Justin's Political Corner

An email sent from Charisma media, a Pentecostal media company, brings the “news” that Obamacare has killed its millionth person. Amazingly, this milestone was reached even before health care reform has been fully implemented. The claim is not documented or explained in any way. It seems to be mostly an attention-grabbing way to promote some right-wing hucksterism.  Here’s how the letter starts:

Obamacare Just Killed its Millionth Person…

Dear Concerned Citizen, 

The eleventh hour is upon us.

In the coming weeks, the full impact of Obamacare will take effect. 

I’ve seen what’s coming and it’s scary. It’s a lethal dose of socialism being injected directly into the heart of the American health insurance market.

Heck, it’s already wreaking havoc. By our estimates, Obamacare has already killed a million people by further straining an already weak healthcare system. 

The letter pitches an anti-Obamacare petition and promotes “Capitol Hill Daily,” an electronic publication launched this year. Capitol Hill Daily’s “Chief Political Analyst” is right-wing activist Floyd Brown, a co-founder of Citizens United and infamous as the political operative behind the Willie Horton ad deployed against Michael Dukakis in the 1988 presidential race.

A few weeks ago, a bipartisan group of legislators once again introduced the Employment Non-Discrimination Act in both the House and the Senate, which will prohibit ”employers, employment agencies, and labor unions from using an individual’s sexual orientation or gender identity as the basis for employment decisions, such as hiring, firing, promotion, or compensation”; such protections are already provided based on things like race, religion, gender, national origin, age and disability.

But “Chaps” Gordon Klingenschmitt is not buying it because he knows that ENDA is really all about driving Christian businesses right out of existence.

“ENDA is the end of the world for [conservative] Christian employers,” Klingenschmitt claimed, saying that ENDA is not about equality but rather “bankrupting Christian business owners.” Even more frightening, ENDA is also apparently about forcing major corporations “to give homosexual bonus pay to your gay or lesbian lover” … whatever that means.

h/t: RWW

Bill O’Reilly recently got into a little hot water with the religious right. The abrasive talk show host dared to suggest on his show, “The O’Reilly Factor,” that the anti-gay movement would be better off using secular arguments against same-sex marriage than resorting endlessly to biblical ones. “The compelling argument is on the side of homosexuals,” O’Reilly argued, adding, “And the other side hasn’t been able to do anything but thump the Bible.”

Since the beginning, the Christian right has been aware that the First Amendment makes it impossible for them to use “God said so” to justify legislation. They’ve spent decades grafting secular reasons onto what are fundamentally attempts to foist their views on the rest of the country, often going out of their way to conceal the religious origins of their policy ideas. In response, I created this list of what the religious right wants; what nonsense secular reason they give for wanting it; and the actual, true reason, usually down to chapter and verse.

1) What they want: A rollback on environmental protections. This is but one of many ways the religious right has merged its interests with that of corporate America.

The secular reasons they give: Many on the Christian right scoff at the science of global warming. Sadly, Americans in general are resistant to the science of global warming, but white evangelical Christians are even worse than the general public. Pew Forum found in 2009 that 47% of Americans accept the science of climate change, but only 34% of white evangelicals. The objections the religious right offers are fed to them by oil industry lobbyists, such as Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council calling global warming theory “speculative.”

The unconstitutional, actual religious reasons: They justify this to themselves religiously coming and going. The fundamentalist Cornwall Alliance claims that belief in climate change is anti-Christian, because it “rests on and promotes a view of human beings as threats to Earth’s flourishing rather than the bearers of God’s image” and implies that God’s creation is “the fragile product of chance, not the robust, resilient, self-regulating, and self-correcting product of God’s wise design and powerful sustaining.” On the other side of it, as Ben Jervey of GOOD argued, 41% of Americans believe Jesus Christ will usher in Armageddon before 2050. If you believe the world is about to end, it seems pointless to make huge sacrifices to preserve its health into the future.

2) What they want: For the government to take money from the public school system and give it to private schools in the form of vouchers. They’ve had remarkable success at this by hijacking the larger, secular debate over education.

The secular reasons they give: The claim is that “school choice” creates competition among schools that improves educational outcomes. Public school charter systems are seen as an inadequate alternative, because they are supposedly not flexible enough.

The unconstitutional, actual religious reasons: They want the government to pay for the religious indoctrination of children. Even though the vouchers can, in theory, be spent on private secular schools, the way the program works in places like Louisiana makes it clear that this is about government-sponsored religious education.

3) What they want: No Equal Rights Amendment. While this battle to prevent the Constitution from being amended to give women equal rights, which the right won, was mostly fought in the late ’70s and early ’80s, Christian right-controlled legislatures occasionally take time to vote against it today.

The secular reasons they gave: In many ways, Phyllis Schlafly used the battle against the ERA to invent the modern conservative strategy of making bad faith secular arguments to advance a religious agenda. As Rachel Maddow recounts, Schlafly and her comrades claimed the ERA would mandate unisex bathrooms, make it illegal for women to be housewives, and destroy families.

The unconstitutional, actual religious reasons: The Bible is pretty clear that women are not equal to men, calling them “the weaker vessel” (1 Peter 3:7) who must live “in silence” to “not usurp authority over man” (1 Timothy 2:12), because women are to basically worship their husbands, “and he shall rule over thee” (Genesis 3:16).

4) What they want: A ban on gay marriage. Often cast as “protecting” traditional marriage.

The secular reasons they give: The argument presented in favor of Prop 8 before the Supreme Court is that marriage was established to make sure children are raised by the parents who created them through sexual intercourse, and that expanding it to include gay couples (it’s already expanded to include stepfamilies and infertile couples) would redefine it in a way that would cause vague damage the anti-gay lawyer refused to describe.

The unconstitutional, actual religious reasons: The Old Testament harshly condemns homosexuality, saying, “If a man also lie with mankind, as he lieth with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination: they shall surely be put to death” (Leviticus 20:13). Christian fundamentalists have downgraded this simply to mean that their government shouldn’t endorse marriages that go against right-wing religious teachings.

5) What they want: To end the teaching of evolution in schools. This battle has been going on since at least the 1920s, and every time it comes around, the religious right gets a little better at hiding its religious motivations behind secularist claims.

The secular reasons they give: The current strategy is to claim that evolutionary theory is scientifically controversial, and therefore schools should “teach the controversy.” Clearly, they hope to give students reason to doubt the theory of evolution. In reality, there is no controversy. As the National Center for Science Education has stated, “There is no serious scientific doubt that evolution occurred or that natural selection is a major mechanism of evolution.”

The unconstitutional, actual religious reasons: For Biblical literalists, evolution is an uncomfortable topic because the Bible says God created the world in the space of six days. While evolution correctly holds that human beings are primates who evolved from a common ancestor, the Bible teaches that God made them out of “the dust of the ground” (Genesis 2:7). Why that is supposed to be less demeaning is hard to say.

6) What they want: To restrict access to abortion and contraception. Everyone knows the religious right has it out for abortion rights, but recently attacks on contraception access have also been increasing.

The secular reasons they give: Abortion is “baby-killing,” it’s unsafe for women, and it causes breast cancer and suicide. Emergency contraception is really “abortion” and birth control pills are unsafe. Telling kids just to abstain from sex is the only public health strategy we need. Condoms don’t work to prevent HIV. 

All of these claims are lies, as is the secular pose that anti-choice activists take when promoting these lies.

The unconstitutional, actual religious reasons: Right from the beginning, the Bible is big on the idea that a woman’s role is to be frequently pregnant, whether she likes it or not. “Unto the woman he said, I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children” (Genesis 3:16). He commands it again to Noah: “And you, be ye fruitful, and multiply; bring forth abundantly in the earth, and multiply therein” (Genesis 9:7).

So, in a very real sense, even when Bill O’Reilly is right, he’s wrong. He’s not wrong to say that social conservatives would do well to come up with secular arguments for their positions, instead of tell a country with strict protections for religious freedom to obey their interpretation of the Bible. He’s just wrong to think they don’t already know that. After all, they wrote the instruction manual.

h/t: AlterNet

Back2Stonewall.com has gotten its hands on the piece of anti-gay propaganda on same sex marriage being sent around the country by Peter Sprigg of the GOP backed hate group the Family Research Council warning citizens against same-sex marriage.

Lies include: Taxpayers would be forced to subsidize homosexual relationships. Birth rates would fall, Demands for legalization of polygamy would grow.

And the ever popular. Fewer children would be raised by a married mother and father.

This particular “memo” was sent out by the FRC to Cincinnati’s Citizens for Community Values an umbrella group of the FRC and “proud affiliate” of the American Family Association.

Total lies, garbage, bullshit and hate.

Be a homophobic bigot for the children.

Family Reseach Council’s Anti-Gay Propaganda EXPOSED! - Top Ten Harms of Same Sex Marriage

h/t: Back2Stonewall.com

Fear itself, President Franklin Roosevelt famously observed in his First Inaugural Address, can present the greatest obstacle to progress. It can easily overwhelm our discourse, paralyze our politics, and splinter the social construct that binds us together as a people. Given enough time, this fear might even convince some that our democratic institutions are a lost cause, our shared problems obviously insurmountable, our collective solutions hopelessly inadequate. In this frightening world, then, the only safe bet worth making is on oneself.

To get a sense of how part of America is going all-in on this bet look no further than National Geographic Channel’s hit reality show Doomsday Preppers. Filmed in an unblinking documentary style, each show profiles a few individuals from the modern-day survivalist movement, all of whom have become convinced that the arrival of a stark, dystopian future is only a matter of when, not if. Though even FEMA believes we’d all be better off doing a little prepping, for these folks, not preparing for what they see as unavoidable disaster is a life-or-death gamble. And though the show often descends into caricature, dismissing the popularity of Doomsday Preppers as mere pop-cultural voyeurism would be a mistake.

