Tuesday, April 11, 2006

Ah, Jesus

TC sent me a clipping from the front page of yesterday's LA Times, which I just now got a chance to read. The headline: "Christians Sue for Right Not to Tolerate Policies."

As with anything sufficiently horrible, I became sickly fascinated, and went off to the LAT's web site in search of the whole article.

As for the title of this post, I do admit to taking the name of the Lord in vain. No matter how many times I call upon Jesus to straighten out his wayward followers, I don't see any response.

One particular disturbing bit from the story:

A recent survey by the Anti-Defamation League found that 64% of American adults -- including 80% of evangelical Christians -- agreed with the statement "Religion is under attack in this country."

I can believe that 80% of the wingnuts feel this way, because it seems that every time I hear about some convention that guys like Delay and Frist attend, that's the sum and substance of every speech made, and is, in fact, usually the title of the convention. Fear sells, especially with the dumb. So does hate.

But 64% of all adults?

Assuming the ADL's survey was properly conducted, I am stunned.

To Ruth Malhotra, Rick Scarborough, Stephen Crampton, Gregory S. Baylor, Orit Sklar, and all your drooling ilk who didn't manage to get quoted in the story, I say this: If you feel like you're "under attack" just because the government won't let you discriminate against an already persecuted minority, I suggest you write to your Representative or Senator.

Oh, wait, you can't. Congress is on Easter recess, isn't it?

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Tried your link Brendan, but got the message that I had to sign up with the LA Times to read it. For others that might not want to do that, here's the first 3 paragraphs of the longish article:

"ATLANTA -- Ruth Malhotra went to court last month for the right to be intolerant.
Malhotra says her Christian faith compels her to speak out against homosexuality. But the Georgia Institute of Technology, where she's a senior, bans speech that puts down others because of their sexual orientation.
Malhotra sees that as an inacceptable infringement on her right to religious expression. So she's demanding that Georgia Tech revoke its tolerance policy."

Ah Jesus, indeed!

Jinnet said...

As Stephen Colbert said recently, Christians are "a long oppressed majority."

Anonymous said...

I think Brendan mentioned this in an earlier blog, but required reading should be Bill McKibben's essay in the August 2005 Harper's Magazine: "The Christian Paradox: How a faithful nation gets Jesus wrong."

In it he points out the hypocrisy of so many of today's American "Christians."

"Christ was pretty specific about what he had in mind for his followers," McKibben writes. Christ said that you could tell the righteous from the damned by whether they "fed the hungry, slaked the thristy, clothed the naked, welcomed strangers, and visited prisoners."

Well, as a nation, we rank second to last of developed countries in aid to developing countries; even when our private donations are added to the calculus, we don't do a whole lot better.

Americans don't take care of their own either, McKibben says: nearly 18 percent of U.S. children live in poverty (and we know how parsimonious the goverment's definition of "poverty" is). More and more families are considered "food insecure with hunger."

We come in last of developed nations in every measure of caring for the least among us.

Why don't the Ruth Malhotras of the world concentratre more on Jesus' message and less on some notion of intolerance that she is divining from the penumbra of the Bible.

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