Do you like to grab your popcorn, head out to the nearest railroad tracks, and watch the boxcars full of Christians being hauled away to the FEMA camps?
Neither do I.
Because it’s not happening.
You wouldn’t know that from reading Pat Robertson’s CBN News, which just published a piece by the president of Massachusetts-based MassResistance, Brian Camenker, who argues there is a big push on to silence Christians:
“Some say American Christians are paranoid, that they’re feeling targeted and persecuted. But is it possible America is facing a growing anti-Christian agenda?”
MassResistance says they are “a pro-family activist organization that educates people to help them confront the attacks on the traditional family, children, religion, and society.” They say they “give citizens and activists everywhere the tools and strategy to effectively confront the anti-family forces against them.”
It’s just a shame they aren’t as willing to confront the facts as they are to push their own prejudices. Invoking the holocaust has, as Mike Huckabee and others have shown, become a regular feature of the Republican Party’s culture war.
Camenker complains in his article that, “Some on the frontline of the culture wars have responded with a resounding “yes.” They feel it up close and personal – right in their faces”:
“I’m particularly sensitive to that because I’m Jewish,” Brian Camenker, with Mass Resistance, told CBN News.
“I saw what happened to Jews in the 1930s and 40s and much of that same thing is happening to Christians now,” he said. “There’s an organized movement to demonize Christians.”
If you see any death camps, shout out. As I have repeatedly shown here, the Religious Right uses the same language of gays as Nazis used of Jews, presenting them like a parasite infecting society. Camenker should be ashamed of peddling such lurid fantasies.
He is not alone of course, and proud of the fact that others share his shameful delusions:
Maggie Gallagher, with the American Principles Project, agreed.
“What we’re seeing very clearly is an effort to target them [Christians] legally when possible and then to humiliate or deprive them of social respect,” she said.
Much of this comes from abortion and gay rights groups and their supporters.
“They see Christianity as refusing to affirm the things they wish to indulge in,” said Peter Sprigg, senior fellow for policy studies at the Family Research Council.
Both Sprigg and Rev. Bill Owens, with the Coalition of African-American Pastors, are frequent targets of gay rights groups.
“They cannot accept any moral code that says what they do is wrong and in order to avoid any sort of guilt that might come upon them if anyone says that what they’re doing is wrong, they want to eliminate that kind of communication from the culture altogether,” Sprigg explained.
Owens continued, “There’s a strong agenda to silence Christians. You see it every day. You can’t walk out of your house and not see something anti-Christian.”
Oh dear, Christians won’t affirm the things we leftists want to indulge in…since when do we care?
We – LGBT people, women, atheists, religious minorities – just want them to leave us alone, and not try to force us to do the things they like to indulge in.
That’s the only problem here. There is most definitely persecution going on, but it is not against, but rather than by, so-called Christians like Camenker.
The people being treated like Jews in Nazi Germany are gays, who are actually being treated like they were treated in Nazi Germany, with the added blow that they are accused by these so-called Christians (like Scott Lively) of having driven the Nazi movement before, bizarrely, throwing themselves (?) into concentration camps.
As Bernie Sanders said in a tweet, “In many states, it’s legal to fire someone for being gay or deny someone housing for being transgender. We’re gonna change that!”
It is not, it might be observed, legal to fire somebody for being Christian, or deny someone housing for being an evangelical. And no, we’re not trying to change that.
In fact, throughout most of the country – twenty-nine states – you can be fired for being gay. There are some exceptions, for example, government employees, and some cities offer protections the states do not.
A 2011 study by the Williams Institute highlighted the extent of workplace discrimination of LGBT people. Many of us have personally witnessed or even experienced harassment from evangelicals in the workplace.
Impossible to find are incidents of gays trying to “force gayness” on unwilling Christians.
The truth is, in exactly zero states can you be fired for being a Christian, let alone risk being carted off to a concentration camp based on your beliefs, however hateful and bigoted. The worst you might have to do is bake a cake.
That’s a pretty rough life. Victims of the Nazis would have been so lucky to have had to bake cakes. You can almost hear Hitler laughing from here.
In fact, far from discrimination, there is wide-spread support for gay rights among Americans according to polls. Not widespread support for persecution of Christians, because the two are not the same. Equal rights for all does not mean fewer rights for one, whatever absurd claims might be made to the contrary.
Yet according to Camenker, the Supreme Court’s marriage equality ruling demonizes the biblical beliefs of Christians “and them along with it.”
Far from it. It doesn’t even stop Christians from demonizing gays. Rather, it prevents Christians from imposing their religious beliefs on other people, which is, after all, something prohibited by the First Amendment.
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