Just as they employ dog whistle calls to stir racial violence and discrimination, the professional Christian class and hate group leaders of organizations falsely describing themselves as supporting "family values" now seem to be using similar dog whistle calls against gays. Be it false claims of "Christian persecution" to rants about the loss of "religious freedom," the hate merchants are ratching up the rhetoric to dangerous levels. The irony, of course is that if any one engages in the persecution of others, it is the Christofascists. A piece in The New Civil Rights Movement looks at this dangerous (and dishonest) phenomenon. Here are highlights:
Matt Barber's recent column, taken in context of his Barbwire website, feels like a dog whistle call to anti-LGBT anti-progressive violence, in my opinion. At least, that's how it feels to me.
Barber, a former boxer who portrays himself as a devout Christian, is now an Associate Dean at Jerry Falwell's Liberty University and the Vice President of Liberty Counsel Action. He is also is the publisher of the newly-created BarbWire.com, an increasingly hate-filled website that attacks gays, liberals, progressives, secular Americans, and reinforces the religious right's anti-women, anti-immigrant, anti-minority beliefs.
But Barber's column, published this weekend at BarbWire ("fueled by the Word of Life"), has already been republished at The Blaze and World Net Daily (WND).
While others may laugh, some might fear it to be, as do I, a figurative incitement to violence.
Here's how it begins:
From behind a smoking sniper rifle high atop his ivory tower peers the secular “progressive.” He surveys his many victims, strewn across the American landscape below and mockingly sneers, “War on Christianity? What war on Christianity?”
He then resumes shooting, all the while insisting that those uncooperative Christians who scatter for cover behind the word of God and the U.S. Constitution somehow suffer from a “persecution complex” (the baker, the photographer, the florist, the innkeeper, the Christian school administrator, etc.).To fully advance the causes of radical feminism, abortion-on-demand, unfettered sexual license, “gay marriage” and the like, the pagan left must do away with religious free exercise altogether. Under the guise of “anti-discrimination,” Christians today face discrimination at unprecedented levels.Portraying the collective of secular progressives as (ironically, since many or most are anti-gun) a sniper shooting a rifle at "uncooperative Christians who scatter for cover behind the word of God and the U.S. Constitution," is Barber calling his supporters to fight back and attack LGBT people and progressives?
Let’s see if we can make this abundantly clear. Christians, true Christians – regenerate, Bible-believing Christians who strive their level best to maintain fidelity to the word of God and honor His commands – will not, indeed cannot, participate in, approve of, facilitate or encourage certain behaviors deemed by the Holy Scriptures to be immoral or sinful.
Barber continues:
For every law, regulation, activist court ruling or presidential edict that demands Christians violate their sincerely held religious beliefs and adopt a postmodern, moral relativist way of life, there increases, in exact proportion, the likelihood of widespread civil disobedience – disobedience of the sort we haven’t seen since the civil rights struggles of the 1950s and ’60s.The piece also shows a number of Barber's tweets that certainly suggest gays need to be met with violence. Here is one I find particularly disturbing:
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