That’s because the show is a microcosm of something else stirring in our country, something more foreboding. The ominous prophecies of government tyranny, financial meltdown and violent anarchy featured on Preppers inform more than just the survivalist movement circa 2013. They’re also being absorbed into contemporary conservatism, which has increasingly bought into these same doomsday storylines hook, line and bunker.

Rose McDermott, a political scientist at Brown University, recently published a study in the American Journal of Political Science that analyzed people’s susceptibility to succumb to fearful thinking. In it, she found a correlation between heightened fear and current conservative attitudes toward immigration and segregation. “It’s not that conservative people are more fearful, it’s that fearful people are more conservative,” McDermott explains. “People who are scared of novelty, uncertainty, people they don’t know, and things they don’t understand, are more supportive of policies that provide them with a sense of surety and security.”

This latent conservative anxiety is also the bubbling undercurrent that runs throughout the 60-odd-year history of the survivalism movement in America. A vast majority of its adherents are undoubtedly harmless “small-s survivalists,” as then Chicago Tribune reporter James Coates calls them in his 1987 book, Armed and Dangerous: The Rise of the Survivalist Right. But Coates also points out that the survivalist movement’s origins nonetheless rest upon a virulently right-wing, or “big-S,” foundation of violence, racism, and anti-Semitism.

“The godfather of latter-day American survivalism of both the big-S and the small-s variety is Robert DePugh,” writes Coates. In the late 1950s, DePugh’s thinking began to coalesce around racist conspiracy theories and tales of imminent societal collapse, many of which form the rootstock of today’s apocalyptic scenarios. By the 1960s, DePugh had founded the Minutemen, the notorious precursor of the anti-government resistance group Posse Comitatus. Across the decades, these Survivalist Right groups and their spinoffs have developed a frightening reputation for criminal activity and violent behavior. Just last summer, five men, including one with suspected Posse Comitatus ties, were arrested in Louisiana for the murder of two sheriff’s deputies.

In recent years, a sort of rebranding has taken place within the survivalist movement to distance it from the poisonous “big-S” worldview as well as from fatalistic End Times religious sects. As a result, around 2008, the more artful, less incendiary term “prepper” began to appear on survivalist message boards, and it has gained momentum ever since. Nevertheless, it’s almost impossible for prepper types to avoid encountering the extremist elements within the movement. “When the small-s survivalists set out to swap ideas with like-minded people,” Coates writes, “they don’t have very far to look before running up against the Survival[ist] Right.”

Studying how ideas and narratives develop within survivalism is key to understanding how its doomsday thinking has propagated outward into the mainstream. “Survivalism centers around this crafting of tales,” says Oregon State sociology professor Richard G. Mitchell, Jr., who spent fifteen years inside the movement while researching his 2002 book Dancing at Armageddon. “The survivalist trick is to tell their story in such a way that there’s a delicate optimism achieved, that what you have in terms of your personal resources, your material resources, your time, your knowledge and so on, is pretty much what you need.” What a survivalist chooses to prepare for, then, is not based on what is the most statistically probable threat to their safety, but on what fits their individual fears and unique circumstances, he says. For example, large numbers of survivalists stockpile gas masks, but as Mitchell has pointed out before, more people have been killed by vending machines tipping over in the past 30 years than have died from biological or chemical terrorist attacks.

This rigid, irrational worldview, one that tries to force fit reality to one’s beliefs rather than the other way around, is a hallmark of reactionary thought. Nearly 50 years ago, Richard Hofstadter, in his seminal 1964 Harper’s essay, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” identified how irrational fears had fueled a similarly unhinged, anti-communist wing of conservatism. Hoftstadter’s essay predates the popular usage of the term “survivalism,” but it nonetheless recognizes the broader similarities between individuals with an inward, self-focused paranoia and those with an outward-looking group-based fear, what he calls the “paranoid spokesman” in politics. “They both tend to be overheated, oversuspicious, overaggressive, grandiose, and apocalyptic in expression,” he writes.

In addition, both survivalism and right-wing political populism experience cyclical ebbs and flows in their popularity. What are subtle shifts, however, become amplified by the press into dramatic boom and bust cycles. After large-scale trigger events—most recently, events like the 9/11 terrorists attacks, Hurricane Katrina, and the dual shocks of Obama’s 2008 election and the Great Recession—media attention in these groups inevitably picks up, and another generation comes forward to put a new gloss on age-old themes.

Thus, a movement like the Tea Party can ride the zeitgeist rollercoaster from non-entity up to sensation and back down to political afterthought in four short years while the demographic cohort that overwhelmingly identifies with it—white, married, male, middle-aged conservatives—is remarkably homogeneous. Likewise, popular survivalist websites of today, such as endoftheamericandream.com and SHTFplan.com (short for “shit hits the fan”), like to repeat the claim that their burgeoning movement has as many as three million followers across the country. But Mitchell says these same numbers were bandied about throughout his many years of research. And in a survey conducted for his book, Mitchell found survivalists to be strikingly homogeneous as well—white (97 percent), married (74 percent), male (89 percent), fairly well educated (52 percent had a bachelor’s or higher degree), and with an average age around 40.

The similarities don’t end there. Just as a New York Times/CBS poll found that “Tea Party supporters over all are more likely than the general public to say their personal financial situation is fairly good or very good,” survivalists also tend to be firmly ensconced in the middle class or well off. For these people the term “survivalism” is an awkward misnomer. “This is not the homeless on the streets of New York,” Mitchell points out. “This is a hobby. It is always done with surplus time, resources, money, interest and so on. You don’t run into a lot of really poor survivalists,” Mitchell notes, laughing.

Because today’s preppers share so many personal characteristics with the modern-day right-wing populists, it’s not unexpected that the former’s doomsday narratives would gain exposure to and a foothold among the latter. (It should be noted that Mitchell also documented a long, if much less prevalent, tradition of left-wing survivalist retreats and communes, which was touched upon in a Season One episode of Doomsday Preppers that featured “Calamity Janet” Spencer, a left-wing survivalist who plans on feeding 1,000 post-apocalyptic survivors in her “Armageddon Inn.”) Nowhere is this give and take more apparent than on the issue of guns. As it is with much of the American right-wing, gun ownership is of fundamental importance to survivalism. Mitchell found that, by far, the most popular step in crisis preparation—taken by nearly 64 percent of survivalists—was to acquire firearms.

Arming oneself becomes a necessity for survivalists who game out the aftermath of societal collapse, explains Coates in Armed and Dangerous. “The most important question, after stockpiling food, water, clothing, machine guns and other gear,” he writes, “is protecting these treasures from the hordes of the less foresighted who are likely to start streaming out of the cities.” This compulsion for a well-stocked arsenal to defend against urban (read: non-white) marauders can have unforeseen and tragic consequences, however.

The violent potential for this intersection of guns and survivalism became tragically apparent last December, after the infamous school massacre in Newtown, Connecticut. In the aftermath of the tragedy, it was revealed that the military-style assault rifle Adam Lanza used in the killings was stolen from his mother Nancy, whom he shot and killed first to start his rampage. “Nancy had a survivalist philosophy which is why she was stockpiling guns,” said her former sister-in-law, Marsha Lanza. “We talked about preppers and preparing for the economy collapsing.” Not long after, an unstable survivalist in Alabama stormed a school bus and killed the driver before holding a five-year-old boy hostage for a week in his well-stocked, homemade underground bunker. (Law enforcement authorities eventually stormed the bunker, killed the man and rescued the boy.)

The Newtown massacre rightly shocked the larger national conscience and prompted a renewed awareness about the toll of gun violence. However, the counter-narrative crafted by the gun industry’s main lobbying arm, the National Rifle Association, quickly resorted to sounding survivalist-style alarms to justify the group’s intransigence. NRA executive vice president Wayne LaPierre raised the specter of sinister motives behind the Obama administration’s plan for universal background checks—a measure supported by nine in ten Americans, incidentally. He claimed that the plan was a precursor to an ominous “universal registry of law-abiding people” that could lead to government confiscation of all guns. In February, LaPierre conjured up even more paranoid fantasies in an op-ed for a right-wing opinion website. “Hurricanes. Tornadoes. Riots. Terrorists. Gangs. Lone criminals. These are perils we are sure to face—not just maybe,” La Pierre wrote. “It’s not paranoia to buy a gun. It’s survival.” By March, a right-wing website was hawking LaPierre’s 336-page, hardcover “survival guide” that he’d originally authored back in 2010.

LaPierre is not alone in leveraging survivalist imagery in service of stopping new gun control legislation. Not long after President Obama unveiled a commonsense package of reforms in mid-January, GOP Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell sent out an incendiary fundraising email chock full of similarly paranoid allusions. In it, he stoked conservatives’ fears and talked of them being “literally surrounded,” where “freedom is under direct assault,” due to Obama’s “attempt to gut our Constitution.”

These statements are provocative, to be sure, and to see them enjoy the imprimatur of such prominent public figures is even more unsettling. Still, it would be a mistake to think of this rhetoric as the source code of doomsday myths. “Those who are on the fringe don’t get their ideas from Mitch McConnell,” Mitchell remarks. “They’re going to turn to Glenn Beck or Laura Ingraham or Rush Limbaugh or Bill O’Reilly.” Though these and other right-wing media personalities act independently through their respective TV, radio and Internet platforms, they form a powerful chorus that picks out, rearranges and amplifies tales of impending chaos or looming oppression in an ever-churning feedback loop. To see this vicious cycle in action, look no further than the months-long campaign organized around the lie that Obama’s healthcare reform law would set up unaccountable government “death panels” that could deny coverage, encourage suicide and even institute euthanasia.

