Wednesday, March 05, 2014

Quotes of the Day: Fading Christofascist Power and Privilege





I often remark on the growing meme that one hears among Christofascists that they are facing growing persecution, intolerance and hostility - things that they have subjected others to for years, if not centuries or millennium.  Recently, I reflected on Ross Douthat's op-ed in the New York Times that continued this meme and, to my mind demonstrated the ultimate selfishness of the Christofascists and their never ending quest for power and control over others.   In a post today, Andrew Sullivan highlighted comments from readers on this issue that summed up the real basis for the Christofascists' unhappiness and feigned persecution.  Here are excerpts:

I find I have little sympathy for the protestations of Douthat, Dreher, etc., and here’s why: what they’re protesting is their fading ability to dictate to others how to live their lives. They have not actually lost any rights, but rather lost a position of privilege and authority from which they have called the tunes to which others have been forced to dance. What they’re upset about isn’t the loss of power over their own lives; it’s about the loss of power over others’ lives. To which I say, “Boo-freaking-hoo.”
Here's another:
I’m sure it’s painful to discover that your world view is actually just one among many, rather than Reality Itself, and I can sympathize with the pain since I was once a child and had to endure many such painful realizations as I grew up and learned that I was not actually the central character in the universal drama.  . . . .   But I’m finding my resources of compassion seriously over-taxed by Douthat’s et al. reaction to the coming of the age of marriage- equality because it is rooted in the moral and intellectual complacency of privilege.  Douthat, especially, is expending all his intellectual energy on rationalizing his prejudices rather than attempting to examine them. Even so, nobody is forcing him, or anybody, to change his attitudes or behavior – conservative Christians remain free to profess and practice their beliefs.  Indeed, this really isn’t about them at all.  And there’s the rub.  Suddenly they and their views are not the American Unum, but merely part of the Pluribus.  Their outrage (or, in Dreher’s case, apprehension and sadness) is really a reaction to a loss of prestige, a loss of a sense of centrality, a loss of the sense that this is their country and they are the normal ones . . . 

And for the Christofascists, despite Christ's Gospel message, it is ALL about them.  They support the discrimination against others and for the most part support Republican agendas thare the antithesis of the Gospel message.  An final reader then zeros in on what I have argued for a long time as to why a special level of animus has been reserved for gays in the Christianist circles:
The larger issue at stake is the truth claims of Christianity, at least in the view of its most stringent interpreters. If the Bible can’t be trusted to be right about whether or not gay people are horrible monsters on par with murderers, swindlers, and slave dealers, what can we trust it for? . . . I’ve often wondered whether, as gays and gay marriage become more mainstream and, well, banal, many Christians won’t find themselves wondering why the apocalypse hasn’t come after all and what that says about Scriptural authority in a lot of other areas. That’s what’s not sitting well with a lot of Christian culture warriors right now.
The absolute worse thing one can demand of a Christofascist is that they think for themselves and make their own reasoned moral judgments rather than merely parrot what they have been taught.  Suddenly, if their convenient little check list that proves that they are "saved" cannot be relied upon, their entire simple minded world collapse.  And this scares the Hell out of them.  Hence why they lash out so violently at those who threaten their house of cards world view. 

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