Rendering unto Caesar what is Caesar's

A lot of what you hear talked about under the heading of "religious freedom" seems to me to boil down to "reasonable expectations of what a particular profession or institution's responsibilities are."

Take, for example, the kerfuffle last week over a Killeen, Texas public school administrator's choice to take down a poster of Linus (of Peanuts fame) that included the biblical quote he recites in A Charlie Brown Christmas: "For unto you is born this day in the city of David a savior which is Christ the Lord.  That’s what Christmas is all about, Charlie Brown."  Dedra Shannon, the school nurse who had put up the poster, said she was told "it had to come down because it might offend kids from other religions or those who do not have a religion" and that the administrator's decision was "a slap in the face of Christianity."

When I saw this posted on social media a few days ago, it was accompanied by a comment to the effect that diversity and tolerance are apparently all fine except when they apply to white Christians.  Todd Starnes, who wrote the Fox News article I linked above, clearly agrees.  "Those who holler about tolerance are the least tolerant of all," Starnes writes.  "Public schools are supposed to be in the education business and Ms. Shannon was simply educating students about the true meaning of Christmas."

My question is why on earth public schools should be in the role of teaching religion in the first place, except insofar as it has an impact on history and literature.  Imagine, for example, if a teacher decided to teach children the "true meaning of the holiness of the Qu'ran" and put "There is no god but Allah, and Mohammed is his prophet" on the door of the classroom.  My guess is the same people who flipped out about the removal of the Linus poster would flip out in the other direction (and rightly so).

Schools are not in the business of religious instruction.  And why should they be?  Don't churchgoers get enough religious instruction in their churches?  You wouldn't go to the doctor's office and object when they didn't give you advice on your investments -- it's outside of the purview of their responsibilities.  Likewise, it's not the job of a public school to give students instruction about the "true meaning of Christmas."

Then we have the story about Linda Harvey, founder of Mission: America and host of a radio show of the same name, who lamented last week that she had nowhere to shop now that so many businesses have stood up for equal treatment of LGBT individuals.  Harvey said:

For any Christian who wants to spend hard-earned dollars with family-friendly, Christian-affirming retailers, restaurants and service providers, the list is growing shorter all the time.  I stopped shopping at Macy’s in 2011 after learning about the retailer’s grossly unjust policy against women. 

Macy’s management said ‘yes’ to a transsexual young man’s demand to change in the women’s dressing room and rejected a Christian employee’s attempt to block his inappropriate access, even firing her because of her principled actions...  Then there’s Target.  Where to start?  Selling ‘gay pride’ T-shirts a few years back was bad enough, but Target is now ‘proudly standing’ with homosexuals and cross-dressers who want to change America’s 1964 Civil Rights Act to add ‘sexual orientation’ and ‘gender identity’. 

Joining Target in supporting this anti-American, pro-deviance legislation are Amazon, General Mills, Google, Facebook, Paypal, Levi-Strauss and others.

Well, first, saying "I am not going to discriminate against LGBT people" is not synonymous with saying "I am anti-Christian."  No one at Target, or Macy's, or anywhere else is trying to convince anyone of anything except that you should buy what they're selling.  All they said is that they're going to make sure that the rights of their workers and customers are protected regardless of their sexual orientation.

So she, too, is expecting an institution to do something that's outside its purview -- expecting department stores to adhere to Christian values, as if retail outlets were branch offices of the local church.  The point is that the stores are saying they'll serve anyone; what Harvey wants is not only to follow her own code of ethics, but to mandate that everyone else does, too.

The same kind of thing applies to B&B and bakery owners who won't serve gays, and strict Catholic pharmacists who won't sell people birth control.  None of those people are in the business of dictating others' ethics and morals; they are in a service job and therefore should expect that under anti-discrimination statutes, they would be expected to serve any customer who comes in.  And in fact, a B&B owner, baker, or pharmacist who went into the business unaware that they would have customers who differed from them in terms of religion or sexual preference is, in a word, dumb.

C'mon, a pharmacist who didn't know he was going to be expected to sell birth control pills and condoms?  Really?

But all of this is cast as part of the more general War on Christianity, as if telling people "you can't act in a bigoted fashion" is some kind of infringement of their rights to practice their religion.

It comes down to the general rule that you are completely free to attend the church of your choice and adhere to any and all rules the religion requires, but you are not free to expect that businesses and public institutions adhere to any of it.  So honestly, Linda Harvey is completely within her rights not to patronize Target et al.; but expecting that department stores are going to be venues for "Christian values" is a little ridiculous.

So I guess if you believe that tolerance of diversity equates to intolerance of the majority, you'll never be without something to be offended by.  Me, I'd rather try to get along with the people around me than constantly harp on the fact that everyone isn't like me.  All in all, I think it's a much happier way to be.