Some right-wing sites, like World Net Daily, tread boldly into deeper, murkier waters. Despite counting as contributors such conservatives as Rick Santorum and Pat Buchanan as well as Fox News personalities John Stossel and Andrew Napolitano—all of whom enjoy, deservedly or not, some mainstream media respectability—WND.com is renowned for pushing crackpot “birther” conspiracies and apocalyptic sensationalism. In December, the site conducted a bizarre poll asking morbid, leading questions about the hypothetical aftermath of a massive power outage. Among its published “findings”: 50 percent of Americans believe that within two weeks of a catastrophic emergency their home would be attacked by looters; 58 percent would be willing or somewhat willing to use a firearm to kill a neighbor they deemed a threat.

Of course, thanks to the devastation wrought by Hurricane Sandy, hundreds of thousands of people in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut did lose power for days, if not weeks. As for those predictions of roving, bloodthirsty gangs and pitched, neighborhood gun battles? They never materialized. Even a favorite right-wing trope—repeated by the NRA’s LaPierre—about looters “running wild in south Brooklyn” turned out to be a gross exaggeration. In fact, New York City saw a widespread decrease in crime immediately following Sandy, even enjoying a record eight-day span without a single homicide. But as is so often the case, facts are no match for the hard-wired doomsday prepper mindset.

Consider a January front-page post on SurvivalBlog.com by “Elizabeth in the Northeast.” A single mother, Elizabeth describes the rather caring, well-organized emergency aid she and her two children received at a local evacuation shelter the frantic night Hurricane Sandy made landfall. Nevertheless, she summed up her experience interacting with the many on-site government workers this way: “I didn’t feel like a refugee from Monster Storm Sandy, I felt deep within my soul and in my heart that my children and I were in a farce of being shipped off to a concentration camp similar to what I had seen in Schindler’s List.”

Fleeing one’s home during a natural disaster can understandably generate overwrought emotions. But what failed Elizabeth last October were not our public institutions; they, by most accounts, performed admirably. What failed was her trust in them. This is perhaps the most insidious aspect of the survivalist mentality—the willful abandonment of faith in civil society’s ability to function, often contrary to all evidence. This doesn’t make someone apolitical—a common, self-identified claim among preppers—it makes them anti-political and an apathetic stance toward government should never be confused with an apocalyptic one. “If you talk about politics, you’re always talking about actions in the collective,” observes Mitchell. “To do that is to negate the very fundamental notion that individual action is the most crucial factor with survivalism.”

Ironically, a not unsubstantial number of people winning elections these days do so under a banner of being thoroughly disenchanted with the idea of government and the value of collective action. On the state level, it’s not hard to find evidence of reactionary, doomsday thinking among these political self-abnegators. To cite three recent examples: an Idaho state senator blithely comparing her state’s proposed health exchange to Nazi concentration camps; a Wyoming state rep advocating the legalization of gold and silver as legal tender due to “the potential coming collapse of the dollar”; a Texas county judge warning that Obama’s reelection could lead to “civil unrest, civil disobedience, civil war maybe.”

At the national level, polarization studies show that Republicans have tilted even further toward the extreme right in recent years as well. No surprise then, that Mitt Romney, the party’s 2012 presidential standard-bearer, rehashed the bitterly divisive “maker vs. taker” argument, one that has deep roots in survivalist mythology. Likewise, Representative Paul Ryan, chosen to be Romney’s vice presidential nominee, fast-tracked his reputation within the party by authoring a plan to dismantle Medicare in favor of a go-it-alone healthcare voucher system. And don’t look to Tea Party favorite and Republican rising star Senator Marco Rubio if you want to avoid yet another man-made financial crisis or fear being abandoned after the next major natural disaster. Rubio, recently hailed as “The Republican Savior” on the cover of Time, joined a small cadre of hard-right conservatives who uniformly voted against avoiding the fiscal cliff, raising the debt ceiling, and allocating desperately needed disaster relief to victims of Hurricane Sandy.

h/t: Alternet

Militarism is the belief that a group should maintain strong military capabilities and be prepared to use them aggressively to promote their interests, and it may imply the justification of conflict to administer a group’s policy on its enemies. Over the course of the past few years, conservatives have threatened various levels of conflict to impose their particular agenda on the government and American people whether it was opposition to healthcare reform when teabaggers attended protests claiming “we came unarmed this time,” or threats of race, civil, or revolutionary war over gun safety laws and the election of an African American president. Whatever various conservative groups’ causes, their reason for threatening conflict is always their opposition to the government’s right to enact laws within the tenets of the U.S. Constitution. During the Supreme Court hearings on the constitutionality of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) and California’s Prop 8 that banned same-sex marriage, conservative Christians became the latest group to use combative language to express their outrage at the prospect the Constitution forbids them from imposing their religious morality on the entire nation.

A little reported exchange during arguments in favor of perpetuating inequality in America was Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan’s reading a line from the House Report justifying DOMA’s passage in 1996 that defined the law’s entire legal underpinning. It said, “Congress decided to reflect and honor a moral judgment and to express moral disapproval of homosexuality.” That one line is all the reason the High Court needs to strike down the law on two counts; it is rank, government-sanctioned discrimination, and it is straight out of the Christian bible making it a direct violation of the 1^st Amendment’s prohibition on establishment of a state religion. Conservative Christians, meanwhile, fearing the prospect the Court may strike down the law, immediately took up a militaristic posture leading one influential conservative Iowa talk radio host to say, “It’s going to raise the issue to Orange Threat Level, it’ll be DEFCON 6,” and his warning was repeated across the country.

In Texas, about 250 opponents of same-sex marriage assembled at the Capitol to hear the state’s Republican leadership promise that Texas will remain a bastion of “freedom, family and faith,” and that “the hope of America is Texas” according to state Sen. Ken Paxton. The state’s lieutenant governor, David Dewhurst, kept up the battle-field rhetoric and inflamed rally-goers claiming that conservative values were under steady assault from President Barack Obama and his administration,  and that “Over our dead bodies are we going to let this state turn blue.” Another Texas Republican, state Senator Donna Campbell said “Our core values are being attacked on a daily basis … by government fiat in our courts and in our schools. They want to redefine the Constitution and it’s just not going to stand with me” and promised that Christian values would be defended here “because there is no other Texas to move to.” Steve Deace, who warned the threat level was elevating to DEFCON6 said “these people have invested decades in this fight and they are not going to throw up their hands, they’re going to double down, it’s going to be even nastier.”

The freedom, faith, and values crowd, conservative Christians, did not limit their threats to President Obama and the Supreme Court, and set their sights squarely on the Republican Party. An anti-gay activist, Gary Bauer, threatened Republicans and promised mass defections if they dared stand on the side of Constitutional equality, and promised to “leave the party and take as many people with me as I possibly can.” Bauer’s speech was for a “March for Marriage” event organized by the National Organization for Marriage (NOM) at the National Mall, and he told the American Values crowd “shame on the politicians and the judges that are trying to undermine the institution of marriage,” and then dismissed reports of increasing support for marriage equality by claiming “the polls are skewed.” Poll results aside, the simple fact is that no-one is undermining the institution of marriage, redefining the Constitution, or attacking Christian values, but that was never the point. The point is many conservative Christians are up in arms at the prospect of losing their government-sanctioned ability to force their religion’s “moral disapproval of homosexuality” on the nation and they are fully prepared to “double down” and “get even nastier.”

An evangelical anti-gay operative, Ralph Reed, leader of the Faith and Freedom Coalition predicted a protracted battle and said “If the court were to go to the most extreme case and strike down laws defining marriage, it will undermine the legitimacy of the Supreme Court, and spark a movement that will spend decades trying to reverse the decision.” However, the mood among hardline bigots in the conservative Christian movement is at a heightened level of an existential threat and it is unlikely the people threatening to get nastier and defend their bastion of freedom, faith, and family values are going to stand by and lose their legal right to impose the bible’s morality on all Americans for very long. It is not necessarily that conservative Christians are going militaristic over marriage equality in the near future, but they are the same crowd that threatened civil war over gun safety proposals, election monitoring, President Obama’s re-election, implementation of the ACA, and various issues they deemed worthy of nullification and 2^nd Amendment remedies. It is not even a stretch to imagine that a Supreme Court ruling striking down DOMA and Prop 8 will be the final straw because it involves religion, and history is replete with violence precipitated by the belief that someone’s religion is under assault, and to millions of conservative Christians, marriage equality is an attack on their faith, freedom, and families.

H/T: Rmuse at PoliticusUSA

In an interview with Janet Mefferd yesterday, pastor Jim Garlow elaborated on his theory that gay people don’t actually want to get married. In fact, Garlow told Mefferd, gay people want to “destroy marriage” and “force us to affirm an immoral behavior.”

Garlow further warned that if the Supreme Court affirms marriage equality, Christians will be “forced underground. Their buildings will be taken away from them, many of their rights will be taken away from them.”

h/t: RWW

The Religious Right group Government Is Not God PAC in a message to members this week warning that if the Supreme Court strikes down Proposition 8 and DOMA then “religious freedom, freedom of speech and the First Amendment will die.”

“If homosexuals win, the Bill of Rights dies and religious liberty/free speech will die with it,” GING PAC argued. “We either fight this evil or see our children and grandchildren brainwashed and/or coerced into accepting homosexuality as the new normal in our society.”

