Religion provides excuses for people who need excuses.
By Bill Hounslow
Author
Rosa Rubicondior
Were you ever under the impression that Christian values include the fundamental equality of all people? How about the idea that all people are born with the unalienable right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness?
Not so, according to a gaggle of right-wing extremist Christian bigots who are furious at the passing of the Equality Act by the US House yesterday. They see the LGBTQ community enjoying the same rights as them as a frontal attack on them and their faith by the Biden administration.
According to this report in the Guardian:
The House has passed the landmark Equality Act, taking LGBTQ+ Americans one step closer to winning legal protection from discrimination. The Equality Act amends the 1964 Civil Rights Act to include sexual orientation and gender identity as protected classes in addition to race, religion, sex and national origin. The key civil rights bill passed in a vote of 224 to 216, with three Republicans breaking with their party to joining all Democrats in supporting the legislation. But the bill faces an uncertain future in the evenly divided Senate, where Democrats will need 60 votes to break a filibuster on the legislation.
“Without the Equality Act, this nation will never live up to its principles of freedom and equality,” Democratic representative Marie Newman of Illinois, who has a trans daughter, said on the House floor on Wednesday.
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Lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people often encounter prejudice in housing, credit, jury service and public spaces, as only 22 states and the District of Columbia prohibit discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity.
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State legislatures regularly advance laws that limit local LGBTQ+ protections. Since the start of the year, a dozen states have introduced or passed laws to bar trans girls from participating in girls’ sports leagues.
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An estimated 83% of Americans favor laws that would protect LGBTQ+ people against discrimination in jobs, public accommodation and housing, including 68% of Republicans, according to a poll by the Public Religion Research Institute.
The Equality Act has two major goals: it would amend the 1964 Civil Rights Act to include sexual orientation and gender identity to the definition of sex; it would also undermine the Religious Freedom Restoration Act by allowing gay rights to trump religious rights.
But even before the Repugnican allies of the evangelical Christian bigots have had a chance to kill the bill, several prominent professional bigots gave already waded in with their fulminations.
Bill Donohue, President of the Catholic League, whom readers may remember for his spirited defence of the child-abusing nuns of Tuam, Ireland, and his declaration that homosexuals were to blame for Catholic priests raping children, said:
It would mean that Catholics, evangelicals, Orthodox Jews, Mormons, Muslims and many other religious communities could not raise religious liberty objections to any of the aforementioned rights of transgender women. In effect, religious entities would be secularized.
In other words, it will mean religious bigots can no longer hide behind religious liberty as their excuse for bullying and victimisation of minorities and those with whom they disagree, seeing their right to deny rights to others as the greater right. A secular society exercising a degree of control over the more antisocial activities of religious bigots! Whatever next? They’ll be banning witch-burnings soon!
Evangelist Franklin Graham declared on Facebook and in Christianity Today:
The Equality Act would destroy women’s and girls’ sports in this country as we know it. It would allow biological males who choose to identify as females to compete for titles, scholarships, and recognition at all age levels.
The Equality Act would erase women’s privacy—in locker rooms, dressing rooms, homeless shelters, restrooms, and more.
God made us male and female, and that’s it. With some 6,000 years of human history, it has only been in the last few years that people have come up with all of these additional designations for gender identity.
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Christians will be persecuted for their sincerely held beliefs as never before. The clear teachings of the Bible on the sins of homosexuality and abortion will no doubt be considered ‘hate speech.’ It will be a nightmare from which this nation may never recover.
Again, there is the whining that protecting minorities by law from the bullying and discrimination, to which fundamentalist Christians believe it is their entitlement to subject them, is unfairly restricting the rights of Christians to deny rights to people of their choice. As entitled Christians, of course, they believe they have the unalienable right to determine who should have what rights when.
Tony Perkins, President of the right-wing Christian Family Research Council was positively apoplectic, writing:
The Equality Act is a Trojan horse for radical Leftists, whose goal is to invade every square inch of America, even the homes of those who hold different beliefs, with the force of law. It will effectively cancel people of faith from civil society. We urge every Member of Congress to oppose the Equality Act.
I wonder if these paranoid fruitloops ever stop to wonder whether labelling every piece of progressive legislation as ‘radical Leftist’ encourages people to wonder if radical leftism might not be such a bad thing after all, if you want a decent, caring and inclusive society where people can live their lives without the fear of bullying and discrimination by religious bigots such as Tony Perkins, Franklin Graham, Bill Donohue and our fourth fruitloop, pro-discrimination bigot, Republican Representative from Georgia, Marjorie “Mad Marge” Taylor Greene.
Before the vote, Rep Greene posted an anti-transgender sign outside her office, bang opposite the office of Illinois Rep Marie Newman – who has a transgender daughter. Ironically, this infantile stunt might have strengthened the resolve of those few Repugnicans prepared to go against their party colleagues and vote with the Democrats.
In addition to her Christian fundamentalist bigotry, Green has other reasons to oppose anti-discriminatory legislation. She panders to her base with Islamophobic and anti-Semitic comments. She is also a dedicated QAnon conspiracist and recently promoted claims that the 2018 California wild fires were started by space lasers controlled by the Jewish banking family, the Rothschilds, in order to make money.
According to this report, before being elected to Congress, Greene also called for the execution of prominent Democrat Party politicians. She has also pushed conspiracy theories concerning 9/11, Parkland, Sandy Hook, the Las Vegas shooting, the murder of Democrat staffer, Seth Rich and others.
Christian bigots becoming hysterical about other people having legal protection against their persecution of them, illustrate better than most things two truisms of fundamentalism:
- Religion provides them with the excuses they need for their hatred of minorities and anyone who doesn’t agree with them, so they can present it as some sort of higher morality.
- What they fear most is the loss of their assumed right to special privileges in society, including the right to legislate to control the behaviour of others. They see other people gaining the same rights as they have as a loss of this privilege and a challenge to their entitlement to it.
We also get an edifying glimpse of what America, or indeed any other country, would be like if evangelical Christians ever realise their ambition to replace democratic government with a totalitarian, Taliban-style Christian theocracy, undid all the post-enlightenment humanist gains and took us back to their golden age of brutal, Middle-eastern Bronze Age tribalism, before we managed to civilise them.
Originally published by Rosa Rubicondior, 02.26.2021, under the terms of a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International license.