Lying for Jesus

Keep 'em scared.  Convince people that their way of life, their very existence, is threatened.  Tell them that if they don't fight back, the Bad Guys will win, will erase every trace of their culture and belief systems from the country.

After all, fearful people do two things that are very useful.  They double down on their beliefs -- and they are easy for the unscrupulous to manipulate.

That's a lesson that evangelical preacher Jim Bakker and his pal Rick Wiles, host of the ultra-Christian radio show TruNews, have learned all too well.  Despite the fact that 83% of the citizens of the United States self-identify as Christian, Bakker and Wiles have taken it on as their mission to convince that overwhelming majority that they are a desperately embattled minority who faces persecution and eventual extinction if they don't, for god's sake, do something.

Lying For Jesus, is how I see it.

Jim Bakker [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

In an interview last week on TruNews, Bakker and Wiles make it abundantly clear how this extermination plan is going to go.  Bakker said:

Be ready.  Be ready.  Are you ready to serve God if they're gonna cut your head off?  Years ago, God spoke to me, and I was supposed to start preaching it, but nobody would accept it.  How are you gonna tell people that the church needs to be ready to have their heads cut off, to say, "I'm willing to die for the gospel of Jesus Christ?"  There is such fear in the church... I mean, fear.  Not just fear of ISIS, not just fear of one thing, but fear of not being politically correct.  I tell you, you will be murdered if you preach the gospel of Jesus Christ. 

Wiles, of course, agreed, instead of doing what I would have done, which is to point out that not only has no one been murdered in the United States for preaching the bible, but church attendance seems to be as strong as ever, and just last week the Religious Right successfully sledgehammered their views into law in North Carolina, making it legal for Christians to discriminate against LGBT individuals in the name of "religious freedom."

But people like Bakker and Wiles never let a little thing like reality interfere with their message.  Bakker goes on:

It's over, people!  The gospel is over in the United States of America!  We have turned our back on the Bible.  We can't preach the Bible anymore.  I could tell you stories that would curl your hair... If I told you what I have been through and what I go through and what I am facing, because of what we would call the old-fashioned gospel, which is simply the Bible.  Anyone who wants to stand on the absolute word of God -- you don't have much...  Everyone's talking about Donald Trump.  Who would have thought that we would have a man running for president who needed to say, "Next Christmas, we're going to say 'Merry Christmas' again?"

Well, that got lots of applause from the studio audience, given how evidently in their pretend world the 17% of us who aren't Christian are winning a war on the 83% of the United States who are.  The only possible response, of course, is to fight tooth and nail to maintain the hegemony they have had for over two hundred years, and which is showing no sign of going away any time soon.

And speaking of lying, Wiles then suggests that whenever you go to a store and have to give your name to be called for an order, you should say your name is "Merry Christmas" so the clerk has to say it over the microphone.  Because, apparently, lying outright to a clerk is exactly what Jesus wants you to do.

This idea also got lots of applause.

Seeing the support he got from that point, Bakker decided to pursue it:

How can this be a point on which to run for president?  How can it be?  How can it be almost illegal to say "Merry Christmas?"

"Almost illegal?"  Sort of like "almost pregnant?"

Rick Wiles then asks a question:

Going back to the spiritual uprising; who is telling us that we can't say "Merry Christmas?"

Exactly, Rick.  Good question.

But Bakker, of course, has a response:

[If you prayed or said "Merry Christmas" in public] they would threaten to arrest you.  They would threaten to mow you down with a machine gun. 

Even Wiles seems to realize that they're on shaky ground at that point.  He asks:

They're gonna come in with guns, into a high school graduation, and shoot you for saying the Lord's Prayer? 

But Bakker hasn't gotten where he is by backing down:

Not right now, but they will.  They will if we don't stop them. 

Ah, yes.  "They."  By whom he means, apparently, atheists like me.  Who, by the way, could not care less how much time Bakker, Wiles, or anyone else spends in church, how many times they thump the bible, or what they preach on the street corner.  We honestly don't give a rat's ass if they stand on their roofs in July, stark naked, shrieking "Merry Christmas!" at passersby all day long.  All we want is for Bakker and his ilk to keep their beliefs out of our schools, laws, and public buildings.  Beyond that, they can believe any damn fool thing they want to.

The frustrating thing about all of this is that Lying For Jesus works.  If you tell people often enough that they're embattled and besieged, they'll believe it.  Even if the messenger is a guy who resigned from his first ministerial post because of a sex scandal (in which he offered to pay $279,000 to the victim to keep silent), and in a separate incident was imprisoned for five years on fraud and conspiracy charges.

But don't let that dissuade you from believing everything he says.  Especially if what he says is "be afraid."