The group went on to say that “no institution will be safe from being homosexualized” and that society will soon “see our children and grandchildren brainwashed and/or coerced into accepting homosexuality as the new normal in our society,” as anti-gay activism “will be punishable by suppression, fines, or even jail sentences.”

h/t: Right Wing Watch

From the website: 

CHRISTOPHOBIA is spreading across AMERICA. Christians must end the silence and come out of the closet. We must RISE UP against the intolerant liberal secular progressive mob. I PRAY more Christians in America will become unashamed, unabashed, public glorifiers of JESUS – no matter where they are or who they are with… especially in public and at public schools. It’s NOT against the law to pray, talk about JESUS or wear Christian t-shirts or crosses. Teach your kids to be proud of Jesus and to spread His gospel. Stand up to the liberal progressive Christophobic mob and their ANTI-JESUS agenda. Glorify JESUS NOW.

The best way to glorify Jesus, apparently, is through the purchase of their $19.95 t-shirts. The founder of the site says, unsurprisingly, that he was spurred to act because of homofascism. 

Burgess is a well-known anti-gay activist whose tactics typically involve wading into the middle of gay rights rallies to scream condemnation.

h/t: Joe.My.God

In conservatives’ preferred vision of America, we are a white Christian nation. And it is true that in the not too far distant past, we were, at least in numerical terms, an overwhelmingly white Christian nation.  In 1944, 80 percent of adults were white Christians.  But things have changed a lot since then.  Today only about 52 percent of adults are white Christians. By 2024, that figure will be down to 45 percent. That means that by the election of 2016, the United States will have ceased to be a white Christian nation. Looking even farther down the road, by 2040 white Christians will be only around 35 percent of the population and conservative white Christians, who have been such a critical part of the GOP base, only about a third of that—a minority within a minority.

Part of this of course is the inexorable march of race-ethnic change.  The white share of the population is declining at a rate of about a half percentage point a year and is expected to continue to do so for the next several decades.  But the other part of the shift away from white Christians is less well-understood: the rise of religious diversity.

There are two components to the rise of religious diversity: (1) increasing numbers of Americans who practice a non-Christian faith; and (2) increasing numbers of Americans who are secular or unaffiliated with any religion.  A recent Pew report sheds light on these important trends.

Part of the reason for this rapid growth is generational.  Pew’s study notes that, among the youngest Millennial adults—those born 1990-1994, over a third (34 percent) have no religious affiliation.

There are significant social and political implications to these trends.  Pew and other data consistently show how liberal the unaffiliated are, particularly on social issues.  And they vote that way: in the 2012 exit poll, the unaffiliated supported Obama over Romney, 70-26.  In addition, those of non-Christian faiths supported Obama by 72-27.  To add to conservatives’ woes, their strongest group, white evangelical protestants (78-21 Romney) actually declined by 2 percentage points in the 2007-2012 time period.

h/t:  Ruy Teixeira at Think Progress Election

ALMOST AS SOON AS THE U.S. SUPREME COURT made women’s access to abortion a constitutional right in Roe v. Wade, the Senate passed the first “conscience clause” allowing private (largely Roman Catholic) hospitals receiving federal funds to refuse to provide abortions or sterilizations on “the basis of religious beliefs or moral convictions.” Over the years, antichoice forces have won more “conscience clauses,” allowing health care professionals like pharmacists and physicians to refuse care based on their own religious or other beliefs. 

These same struggles reverberate through the effort to expand health care coverage in the Affordable Care Act (ACA). To try to secure votes from antichoice Democrats, President Obama issued an executive order that reinforced and expanded the legal reach of the 1977 Hyde Amendment, barring federal funding of abortions except in the case of rape, incest, or when the life of the woman would be endangered. It outlined new legal protections for health care facilities and providers who are unwilling to provide, pay for, provide coverage of, or refer people to abortion care. Finally, the executive order prohibits tax credits and cost-sharing reduction payments to pay for abortion services (except in cases of rape or incest, or when the life of the woman would be endangered) in the health insurance exchanges beginning in 2014. In the end, the ACA passed with only Democratic votes in favor of the law and zero support by Republicans. 

Although most reproductive justice advocates agree that the landmark Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act provides unprecedented gains for women’s health by ending discrimination based on pre-existing conditions, expanding Medicaid eligibility, and requiring contraceptive coverage, the antichoice Right’s long term work to dismantle abortion remains effectively intact. And as reproductive justice advocates also argue, if reproductive healthcare is compromised for low-income women, often women of color, by encroaching funding restrictions, we cannot even begin to claim we’ve achieved comprehensive healthcare coverage for women. 

As researcher and activist Jay Michaelson shows in this report, a coalition largely made up of Roman Catholic elites and right-wing evangelicals continues its battle to undermine the promise of the Affordable Care Act by pushing for an even broader realm of religious exemptions in the name of defending religious liberty. Michaelson names the key intellectuals, Religious Right organizations, such as the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, and legal groups, like the Becket Fund, that are working together to advance a discriminatory agenda that would allow employers to put contraception coverage out of reach of their employees. 

 The Religious Right, writes Michaelson, is working to redefine existing constitutional protections of freedom to (and from) religion to mean the right of conservative Christian individuals and businesses to practice discrimination otherwise prohibited by law. That means, for instance, expanding exemptions to allow major companies, like the craft-store giant Hobby Lobby, to refuse contraceptive coverage in its employee healthcare plans. With 525 stores in 42 states, Hobby Lobby’s founder David Green is a substantial employer; the Becket Fund is representing the company in court. 

To date, according to this report, there are 49 pending cases, many represented by the Becket Fund, of companies and nonprofits—including universities—claiming that observing the contraceptive coverage requirement is a violation of their religious liberty.  

Finally, the right-wing campaign peddles propaganda rich with misinformation about the health care law, scaring small business owners and attempting to create public sympathy for multimillion dollar companies like Hobby Lobby. 

In unpacking the Right’s sophisticated campaign to redefine religious liberty, Michaelson shows how reproductive justice and the LGBTQ community are just the Right’s latest targets of old fashioned discrimination—excused on religious grounds. As in the age-old debate about prayer in schools or the display of crèches on public land, the Right inverts who is the oppressor and who is the victim. 

“The Christian Right turned antidiscrimination arguments on their heads,” he writes. “Instead of public prayer oppressing religious minorities, Christians are being oppressed by not being able to offer them.” We should not be fooled when women’s and LGBTQ rights are at stake. 

POLITICAL CONSERVATIVES SEEM TO HAVE FOUND A POTENT ARGUMENT in current debates about LGBTQ equality and reproductive health when they claim that their religious liberty is threatened. The potency comes not from the truth or validity of this claim, but from the fact that such a claim puts progressives into a quandary. Religious liberty is one of the most cherished values of American society, and progressives esteem this principle no less than conservatives do. As a result, progressives often tread too delicately in this area, for fear that they will be forced to choose between falsely competing values of liberty and equality.

This dilemma becomes exacerbated if, like me, you are a progressive person who strongly identifies with a faith tradition. As a Catholic who works for LGBTQ equality, my loyalties to faith and justice sometimes pull me in opposite directions when the argument for religious liberty is raised. As a practicing Catholic, I want to be sure that the government is not going to interfere with my church’s ability to govern itself. As an advocate for LGBTQ issues, I want to make sure that equality is served. 

Added to this dilemma is the uncomfortable knowledge that my church’s bishops are often the ones sounding the alarm for religious liberty, and often in spurious ways. 

With the appearance of Jay Michaelson’s report, “Redefining Religious Liberty: The Covert Campaign Against Civil Rights,” these tense internal tugs of war between liberty and equality and between faith and justice have been greatly ameliorated. With fairness and precision, Michaelson documents how arguments for religious liberty have been manipulated to play on the fears and values of both conservatives and progressives, as well as people of faith and secularists. His analysis clears a path through the morass of contradictory allegiances that many people experience when the question of religious liberty is raised. 

This report serves as a primer for all interested in the many intricacies surrounding the religious liberty debates. Legal, political, and religious observers alike will benefit from the succinct history, the objective reliance on facts and data, and the analysis of how arguments are constructed, and how they can be refuted. Advocates will learn strategies to engage in debate in intelligent, compassionate, and effective ways.

Michaelson is uniquely positioned to report on this matter. With a Ph.D. in Jewish Thought from Hebrew University and a J.D. from Yale Law School, he offers a perfect bridge between the worlds of religion, politics, and jurisprudence that impact the religious liberty debate. As the founder of the Tibet Oral History Project, which records the testimonies of Tibetan victims of the Chinese Occupation, Michaelson is certainly not a stranger to the personal and political realities of religious and governmental entanglement and oppression.

His dual background in law and religion brings a depth to this report which is missing from many other discussions of the topic. Most refreshing and inspiring in Michaelson’s report is that he maintains a balance of a deep respect for religious leaders and tradition—and, indeed, their liberty—while also deeply valuing the civil liberties tradition of American history and culture. His analysis is a reminder that the goal of this debate is not to have a victor and vanquished, but to build an American society where honesty, fairness, and equality reign. 

Michaelson throws out the traditional binaries in this debate—religious vs. secular, conservative vs. progressive. The realities are much more complex than these categories can express. For example, not all religious people feel that their faith is threatened by policies which promote LGBTQ equality and reproductive health for women. In fact, for many religious people, it is indeed their faith which motivates their advocacy for these principles. So framing the debate as a war between church and state is not only inaccurate, but it also plays into the hands of proponents of the religious liberty argument who want to claim victim status. 

