This is the religious right’s radical new plan: The very real efforts to create an American theocracy in plain sight
The religious right can't win at the polls. But that will not stop them from pursuing this dangerous, scary path
UCC’s general minister and president, the Rev. John C. Dorhauer, wrote the preface to a major new report, shedding new light on the right’s decades-long campaign to redefine religious freedom into a tool for their own theocratic domination. “Removing someone’s civil rights by empowering the government to protect and preserve my religious phobia is not my idea of religious liberty,” Dorhauer writes. But that’s exactly how the religious right has tried to stand the idea of religious freedom on its head. “What they want to call religious freedom is in fact the kind of oppressive religious tyranny that my ancestors left their homeland to escape,”
“When Exemption is the Rule: The Religious Freedom Strategy of the Christian Right,”published by Political Research Associates on Jan. 12, was written by Frederick Clarkson, PRA’s Senior Fellow for Religious Liberty, author of “Eternal Hostility: The Struggle Between Theocracy and Democracy” and co-founder of the blog Talk to Action. The le highlights a key aspect of the religious right’s long-term strategy, taking the time-honored principle of religious exemption, intended to protect theindividual right of conscience, and expanding it recklessly to apply to whole ins utions, even for-profit businesses—as seen in the Supreme Court’s 2014 Hobby Lobby decision, in a process designed to fragment the common public sphere and carve out vast segments of American life where civil rights, labor law and other core protections simply do not apply.
“When Christian Right leaders talk about religious liberty, they often really mean theocratic supremacism of their own religious beliefs inscribed in government,”
how their Orwellian agenda is unfolding, combining up-to-the-minute analysis of recent developments with an historical account dating back to the 1970s and the birth of the modern-day religious right, defending Bob Jones University’s “right to discriminate,” based on religion.
As recently as the 1980s, Christian Right activists defended racial segregation by claiming that restrictions on their ability to discriminate violated their First Amendment right to religious freedom….
Instead of African Americans being discriminated against by Bob Jones, the university argued it was the party being discriminated against in being prevented from executing its First Amendment rights. The Supreme Court disagreed….
Two things are worth noting here: first, the primacy of discrimination as a political motivation, and second, the “envious reversal” of victim and victimizer that lies at the heart of the conservative victimhood shtick.
even before the issues of abortion and sexuality became the policy priorities of a newly politicized Christian Right, its leaders fought the perceived threat of racial equality at conservative Christian academies by claiming their religious freedom to discriminate. This legacy should remind us that the Right’s religious liberty campaigns mobilize old arguments around new targets, and that their agenda extends beyond questions of contraception coverage, or marriage and nondiscrimination in the LGBTQ context.
the cause they are actually advancing is neither religion nor freedom, but the an hesis of both: theocratic political control. No church, minister or priest anywhere in America has ever been forced to perform a gay marriage against their will—the kind of scenario that so-called “religious freedom” advocates supposedly fear. Yet, for almost two years, UCC ministers in North Carolina faced criminal charges if they dared to perform a same-sex marriage ceremony. UCC’s case made it stunningly clear which side was really interested in religious liberty, and which side was deceptively hijacking the concept to force its own narrow-minded religious views onto the rest of society—the exact opposite of what most Americans instinctively know religious freedom to be.
“The evangelical Protestant Christian Right and U.S. Roman Catholic bishops are intensifying their campaign to carve out arenas of public life where religious ins utions, individuals, and even businesses may evade civil rights and labor laws in the name of religious liberty,” Clarkson writes in the executive summary. “By creating zones of legal exemption, the Christian Right seeks to shrink the public sphere and the arenas within which the government has legitimacy to defend people’s rights, including reproductive, labor, and LGBTQ rights.”
These efforts have powerful outside allies as well, Clarkson notes. “In this, it is often aligned with the anti-government strategy of free market libertarians and some business interests, who for a variety of reasons also seek to restrict arenas where government can legally act.”
This conservative Christian alliance is challenging a century or more of social advances and many of the premises of the Enlightenment underlying the very definition of religious liberty in the United States. Its long-range goal is to impose a conservative Christian social order inspired by religious law, in part by eroding pillars of undergirding religious pluralism that are integral to our cons utional democracy.
Their goal is to impose a conservative Christian social order inspired by religious law. To achieve this goal, they seek to remove religious freedom as an integral part of religious pluralism and cons utional democracy, and redefine it in Orwellian fashion to justify discrimination by an ever wider array of “religified” ins utions and businesses.
“For example, a church receptionist is not exactly a secular job,” Clarkson said. “But it is usually a stretch to call it a ministry by any reasonable standard.”
Along these same lines, in the report, he wrote:
The Southern Baptist manual suggests assigning “… employees duties that involve ministerial, teaching, or other spiritual qualifications—duties that directly further the religious mission. For example, if a church receptionist answers the phone, the job description might detail how the receptionist is required to answer basic questions about the church’s faith, provide religious resources, or pray with callers.”
While the courts may not buy the idea that a receptionist can be reasonably construed as a minister in the legal sense, this is the kind of thinking that is permeating the conservative Christian world in the wake of Hosanna-Tabor.
...
http://www.salon.com/2016/01/16/this...n_plain_sight/
Krazy Christian Taliban Kruz is running to be Pope and Patriarch of Christian-only America, imposing Christians' intolerance, authoritarianism, HATE, discriminaiton, racism, and Biblical fairy tales on non-Christians.
Along with the VRWC having exactly the same strategy, the more the Christian Taliban can override, weaken, defund govt, the more power for the Christian Taliban and VRWC.
America is ed and un able, and the silence from You People about how to un it is implicit agreement.
Reply With Quote