There's a part of this fear, though, that is very real.  And that is the fear of rational people that the rest of the citizenry is going to make decisions based in irrational fears like the ones Bakker and Wiles are peddling.  We've got an election coming up, and more than one of the candidates is capitalizing on that sense of being constantly at risk.  So ask yourself: do you want the voice of reason to be swamped by people who are accepting the fact-free scare-talk of a huckster who somehow, bafflingly, still gets people to listen to him?

Because if that comes to pass, maybe there's a reason to be afraid, after all.

Scoring points from tragedy

There's a time for politicizing, for spin, and for debate.  There might even be a time for grandstanding.

But sometimes, all a moral and compassionate person needs to do is stand in solidarity with people who have experienced a great loss.  And that is where we should be, as a nation, with respect to the senseless tragedy that happened two days ago in Charleston, South Carolina, where a 21-year-old man murdered nine people at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, apparently motivated by racism, hate, and the ideology of white supremacy.  "I'm here to shoot black people," the killer allegedly said.  "You've raped our women, and you are taking over the country...  I have to do what I have to do."

The Emanuel AME Church [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Horrific, and hard to imagine that in the 21st century, we're still seeing such crimes occur, that racism is still an entrenched part of our society.  Those are the discussions we should be having today.

But not, apparently, if you work for Fox News.

The pundits over at Fox wasted no time in trotting out their "War on Christians" trope that they've been flogging for years, every time anything happens that threatens the unchallenged hegemony that Christianity has had in the United States ever since its founding.  And instead of treating the Charleston killings as what they are -- racially-motivated hate crimes -- Fox is spinning this as an attack motivated by hatred for Christianity.

They invited Earl Walker Jackson, a minister and unsuccessful candidate for both Senate and Lieutenant Governor in the state of Virginia, to give his opinion.  Jackson is an interesting choice, given that he has made statements in the past that call his sanity into serious question -- such as his claim that doing yoga will lead your to being possessed by Satan.  But apparently Fox, and Fox & Friends host Steve Doocy, thought that Jackson would be the perfect person to comment.

And Jackson fell right in with the Fox party line.  In a segment entitled "Attack on Faith," Jackson said:

Wait for the facts, don't jump to conclusions, but I am deeply concerned that this gunman chose to go into a church.  There does seem to be a rising hostility against Christians in this country because of our biblical views.  It is something we have to be aware of.  We have to create an atmosphere where people don't take out their violent intentions against Christians.  I urge pastors and men in these churches to prepare to defend themselves, at least have some people in there that are prepared to defend themselves when women and children are attacked.

Doocy concurred:

Extraordinarily, they called it a ‘hate crime,’ and some look at it as, ‘Well, because it was a white guy and a black church,’ but you made a great point earlier about the hostility towards Christians.  And it was a church.  So maybe that’s what they were talking about.  They haven’t explained it to us.

So, "I'm here to shoot black people" wasn't enough for you?  You have to jump on this as a chance to prop up your ridiculous persecution complex, trying to convince Christians -- who, allow me to point out, make up 74% of the citizens of the United States -- that they're some kind of embattled minority?

Or is it because your ideology won't let you admit that enculturated racism is still part of our society?

No, we can't go there.  Not in a state where the Confederate flag is still flown over the state capitol building.

And Fox wasn't the only one who went in this direction.  Rick Santorum decided to use the murders to score political points in his run for the Republican nomination for president, as usual kowtowing to his supporters on the Religious Right and making not a single mention of race as a motivation for the murders.  In an interview on AM 970, a New York radio station, Santorum said:

All you can do is pray for those and pray for our country.  This is one of those situations where you just have to take a step back and say we — you know, you talk about the importance of prayer in this time and we’re now seeing assaults on our religious liberty we’ve never seen before.  It’s a time for deeper reflection beyond this horrible situation...   You just can’t think that things like this can happen in America.  It’s obviously a crime of hate.  Again, we don’t know the rationale, but what other rationale could there be?  You’re sort of lost that somebody could walk into a Bible study in a church and indiscriminately kill people.  It’s something that, again, you think we’re beyond that in America and it’s sad to see.

What other rationale could there be?  What, the apartheid-era South African flag on the killer's shirt in his Facebook photograph wasn't enough of a clue for you?

But I think what gets me most about all of this is the callous lack of compassion and empathy for the victims and their families.  This is beyond being tone-deaf; this is calculated, deliberate pandering.  For Santorum and the pundits on Fox & Friends, it was more important to latch onto this tragedy to advance their warped agendas than it was to step back and say, "The crucial thing right now is to stand together as Americans and repudiate racism and racially-motivated violence."

You have to wonder why that's so hard for them to say.  Afraid to lose some of their supporters, perhaps?

I don't know what else to say.  This repulsive use of a tragedy to gain political ground has left me feeling nauseated.  So I'll just add one more thing.  To Senator Santorum, and your allies over at Fox: if you can't find it in your hearts to offer unqualified support and solidarity with the families of the victims of this horrific attack, then kindly just shut the fuck up.