The war on Christians continues

Posted by Melissa McEwan at 7:01 AM on April 11, 2006.

Yesterday's LA Times featured an article about a Georgia Tech student who's crusading for her right to harass gay people, arguing that her religion "compels her to speak out against homosexuality." She's part of a growning number of conservative Christians who claim that anti-discrimination policies put in place to protect the LGBT community from harassment infringes upon their freedom of religion. My new favorite Christian crackpot, Vision America's Rick Scarborough, who organized the recent War on Christians Conference, has thrown his weight behind the case. "Christians," he said, "are going to have to take a stand for the right to be Christian."

The Green Knight, a liberal Christian blogger, quite bluntly retorts: I Can't Stand These People.

Being in a situation where you have to (gasp!) be polite to other people does not infringe on your "right to be Christian." Being Christian means one thing, and one thing only: that you believe in, follow, and try to model your life on Jesus. That's it. It does not mean that you're compelled to be a jerk to gay people. In fact, I'd say it means the opposite…

I just can't stand these people. They take a complex and subtle spiritual tradition and turn it into a club to hit people with. They take a powerful and central concept like freedom and turn it into the right to be a jerk. They take science and throw it out the window. They look at their fellow human beings and see grist for their political mill.

It's not the secular culture or Hollywood or the so-called "liberal media" or mainstream churches that have made so many decent and sensible people run screaming away from any kind of spiritual thinking and language. It's right-wing morons like this.

Can I get an amen?

Jill at Feministe has some good thoughts on this one, too, and BlondeSense Liz suggests, "This broad ought to get a job in a soup kitchen and learn a thing or two."

Personally, I'm just wondering whatever happened to the "activist judges" rhetoric? I guess you've got to hope for a "judiciary run amok" when you're suing for your right to be an asshole.

In the end, this situation is little more than further evidence of the tendency toward projection that we see so often among movement conservatives. They deem homosexuality a choice, regard any open displays of homosexuality as indicative of an entire "lifestyle" the parts of which are immutably inextricable from being gay, accuse gays of "barraging" others with their choices and beliefs, and associate the merest identification with homosexuality as political propaganda. None of which accurately describes gays, but certainly does describe the likes of Malhotra, Scarborough, and company, who choose their religion, which they claim obligates them to "speak out against homosexuality" and any other people or behaviors they don't like, and turn their religion into a political tool which is taken to the legislatures and the courts with regularity. Homosexuality isn't a lifestyle choice, but being a Christian is.

And I think we know which one really has the radical agenda.

(The Green Knight, Feministe, BlondeSense)

--> Sign up for Peek in your inbox... every morning! (Go here and check Peek box).

Melissa McEwan writes and edits the blog Shakespeare's Sister.