Similarly, those who espouse religious liberty arguments against progressive measures often fail to recognize that in doing so they are in fact trampling on the liberty of religious people who support such measures. Political conservatives are not the only ones whose religious liberty needs protection. No single religious leader speaks for all religious people. No single Christian leader speaks for all Christians. 

Not even does any single Catholic leader speak for all Catholics. Religious liberties of various faiths can sometimes conflict—one reason why this issue needs to be mediated by neutral parties.

Because of these complexities, Michaelson wisely advises supporters not to fall into the trap of demonizing religious people, many of whom, in fact, agree that religious liberty is not under attack by progressives. Demonizing serves no productive purpose and only feeds the opposition’s paranoia that they are being attacked. The religious liberty debate must be won on its merits, on the fairness inherent in the American value system, and not on alarmist rhetoric about secret and manipulative enemies. Both sides court peril when they seek to demonize.

Indeed, one of Michaelson’s most important recommendations from this report is that a faithbased response to the religious liberty argument is strongly needed to be part of this conversation. 

Such a response would not only prove invaluable strategically, but it would help to save religious groups from the worst elements within their ranks. For example, while Catholic leaders have been among the most vociferous proponents of the religious liberty argument, there are many Catholic thinkers who oppose this strategy because they uphold the lesser-known Catholic principle that an individual must ultimately be ruled by one’s conscience, not by the dictates of doctrine or authorities. 

A faith-based response to religious liberty would help to unearth the hidden gems within faith traditions which value conscience, equality, and justice. Such resources are needed to arrive at faith-based answers to the question of religious liberty, which will coincide with our American political tradition. 

The evident power and strength of the advocates of the religious liberty argument indicate that this debate will continue to be part of our national conversation for a long while to come. Michaelson’s contribution can reshape the landscape of the debate so that the civil rights of individuals and our heritage of religious liberty do not have to be opposed, but can live in harmony and mutual support of each of these important traditions. Both religious and secular leaders will find his report an important tool in their work to build a nation where liberty, equality, and justice interact to protect all people and institutions.

Francis DeBernardo

Executive Director, 

New Ways Ministry

March 2013

A HIGHLY ACTIVE, WELL-FUNDED network of conservative Roman Catholic intellectuals and evangelicals are waging a vigorous challenge to LGBTQ and reproductive rights by charging that both threaten their right-wing definition of “religious liberty.” 

The Christian Right campaign to redefine “religious liberty” has been limiting women’s reproductive rights for more than a decade and has recently resulted in significant religious exemptions from antidiscrimination laws, same-sex marriage laws, policies regarding contraception and abortion, and educational policies. Religious conservatives have succeeded in reframing the debate, inverting the victim-oppressor dynamic, and broadening support for their agenda.

While the religious liberty debate is a growing front in the ongoing culture wars, it is actually an old argument repurposed for a new context. 

In the postwar era, the Christian Right defended racial segregation, school prayer, public religious displays, and other religious practices that infringed on the liberties of others by claiming that restrictions on such public acts infringed upon their religious liberty. Then as now, the Christian Right turned antidiscrimination arguments on their heads: instead of African Americans being discriminated against by segregated Christian universities, the universities were being discriminated against by not being allowed to exclude them; instead of public prayers oppressing religious minorities, Christians are being oppressed by not being able to offer them. 

In the “religious liberty” framework, the Christian Right attacks access to contraception, access to abortion, same-sex marriage, and antidiscrimination laws—not on moral grounds (e.g., that contraception is morally wrong or that LGBTQ rights violate “family values”) but because they allegedly impinge upon the religious freedoms of others (e.g., by forcing employers to violate their religion by providing contraception coverage). 

The nerve center of the conservative “religious liberty” campaign is a small group of conservative Roman Catholic intellectuals and scholars concentrated around the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, a public interest law firm based in Washington, D.C., and the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB).

Anthony Picarello, former counsel of the Becket Fund, left in 2007 to serve as USCCB’s general counsel to work against marriage equality. These Roman Catholic organizations are supported by conservative evangelical allies, including organizations such as the Alliance Defending Freedom, Christian Legal Society, and Family Research Council. These alliances were forged in the antichoice movement, which has provided strong turnout of supporters at “religious liberty” events. These alliances were expressed in the Manhattan Declaration, which launched in 2009 when 150 Roman Catholic and evangelical clergy signed a statement to defend “life, marriage and religious liberty.” Examination of these affiliations, history, and current activities makes clear that the campaign to redefine “religious liberty” aims not simply to win religious exemptions to the law, but to contest the authority of secular law itself.

 The conservative “religious liberty” campaign’s methods include:

• conducting a PR campaign to convince Americans that religious liberty is under attack and deploying misleading exaggerations to scare voters, for instance, by falsely claiming that churches will be required to sacralize same-sex weddings and employers forced to pay for abortions;

•  reframing questions of discrimination (e.g., in the Boy Scouts) as questions of the religious liberty of those who wish to discriminate;

• filing lawsuits to limit LGBTQ rights on religious liberty grounds and exploiting ambiguities in the law to conduct a nationwide litigation campaign;

• exploiting the structural ambiguity in civil rights law that emerges when fundamental rights clash, as that between religious expression and civil rights;

•  scaring the public by eliding the differences in legal standards between discrimination against LGBTQ people and discrimination against African Americans and other racial minorities, and suggesting that protections for the latter will be extended to the former; 

• influencing legislation to obtain exemptions from antidiscrimination laws, and enabling Christian organizations to discriminate (e.g. student clubs in the Virginia university system); 

• limiting access to reproductive health care, first through a series of religious exemptions for abortion and now by attempting to limit insurance coverage for contraceptives under the federal Affordable Care Act;

• attempting to expand existing religious exemptions beyond religious organizations to include private businesses (such as the retailer Hobby Lobby, the plaintiff in a prominent current case); and

•  marshaling the support of influential academics such as Douglas Laycock, a distinguished professor at the University of Virginia Law School who successfully argued a key religious liberty case before the U.S. Supreme Court for the Becket Fund, and longtime conservative Catholic campaigner Robert P. George of Princeton University, who was coauthor of the Manhattan Declaration and is a board member of the Becket Fund. They and other scholars provide intellectual leadership for the movement, both within the Christian Right and more broadly. 

The “religious liberty” campaign’s influence on contemporary politics and debate is increasingly visible. For example:

• It was a significant topic in the 2012 Vice Presidential Debate;

• It was the Christian Right’s primary argument opposing same-sex marriage in the North Carolina, Minnesota, and Maine ballot initiatives in the fall 2012;

• The Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington D.C. is developing religious liberty caucuses in state legislatures to promote the Christian Right public policy agenda opposing LGBTQ and reproductive rights (At least nine states currently have such caucuses); 

• The conservative “religious liberty” argument has been instrumental in winning exemptions from same-sex marriage laws and reducing women’s access to contraception coverage;

• While a June 2012 survey by the Public Religion Research Institute found only 39 percent of Americans believe religious freedom is threatened, polls also show the argument is effective when the Right sows confusion among the public; for instance, in suggesting that ministers would be forced to marry LGBTQ couples if a state legalizes same-sex marriage. 

Aside from its power in legal arguments, the Right’s “religious liberty” claims appeal to both conservative and moderate Christians by resonating with core martyrdom and persecution narratives. Moreover, among Roman Catholics, it resonates with the memory of Protestant separationists’ anti-Catholicism; among moderates, it resonates with the American civic value of religious freedom. Finally, the Right’s “religious liberty” arguments have won intellectual respectability even among some liberals. Unlike the Christian Right’s usual claims, grounded in religious dogma, the conservative “religious liberty” argument appeals to liberal values enshrined in the Constitution and has the support of respected academics. Liberals may support many of these “religious liberty” causes and key players in the campaign to redefine religious liberty—such as the Becket Fund—have litigated in defense of Muslims as well as Christians. And there is a strong popular appeal to some basic arguments; after all, few want to abridge religious freedom.

Yet there should be no mistake: the Right’s “religious liberty” campaign is a key front in the broader culture war designed to fight the same social battles on new-sounding terms, and is part of a movement with old roots in Christian Dominionism (a form of theocracy) and ties to conservative Catholics who launched the antichoice movement. Its deliberate inversion of victim-oppressor dynamic has led to limits on women’s and LGBTQ people’s real freedoms in the name of defending chimerical ones. Proponents may sincerely believe that they are defending religious freedom, but the campaign’s endgame is a “Christian nation” defined in exclusively conservative terms. And it is thus far inadequately opposed.

ALTHOUGH THE CURRENT APPLICATION of right-wing “religious liberty” arguments to questions of institutionally provided health care and antidiscrimination laws is relatively recent, the deployment of the value by conservative Christians is not. This section describes the early history of religious liberty in American culture, and addresses the legal history of conservative “religious liberty” claims from then until now. 

In conservative rhetoric, the fight for religious liberty dates all the way back to the Pilgrims’ flight from England. To an extent, of course, this is true: not only were the Pilgrims religious refugees, but they were quite conservative as well, aiming to set up not a pluralistic society where all could worship as they wished, but a specific theocratic society, apart from the England that oppressed them. In both popular and scholarly texts today, conservatives see themselves as heirs to these religious dissenters and seek to restore an older, better, more religious United States that, in their view, the founders intended.

The sense in books such as Donald Wildmon’s Speechless and David Limbaugh’s Persecution is that “Christians”—by which is meant conservative Roman Catholics and evangelical Protestants—are now the persecuted minority. 

