’re in the military because, in fact, we are God’s army.”

He’s all into that “My God can beat up your God,” stuff and was one of the would-be crusaders of the Iraq War era. I’m not certain at what point he missed the whole Moral Majority-thing but then again, he hasn’t ever read a Bible either.

And then you’ve got your Tony Perkins – Boykin’s boss at the FRC – who said last month on Washington Watch that Obama isn’t a Christian and told a caller,

“I think, John, your point about Christians rising up, I think we are getting close to that in this country as we see increasingly this growing hostility at the hands of our own government toward Christianity and I think especially if the court imposes upon the nation a redefinition of marriage. I don’t think the nation is going to accept it, I absolutely don’t, and the conflict that is going to come as a result of it.”

Pro-rapist Mike Huckabee jumped on the bandwagon too, saying last week on Washington Watch that gays “won’t stop until there are no more churches,” and that a “phony crisis” turned Walmart against them, not their blatant intolerance and bigotry:

It’s been manufactured by the left, just as was the war on women. There was no war on women. The left has gotten very good on creating a crisis, something to divide the country, something to create this sense in which ‘we’ve got to go after these conservatives because they are trying to trample over our rights.’

No, I am pretty sure Walmart, looking at the bottom dollar, said, “Holy sh*t, these people are f***** in the head! Let’s bail!”

I am equally sure women will be happy to know they’re just imagining the prospect of going to prison for having a miscarriage.

Oh wait…I guess if there really isn’t a Republican war on women, then Purvi Patel can go home today?

Pat Robertson, frequently the last word in Satan-level dishonesty, says “the gays want to control everything,” when, in fact, they just want the same rights Robertson has.

And Louisiana Governor “Bobby” Jindal, competing with Ted Cruz for the hearts and minds of the Santorum-crowd (the dim-witted who have never actually read the Bible), says the “real victims” of the RFRA were the antigay small business owners, not the gays who were being discriminated against.

According to the hypocritical Jindal, the left are the real hypocrites:

What’s really underneath all of this is the left preaches tolerance and diversity and openness, and that’s true, unless you disagree with them. They don’t want to discriminate anybody unless you happen to be a conservative, or in this case, an evangelical Christian, and that’s the hypocrisy in this.

Somehow, he thinks a better position than equal rights for everybody is extra rights for Christians and none at all for everybody else, and then call that religious tyranny “religious freedom.” Well, we can’t expect much out of Jindal. He is reaching for that Santorum-crowd, too.

The consensus in all this seems to be one of “either us or them,” and “you’re with us or you’re against us,” and that only one of them can survive the encounter. Despite the rhetoric, gays are willing to co-exist. It’s just that the gays are unwilling to be victims of religious persecution.

And that rankles a group that has systematically bullied every opposition, and alternative raised up to it, into the grave over a period of almost 2000 years. Christian conservatives are not very Christian but they are and have always been very ruthless, which is why they have generally been on top of the heap.

They aren’t used to not winning. And being able to use violence to get their way, and we see this tendency toward violence in place of Jesus’ turning the other cheek every time we see gay people or transgenders beaten and murdered by hypocritical fake Christians who claim, like these clowns, to follow the “Prince of Peace.”

Watching Ted Cruz begin his campaign with a hypocritical appeal to Jesus, and the Religious Right’s denunciations of corporations, you have to wonder at what point the Republican establishment follows businesses and backs away – if it can – from their crazy fake Christian allies.

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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.

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