Quote of the Day: The Sickness of the Evangelical Right

A frightening image used to promote this year's Promise Keepers gathering

While the motives of the domestic terrorist who shot up the Planned Parenthood facility in Colorado Springs are still not fully clear, as the Washington Post reports, Robert Lewis Dear made statements to authorities that would indicate that he may have acted based on the false and inflammatory videos released by anti-abortion extremists this past summer.  Here are details:

The gunman suspected of storming a Planned Parenthood clinic and killing a police officer and two others used the phrase “no more baby parts’’ to explain his actions, according to a law enforcement official, a comment likely to further inflame the heated rhetoric surrounding abortion.

The attack on the clinic, allegedly by Robert Lewis Dear Jr., was “definitely politically motivated,’’ said the official, speaking on the condition of anonymity because the investigation is still underway. NBC News, which first reported the comment, said that Dear also mentioned President Obama in a range of statements to investigators that left his precise motivation unclear.

As much as politicians and the media refuse to admit the reality, far right evangelical Christians are becoming increasingly dangerous and extreme as they lose their ability to persecute others and the modern world and science prove the falsity of many of their cherished fairy tale beliefs.  Blogger friend Bob Felton sums up the situation well:

By any sane reckoning, the evangelical right has lost the culture war, and lost big. That doesn’t mean that the sickness has run its course, however. The cultural Christians are mostly gone, so there is nobody left in church but the crazies. What is more, frantic for revenue, the preachers give the crazies what they want. So every Sunday morning, all across the country, howling and bellowing pastors are denouncing abortion and preaching sedition. This is no joke; it’s really happening — and happening, incidentally, with a public subsidy in the form of tax protection.

We are nowhere near the end of it. Our godly neighbors, ever more marginalized and out-of-step with a world they are increasingly incompetent to live in, are a lot more dangerous than a few thousand Syrian refugees who want to get away from True Believers.

Sadly, I suspect we can expect increasing violence from the "godly folk" as their fantasy world is increasingly rejected by sane and rational people.  And don't forget the study that found that children raised in deeply religious homes were less generous and less kind than those raised in secular homes.  The myth that religion is a positive influence needs to die once and for all.  Think me harsh?  Check out the tweets gathered here that see the terror attack as a positive.