The actual history is somewhat different. As told by Sarah Barringer Gordon in The Spirit of the Law, from the 1770s through the 1840s, the establishment and free exercise clauses of the First Amendment did not apply to the states, and the exercise of minority religious practice was sharply curtailed by state and local governments. In 1787, six of the original thirteen states had official, established churches, though all had disestablished them by 1833. Religious liberty was simply not a matter of federal protection or concern, and as a result, minority religious practices were often suppressed. 

From the 1840s until the 1930s, a middle period reigned. While mainstream religious practices would be protected by courts and the federal government, it was clear that states had the “police power” to punish religious dissent (blasphemers, experimental religious groups, etc.) and neither the Supreme Court nor the federal government did much to protect religious minorities—the primary case in point being the Mormons, who were persecuted in several states as they traveled across the country. The 1879 Supreme Court decision in Reynolds v. United States (later overturned) is instructive: “While laws cannot interfere with mere religious belief and opinions, they may with practices.” This dictum shows how distant the historical reality was from religious liberty rhetoric. Evangelicals, too, had their freedoms curtailed during this period. Forgotten today, the Salvation Army’s original mission was indeed salvation; in a period of declining church attendance, they held huge outdoor parades, revivals, and rallies in the late 19th century. These ran afoul of local nuisance laws, and Salvation Army figures were often jailed and beaten. Unlike the Mormons, they had some success in obtaining judicial relief, and were arguably the first conservative religious group to prevail on the grounds that their religious liberty was being impaired by secular governmental action. Overall, however, constitutional protection of religious liberty was limited to mainstream religious activities until the 1930s.

Because the subsequent seven decades of this history has been shaped by crucial Supreme Court cases, we will now examine three of those cases as a lens through which to view the history as a whole. 

BARNETTE

The notion that the U.S. Constitution protects all religious liberty is really a creation of the last 80 years, and the result of the work of marginal religious groups, not mainstream ones. Chief among these were the Jehovah’s Witnesses, who refused to salute the flag or recite the Pledge of Allegiance, a controversy that reached fever pitch in the 1930s and 1940s. Initially, in 1940, the Jehovah’s Witnesses lost in the Supreme Court, which held (8-1) that the state’s interest in teaching patriotism trumped the Witnesses’ religious freedom interests.36 This opinion was overturned only three years later, in 1943’s West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette opinion, now seen as a landmark case for religious liberty, though in reality it rested on free speech grounds (i.e. that no one could be compelled to recite the pledge). 

Barnette ushered in protections against compulsory secular expression. Yet it was followed by cases which ushered in protections against potentially coercive compulsory expression of religious views. For example, the bête noire of the Christian Right is Engel v. Vitale, the 1962 case that ushered in the contemporary period of separationist jurisprudence and outlawed state-sponsored prayer in public schools, even nonsectarian and noncompulsory prayer. Subsequent cases such as Wallace v. Jaffree (1985), banning moments of silence, and especially Lee v. Weisman (1992), banning clergy-given prayers at graduation, convinced many traditionalists that there is a secularist war against Christianity. Really, however, they are but the complement to Barnette: religious acts may not (usually) be restrained, yet they may not be compelled either. Indeed, the irony of today’s conservative “religious liberty” campaign is that the same logic of these much-loathed cases is now being applied to Christian religious “dissenters.”

BOB JONES

The most important case for contemporary “religious liberty” claims and the Christian Right itself is the Bob Jones University v. United States case, decided in 1983. This was a controversial case at the time, inspiring countless legal and academic articles, and, according to some accounts, was the most formative event in the creation of the Christian Right and the politicization of American evangelicals. Notably, Bob Jones University was part of a last ditch effort to maintain racially discriminatory institutions; then as now, the “religious liberty” in question was the liberty to discriminate against others.

The evangelical Bob Jones University had originally barred African Americans from admission. By the late 1970s, these restrictions had been relaxed, but the university still banned interracial dating on religious grounds. The United States Internal Revenue Service (first under President Nixon, though President Carter—an evangelical—is usually blamed by the Christian Right) revoked the school’s tax-exempt status, stating that a nondiscrimination policy was required for tax exemption. The Supreme Court agreed, stating that since the exemption was a privilege, it could only be obtained if one comported with law and public policy. Though the decision neither shut down Bob Jones University nor compelled it to change its policies, this perceived infringement on religious liberty fueled the contemporary Christian Right, and was hotly debated in the press.

The parallels to contemporary “religious liberty” cases are obvious, and the questions asked are the same: may the government compel religious institutions to adhere to the rule of law, or are religious institutions exempt from doing so? 

The school itself has now become a symbol: When George W. Bush sought to burnish his conservative credentials in 2000, he did so by giving a speech at Bob Jones University. Interestingly, this incident thrust the university back into the limelight, and it ultimately removed its discriminatory policy. 

And to this day, conservative legal theorists and Christian Right writers decry Bob Jones as a wrong decision. Moreover, the creation of such enclaves has only increased since, with the increase in home-schooling, Christian academies, and para-academic institutions such as Liberty University (associated with televangelist Jerry Falwell) and Regent University (associated with Pat Robertson). 

Bob Jones also prefigures the inversion of the victim-oppressor dynamic that marks contemporary “religious liberty” rhetoric. The real victims were Black students at Bob Jones—not the university. Today, the conservative “religious liberty” frame claims that the real victims are not gay students being bullied, women denied accessible health care, and nonreligious students coerced into participating in a religious ceremony. Conservative “religious liberty” rhetoric says that true victims are the university, the bully, the woman’s employer, and the graduation speaker who is not able to recite a prayer. Instead of a conflict between civil rights, this rhetoric focuses only on the rights of the person doing harm to another.

HOSANNA-TABOR

An important “religious liberty” case was decided in 2012: Hosanna-Tabor Evangelical Lutheran Church and School v. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

This case was argued by Douglas Laycock for the Becket Fund, and, in a 9-0 decision, the U.S. Supreme Court expanded the First Amendment’s “ministerial exemption” to employment discrimination laws, holding that churches and other religious groups must be free to choose and dismiss their leaders without government interference. It allows churches and some religious institutions to apply religious precepts in hiring and firing of ministers broadly conceived as including religion teachers—including, presumably, allowing employers fire LGBTQ people. The Wall Street Journal called it “one of [the] most important religious liberty cases in a half century.”

CURRENT STATE OF THE CONSERVATIVE “RELIGIOUS LIBERTY” MEME

As first described by Richard Dawkins, a “meme” is a unit of culture that replicates and perpetuates itself in different contexts. The conservative “religious liberty” meme has had just such a life. Henry Ford preached about a “war on Christmas and Easter” in 1921; Bill O’Reilly picked up the theme in 2005. In the mid-twentieth century, Roman Catholics described the separation of church and state as a Protestant war against Catholicism; in the twenty-first, Protestants and Catholics describe it as a secular war against Christianity. 

The contemporary use of this latest contemporary “religious liberty” meme evolved in the 1990s in crafting “conscience clause” exemptions to abortion access, and in response to the LGBTQ rights movement. The Acton Institute for the Study of Religion and Liberty, for example, was founded in 1990, and began publishing Religion and Liberty magazine in 1991. The earliest prominent use of the conservative “religious liberty” argument in the gay rights context appears to be the 1992-1996 fight over Colorado’s Amendment 2, which would have prevented any locality from enacting a gay rights ordinance.

In the subsequent court battle, which ended with the amendment being found unconstitutional by the Supreme Court, Colorado argued that one of the state’s interests in the amendment was protecting the freedom of religion. This appears to be the first time in which this argument, familiar from the contexts described above, was applied to questions of gay rights. It was also apparently the first time when religious exemptions to gay rights laws were mentioned in a court opinion, when the Colorado Supreme Court suggested they would be a better remedy for religious freedom concerns. Outside of these contexts, one does not find such arguments made in the contexts in which we find them today until the last decade. For example, it is striking that “religious liberty” arguments are almost absent in Didi Herman’s comprehensive 1998 study of the Christian Right’s anti-gay rhetoric, The Anti-Gay Agenda.

This conservative “religious liberty” campaign gained steam beginning in the 2000s, when a small group of conservative Roman Catholic-affiliated scholars and think tanks, who had been making various religious liberty arguments for decades, injected the argument into the new contexts of health care and LGBTQ issues. It is reasonable to wonder whether some of this must have been tactical: faced with changing attitudes on LGBTQ rights and a decline in traditional homophobia, such organizations turned to “religious liberty” as a fallback. However, this research did not find hard evidence to support this theory. On the contrary, these arguments predate the successes of the contemporary LGBTQ rights movement in the last five years. In 2003, Alan Sears of the Christian Right legal group Alliance Defending Freedom named the so-called homosexual agenda “the principal threat to religious freedom,” well before that agenda enjoyed its recent successes.

By now, conservative “religious liberty” arguments are standard fodder on Fox News and among the rightwing punditry. Phyllis Schlafly, for example, writes that “the policies of the Obama administration represent the greatest government-directed assault on religious freedom in American history.” Rush Limbaugh, too, has alleged that the president is assaulting religious liberty—and recall that Limbaugh’s comments disparaging Sandra Fluke, the Georgetown law student advocating for women’s health rights, came in the context of a key “religious liberty” battle, the HHS provision debate.

The conservative “religious liberty” claim is firmly embedded in American political culture as well.

