Quote of the Day: Americans Are Growing Hostile to Religious Bullies

To hear the professional Christian set and the scamvangelists one would think that open war has been declared against Christians in America.  The shrieks and claims of victim hood and persecution are ridiculous for many reasons, not the least of which is that a large majority of Americans continue to identify as Christian.  The other reason, of course, is that nothing has been done to limit Christians' ability to worship as they desire and to believe what they wish without having to support an official state religion - the actual true intention of the Founding Fathers.  What has changed is that no longer are Americans willing to give undeserved deference to hateful religious views and to allow the Pharisee-like "godly folk" to ride rough shod over the rights and lives of others.  A piece in Patheos sums up the situation well:

No one is trying to stop you from being a Christian. The country is not growing hostile towards Christians. It’s just growing hostile towards extremist, religious bullies, who are trying to hijack the nation and force everyone to live under their own set of morals and ethics.

Growing hostile towards that kind of nonsense is not the same thing as growing hostile towards Christianity. It’s not even close.

Perhaps the most amusing aspect of this quest for “religious rights” is the sheer hypocrisy of it all. When the LGBTQ rights movement first got underway, religious conservatives sounded the alarm bells saying, “They don’t want equal rights, they want special rights!” When those on the religious right realized that we have neighbors who are– gasp– Muslim, they say, “Fine, let them have a mosque in certain places we approve, but we have to fight against them trying to make us all live under their religious laws.”

And then, they turn from those discussions and do the very thing they condemned just moments before– they demand special rights, and demand that their religious code influence the laws that everyone else is governed by.

This is precisely the kind of thing that made Jesus throw up his hands and shout, “You hypocrites! You blind guides!” over and over again in the Gospels.

If our friends on the religious right think we’re growing hostile, it’s because it’s true. But no, it’s not because we’re growing hostile towards the practice of our own religion, or hostile towards religious liberty.

We’re just growing hostile towards hypocrites and religious bullies who aren’t content to just live their lives the way they please, but who instead seek to impose their extremist beliefs on the rest of us.

As I have said countless times, it is the Christofascist who are demanding special rights, not the LGBT community.