THE WAR ON RELIGION

Since the 1970s, conservative evangelical Christians have adopted the earlier Catholic narrative that there is a determined secularist campaign to destroy religion and replace it with “humanism.” Francis Schaeffer, Tim and Beverly LaHaye, Jerry Falwell, and Adrian Rogers (the leader of the Southern Baptist Convention following the conservative ‘coup’ of 1979), and many others drew on what historian Richard Hofstadter would call “paranoid” themes in right-wing American anticommunism, dislocations in traditional life brought on by post-1960s flights to the suburbs,and changes wrought by the civil rights, women’s, and gay liberation movements to depict an overall war on religion itself. Secularism has become the new socialism—though in the racist way President Obama is depicted in some of this literature, it seems the themes are reunited.

To some, this battle is literally the battle between God and Satan. Tim LaHaye, for example, demands that Christians “resist the devil and… put on the whole armor of God.” Beverly LaHaye wrote in 1984 that secularists are “priests of religious humanism and are evangelizing our children for Satan.”

Donald Wildmon’s outrageous tome Speechless is of the same ilk. These formulations seem unlikely to appeal to more moderate Christians, and on the contrary are likely to turn them off. Yet they have a strong appeal among evangelicals. In a 1990 survey reported by Sarah Barringer Gordon, more than 90 percent of those who self-identified as evangelicals (not just conservative evangelicals but evangelicals in general) agreed with the statement that “Christian values are under serious attack in the United States today.”

This rhetoric, even in its extreme form, is not simply propaganda but reflects a sincere sense, justified by opinion polls, that show the country moving away from traditional religion—that an old Christian order is waning. Rather than ascribe this trend to socioeconomic, scientific, psychological, or other factors, the Christian Right narrative looks for an enemy: Satan, socialism, communism, liberals, the War on Christmas, secularists, Barack Hussein Obama, feminists, homosexuals, evolution, abortionists, socialists, humanists—or, best, a hodgepodge of all of the above.

“Religious liberty” rhetoric is part of this narrative. Christianity is not losing its power in this narrative; someone is taking it away. Christianity is still the dominant religion in America, but its power is changing. One recurring theme in the right-wing literature is the sense of a “coming storm,” to quote from an anti-marriage equality commercial by the National Organization for Marriage. Like the red menace, the secularist danger is imminently looming. The metaphors are appropriately biblical: soon there will be a flood of litigation, a firestorm of controversy. Indeed, these apocalyptic pronouncements resonate closely with the millennialism that one finds in conservative evangelicalism generally and Christian Reconstructionism/pre-millennialism specifically. The “coming storm” and the End Times are not distant from one another. 

MARTYR NARRATIVE

In describing the war on religious freedom, conservative “religious liberty” discourse may seem paranoid, but to traditionalists, it resonates with significant moments in Christian history, such as the early Christian martyrs in the Roman period. The “martyr narrative” is best understood as theological, rather than political, speech. Indeed, while many progressives of all faiths see themselves as resisting an overbearing, conservative Christian dominance in public life, many Christian conservatives see themselves as resisting a secular, anti-Christian hegemony, a perception that taps directly into narratives of Christian martyrdom, including that of Christ himself. 

Many conservative “religious liberty” campaigners have analogized the “persecution” in the United States to that in Nazi Germany. Recently, for example, the pastoral outreach director for Minnesota for Marriage said that the way Hitler persecuted Jews was that he “removed their voices in the public square and removed their control of their own businesses. So, he stopped Jewish people from speaking out in public and he silenced them.” This, of course, is not new rhetoric either: the American Family Association’s Bryan Fischer once attributed the idea of church-state separation to Hitler. In similarly offensive fashion, Pastor Rick Warren and others have called the Hobby Lobby case the “equivalent of the Birmingham bus boycott.”  

STAGES OF DOMINION

Finally, who may abridge those rights is constantly at play in “religious liberty” discourse. Typically there are five tiers of actors:

1. Churches, clergy, and religious institutions 

2. Religious organizations

3. Religiously affiliated organizations

4. Religiously owned businesses

5. Religious individuals

The law treats these tiers differently: churches are rarely required to obey antidiscrimination laws, for example, but religious organizations may be, and religious-owned businesses are. Conservative “religious liberty” rhetoric deliberately misstates harms upward, and tactically expands exemptions downward. On the one side, no clergy will ever have to solemnize any marriage against her/his beliefs, yet restrictions on tier 4 or 5 individuals are cynically extended by conservative messaging to tier 1.  

LGBTQ ISSUES: 

SAME-SEX MARRIAGE AS FLASHPOINT

Few issues have galvanized the Christian Right more than same-sex marriage. As views on the subject have evolved with a majority of Americans now supporting it, “religious liberty” rhetoric has provided a new frame for old animus. Yet to shift from opposing same-sex marriage outright, to opposing same-sex marriage as a violation of religious liberty, activists must twist the facts. The broadest, and least accurate, “religious liberty” claim is that members of the clergy will be forced to solemnize same-sex marriage. “Once federal and state laws uphold gay marriage, gays will be entitled to sue anyone licensed by the state that refuses to perform a marriage,” writes Brad O’Leary in The Audacity of Deceit: Barack Obama’s War on American Values. This is universally untrue. All same-sex marriage laws specifically exempt clergy from being forced to sanctify any marriage of any kind. This, of course, is already the case without such exemptions; Orthodox rabbis cannot be forced to sanctify an intermarriage, for example. Yet this myth is an effective one, as we will see below.

It is also not the only myth that appears in this rhetoric. There are a handful of cases which appear again and again as anecdotes, and yet are misrepresented every time. For example: 

• In Willock v. Elane Photography, a photographer in New Mexico refused to take wedding photos of a same-sex couple. The couple sued and won. This case is sometimes used in anti-same-sex marriage arguments, yet the actual holding never mentioned marriage, and there was no same-sex marriage (or ban) in New Mexico when the case was decided. 

Rather, the holding was based entirely on antidiscrimination law and on the fact that the photographer was operating a public business. Nonetheless, because it involves a wedding photographer, Willock is routinely trotted out by anti-marriage [equality] activists.

• A second marriage-related case is New Jersey’s Bernstein v. Ocean Grove Camp Meeting Association.

The Ocean Grove Camp Meeting Association is a Methodist organization which runs a beachfront boardwalk pavilion open to anyone, but they refused to host a same-sex marriage. 

The court specifically noted that this was not a case involving a church house, which would be exempted from anti-discrimination laws: the pavilion was found to be a “public accommodation,” and was open to all kinds of events (including non-Christian and secular ones). Thus, it could not discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation. As a result of the discrimination, the pavilion lost its tax exemption, and was promptly assessed $20,000 in back taxes.Once again, this case actually had nothing to do with same-sex marriage, which is still not valid in New Jersey. Nor was anyone required to sanctify anything. Nor was the pavilion, or the church, even shut down; it merely lost a tax benefit.

This case was about a boardwalk pavilion that happened to be run by a Methodist organization. 

• A third favorite case is Parker v. Hurley.

Here, a religious family objected to a public school curriculum that included same-sex families in a curriculum on diversity. 

The family lost. This case is not new in theory; there are numerous previous cases where individual parents have tried to change objectionable (to them) elements of a school curriculum, and they have almost always lost. Once again, this case is not actually about same-sex marriage, but about whether one family’s religious views trump the interests of every other student—as determined by the school board, at least—in receiving an education. Yet this case is often presented as evidence that same-sex marriage means children will be taught that the “gay lifestyle” is “equally valid.”

REPRODUCTIVE RIGHTS: 

THE HHS PROVISION AS FLASHPOINT

On October 20, 2012, a coalition of over 60 local and national organizations held a series of national rallies around the country against the Health and Human Services (HHS) contraception provision enacting the 2010 Affordable Care Act (“Obamacare”). As the Stand Up for Religious Freedom coalition describes it on their website:

The new Mandate would requiring [sic] nearly all private health insurance plans to include coverage for all FDA-approved prescription contraceptive drugs and devices, surgical sterilizations and abortion-inducing drugs—drugs that interfere with implantation in the womb and therefore destroy the life of a human being in the earliest stage of development.

Though hardly ever reported in the media, this provision did not originate with “Obamacare.” In 2000, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission held that failure to provide contraceptive coverage violates the 1978 Pregnancy Discrimination Act, an amendment to Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act that outlaws, among other things, discrimination based on sex.Thus, contraception coverage has been the law for all employer-sponsored health plans for businesses with more than 15 employees for twelve years. 

In addition, over half of the states already have their own state laws that require contraceptive coverage. Some of these laws contain exemptions for certain religious employers that are almost identical to the religious employer exemption in the HHS Benefit; two of those have been challenged unsuccessfully in court. The highest courts in both New York and California upheld their state laws against challenges, finding that the laws do not violate free exercise of religion.

Countless editorials have omitted this fact, suggesting that it was simply HHS’s idea to narrowly construe “religious employers.”Moreover, the Affordable Care Act itself required that contraceptive coverage be made available without a co-pay; HHS was enacting the law. They were following the law as set forth by the EEOC and several state courts. The only difference between the HHS provision and the previous law was that under the new requirement, employees would no longer have cost sharing with employers since they don’t pay the deductible associated with contraceptive care. 

What transpired, however, was anything but settled. In January 2012, HHS Secretary Katherine Sebelius announced the new policy. Though it exempted churches and religious organizations (tiers 1 and 2), Catholic churches and charities immediately objected. On February 11, 2012, HHS announced a compromise, in which insurance providers, rather than employers, would absorb the cost of the deductible. This would have seemed to remove the conscience-offending causality, but by now the Catholic Church (and in particular the USCCB) was empowered, and took on the entire HHS provision, including the part that was already part of settled law.

On February 1, 2013, the Obama administration proposed allowing faith-based hospitals and universities—not merely churches and religious organizations—to issue plans that do not provide birth control (i.e., tier 3, in addition to tiers 1 and 2). They would not have to contract, arrange, pay or refer for any contraceptive coverage to which they object on religious grounds. The women who work for this second group would still get birth control coverage, but it would come through a separate individual plan, not from the religious organization’s plan. This is a proposed rule and has not yet been finalized.

This is a huge concession, and should represent a victory for the “religious liberty” campaign. Yet in a statement, the Becket Fund said the new rule “does nothing to protect the religious liberty of millions of Americans”—and promised “to study what effect, if any, the Administration’s proposed rule has on the many lawsuits” involving Becket’s clients.130 The campaign has had such success that it is now focused on winning the entire game, and obtaining religious exemptions for any corporation that wishes to obtain them. Despite these remarkable gains, the prophetic rhetoric has reached fever pitch. A June 2012 video by the Acton Institute warns that the HHS provision will literally mean “The End of America.” 

SPECIFICALLY, THIS REPORT RECOMMENDS THAT SOCIAL JUSTICE ADVOCATES:

1. Define and Publicize the Coordinated Campaign to Redefine Religious Liberty. 

While grassroots evangelicals are active in the conservative “religious liberty” campaign against LGBTQ and reproductive rights, it is a coordinated fight led by well-established right-wing institutions like the Becket Fund and Alliance Defending Freedom. The Roman Catholic Church hierarchy and conservative Catholics are important thought leaders for the campaign. The evangelical/Roman Catholic alliance builds on relationships forged in the antichoice movement.

2. Organize A Unified Response

There is need for further mapping, coordinating, and building out alliances among advocates countering the Right’s campaign. We need to strengthen the alliance between prochoice and LGBTQ forces, and ally with emerging faith-based responses. Alliances must also be made with liberal business owners and libertarians; this can increase effectiveness of existing efforts. 

3. Counter Misinformation

Many conservative “religious liberty” claims rely on falsehoods and scare tactics. Simply put, clergy will never be forced to perform a same-sex marriage. Social justice advocates must learn and be able to counter the Right’s go-to examples of spurious “religious liberty” violations. 

Understanding and clarifying the Right’s use of the martyr narrative and inversion of the victim-oppressor dynamic is a good start to countering right-wing rhetoric. 

4. Reclaim the Religious Liberty Frame

The term “religious liberty,” like the phrase “family values,” has become a code for the larger culture wars. While religious belief and expression are valid and protected constitutional claims, religious liberty is not the freedom to discriminate and harm others. It does not allow a boss to tell an employee what health care they can obtain, taking away the employee’s ability to make moral and religious choices. Nor does sexual and gender equality have to be pitted against religious liberty. The clash is not just between secularism and religion, or equality and religion, but of competing religious values. Challenging the conservative frame also means distinguishing between commercial and religious acts, and valuing competing civil rights; an effective response requires sustained intellectual and legalchallenges to the Right’s argument.

5. Develop Academic Responses

Social justice advocates must take seriously the influence of right-wing academics on policy and public debate. Religious freedom is a complex topic, which can too often become co-opted by the conservative “religious liberty” campaign. 

That this happens, often unknowingly, to fairminded academics and legal scholars is something that can be reversed by raising awareness of the issue, including with academic conferences on the topic.

6. Leverage Religious Communities

We must build on existing interfaith work to counter the conservative “religious liberty” narrative, informing and organizing more in faith communities. The social justice community must create unity by issuing a common “Call to Conscience” of religious people seeking to maintain their religious liberty against the conservative proposals and policies. LGBTQ faith communities, Jewish and progressive faith organizations, in particular, must be supported in countering the Right’s claims about what religious liberty means.

7. Ongoing Research and Monitoring

Social justice advocates and defenders of true religious freedom must become better informed about the right-wing campaign to redefine religious liberty—including its principal players, strategies, and vulnerabilities. Ongoing investigative research into U.S. conservatives’ use of religious liberty legal and rhetorical strategies, both domestically and abroad, is needed to keep advocates and journalists informed about strategically significant developments. Moreover, we must track the influence of conservative academics on policy and public debate.

h/t: PoliticalResearch.org

If the Family Research Council gets its way, evangelical Christians all across America will hear their pastor deliver a sermon written by an FRC official condemning homosexuality and the advance of marriage equality this weekend or next.  On March 26 and 27 the U.S. Supreme Court will hear arguments in cases involving California’s Proposition 8 and the federal Defense of Marriage Act, and this week FRC emailed pastors urging them to hold a “Stand for Marriage Sunday” before then, providing links to a sermon and full-color bulletin insert recapping its main points.

The 4300-word suggested sermon and accompanying power point presentation start with the wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton and march through every Religious Right talking point on homosexuality, marriage equality, and the Satanic, anti-Christian, Nazi-like gay rights movement that is inviting the downfall of civilization. Here are the section heads and some highlights:

Section 1: The Divine Pattern

The sermon says God created men and women to complete each other, and actually includes, “Aren’t you glad God created Adam and Eve, and not just Adam and Steve?” It quotes James Dobson saying “More than ten thousand studies have concluded that kids do best when they are raised by mothers and fathers.” And it asserts that in both the Old and New Testaments, “one man and one woman in a marriage covenant relationship for life is the divine pattern.” (The sermon does not address the abundant inconvenient exceptions to one-man, one-woman marriage in the Bible.)

After reviewing all the ways marriage makes people, couples, and children happier, the section concludes:

God’s way works! Think about it. Every civilization in history is built upon the institution of marriage. It is the foundation. The happiness of couples, the welfare of children, the propagation of the faith, the wellbeing of society, and the orderliness of civilization are all dependent upon the stability of marriage according to the divine pattern. When this God-given pattern is undermined, the whole superstructure of society becomes unstable. Any deviation from the divine pattern invites disaster.

Section 2: The Deceptive Perversion

According to the sermon, homosexuality is a deceptive perversion, a sin that is “open rebellion against the divine pattern.” It cites the familiar “abomination” verses and the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah.

Section 3: The Definitive Problem

This section compares gay-rights advocates’ claims that people are born Gay or that “God made us gay” to Nazi propaganda. “They essentially practice Joseph Goebel’s Nazi philosophy of propaganda, which is basically this: Tell a lie long enough and loud enough and eventually most mindless Americans will believe it.” The sermon also compares homosexuality to other “sexual sins” such as promiscuity, adultery and pedophilia. “I do not believe,” it says, “that God would not place in your genetic code something that would damn your immortal soul.” [sic on the double negative]

Section 4: The Destructive Program

This section recounts the dangers of the “radical homosexual agenda,” its goal of “silencing critics in the clergy and Christian media,” and its conquest of the entertainment, educational, and legal arenas, citing a litany of familiar Religious Right horror stories about the alleged persecution of Christians who stand against the merciless gay rights steamroller.  And it pushes one of the primary talking points of Religious Right leaders and their conservative Catholic allies: that equality and religious liberty are fundamentally incompatible:

Where homosexual activists win legal approval, whether by court action or legislation, they often deny our full rights as Christians because a homosexual’s so-called “civil rights” and a Christian’s freedom of conscience and speech opposing homosexuality are mutually exclusive.

“Listen,” the sermon warns, “homosexual activists won’t stop at recognition, their aim is domination. They will not stop until they win over our children and our convicting voice is silenced.”

Section 5: The Determined Plan

These are the action steps FRC wants people hearing the sermon to take:

Action Step 1: Pray

The sermon calls on people to pray for spiritual revival and for “God’s mercy on a nation that is speeding toward Sodom, and hurtling toward Gomorrah.”

Action Step 2: Practice

This section says Christians give up their credibility to challenge the culture when their divorce rate is the same as everyone else’s, and urges people to follow biblical instructions on marriage and home life.

Action Step 3: Participate

This section is a direct rebuke to people who think politics are of the world, something Christians should stay out of. “Since God created the institution of government, would He want His people to stay out of it? No. If Christians don’t ‘render to Caesar’ (Matt. 22:21) and don’t function as ‘salt’ and ‘light’ (Matt. 5:13-16) in the arena of government, then we disobey the commands of Christ and allow Satan to prevail by default.”  The sermon urges people to write blog posts, use Facebook and Twitter, comment on news stories, knock on doors, contact elected officials, and join the March for Marriage being organized by the National Organization for Marriage and its allies in Washington DC on March 26.

Action Step 4: Proclaim

This section urges people to tell those in the “homosexual lifestyle” that they do not have to remain “slaves to sin” but can pray away the gay.

Let’s stand along these poor misguided and lost people trapped in Satan’s snare. Let’s love them out of that sinful and destructive lifestyle! … But let’s also exercise our rights as Christian citizens! Listen, we can make the difference. Together, Christians all across America can protect and preserve marriage for our children and our children’s children. Let’s stand for God’s plan for marriage because our future depends on it. And all of God’s people said: Amen!

H/T: Right Wing Watch

Earlier this month we broke the story that Tim Tebow was scheduled to appear at a megachurch led by far-right pastor Robert Jeffress. Today, Tebow announced on Twitter that he is pulling out of the event “due to new information that has been brought to my attention.”

Jeffress has claimed that Roman Catholicism is Satanic, criticized Mormonism and Islam as faiths from the “pit of Hell,” warned that President Obama is ushering in the Antichrist and frequently attacked gays and lesbians.

The preacher has been making the rounds on conservative media denying claims about his extremist rhetoric, and yesterday told radio host Janet Mefferd that liberals simply cannot understand his words because they are “spiritually blinded” and are “the most intolerant and hateful people.”

h/t: Brian Tashman at RWW