Blowback against Specific acts of Religious Intolerance seeking legal status is not a War against Religion

For a group of people obsessed about the possibility that Shari’a law might creep into US Law, christofascists sure seem to thrive on forcing their own brand of it.  All the while, there’s this claim of a “war against religion”.   Forcing other people to suffer from unjust and unconstitutional laws in the name of religion is not the kind of religious freedom the founders had in mind when they penned the first amendment.  Religious status does not give any person or institution the ability to ignore law.  Asking for enforcement of law against narrow religious doctrine does not constitution a war against religion.  Our country is not suppose to favor any one religion or enshrine its pet biases into law.  However, it seems every major Republican candidate hates our Constitution.  How can these people truly seek an office where they are sworn to uphold it yet desire to twist the Age of Reason right out of it?

These are the same folks that have declared jihad on women’s reproductive health, science, and mathematics.  Yes, remember Copernicus who had the audacity to discover that the earth revolved around the sun JUST, FINALLY got a proper burial in 2010.  It only took him 600 years and hundreds of years of science to get his ticket out of hell for heresy.  Meanwhile, Rick Santorum–who swept a round of beauty contests with record low turnouts–is still proving there are people out there that probably think that Galileo and Copernicus are wrong.  Galileo got his apology in 1992 nearly 600 years after his death. He died in 1642.   Let’s not forget the persecution and stalking of Jean-François Champollion whose Rosetta stone proved that Egypt had existed straight through the supposed dating of the great flood.  That’s just a few examples from science.  The use of religious texts to support slavery, ownership of all married women and children, persecution of GLBT populations around world, and wars and acts of terrorism is omnipresent.  Standing against these things and creating laws to make them illegal does not mean you’re against religion.  It means you are for the constitutional separation of church and state and ensuring the basic constitution granted rights of all individuals.  No one’s “God” wrote the Constitution.  Men afraid of religious dictatorships and intolerance did.

Why wouldn’t rational, freedom loving people want to stop the creep of christofascist biblical law wherever possible?  It’s not a war against religion.  It’s blowback against those who are trying to force narrow religious doctrine onto the rest of us and into law.  Luckily, even Antonin Scalia has written about the complete unconstitutionality of all this.

As conservative (and Catholic) Justice Antonin Scalia explained in a Supreme Court opinion more than twenty years ago, a law does not suddenly become unconstitutional because someone raises a religious objective to it — if this actually were true, anyone at all could immunize themselves from paying taxes or from any other law simply by claiming they have a religious objection to being a law-abiding citizen.

We have all just about had it with the Catholic Bishops, Pat Robertson, and all that crap that seems to have come to culmination in the candidacy of Rick Santorum.   Where’s that trademarked Santorum outrage about Cardinal Edward Egan who withdrew his apology for illegally covering up instances of pedophilia on his watch?  Nope, don’t wait for it.  Santorum’s too busy insisting that President Obama wants to force the Catholic Church to accept women priests.   The one thing that I’ve really learned in this primary election is that Republican politicians feel so emboldened by the current hatefest in the base that they will lie about anything and know that Fox News will repeat it every chance they can.

For weeks, Republicans have pretended that President Obama is waging some kind of war on religion because his administration recently approved regulations requiring insurers to cover contraceptive care — spurred on in large part because the conservative U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops opposes the contraceptive care regulations. Their claim is utterly absurd. The new rules exempt churches from the requirement to offer insurance that covers contraception. And they align closely with the beliefs of actual Catholics, 58 percent of whombelieve that employers should be required to provide insurance that cover contraception.

On Fox News this morning, GOP presidential candidate Rick Santorum doubled down on this bizarre claim that Obama is going after religion — falsely claiming that the president wants to tell Catholics who they can hire as priests:

What they’ve done here is a direct assault on the First Amendment, not only a direct assault on the freedom of religion, by forcing people specifically to do things that are against their religious teachings. . . . This is a president who, just recently, in this Hosanna-Tabor case was basically making the argument that Catholics had to, you know, maybe even had to go so far as to hire women priests to comply with employment discrimination issues. This is a very hostile president to people of faith. He’s a hostile president, not just to people of faith, but to all freedoms.

Again, if the first amendment was really serious about that then as a Buddhist, I’d like all my war tax money back now. I’d also like to argue that Rastafarians should be allowed all the legal pot they want for their sacraments.  Then, let’s just go back to letting all those Mormons have multiple child brides.  Religious organizations do not get to exempt themselves from laws.  Again, check the Scalia reference above.

The deal is that Santorum and the Bishops and some of these other full time misogynists posing as Pharisees have had trouble with every law that’s given women the ability to make adult decisions about their own selves.  This includes the SCOTUS decision giving women the constitutional right to birth control and abortion.  Ron Paul has pretty much said that he doesn’t believe it’s possible for a husband to rape a wife.  That falls under the laws that existed in this country prior to 1882 when women were literally written in as an appendage of the husband.  Married women were not considered separate individuals which is why in many states they couldn’t own property.

It gets worse.   Paul hangs around with Christian Reconstructionists.   These folks are truly scary.

Reconstructionism, the right-wing religious-political school of thought founded by Rousas John Rushdoony. The ultimate goal of Christian Reconstructionists is to reconstitute the law of the Hebrew Bible — which calls for the execution of adulterers and men who have sex with other men — as the law of the land. The Constitution Party constitutes the political wing of Reconstructionism, and the CP has found a good friend in Ron Paul.

When Paul launched his second presidential quest in 2008, he won the endorsement of Rev. Chuck Baldwin, a Baptist pastor who travels in Christian Reconstructionist circles, though he is not precisely a Reconstructionist himself (for reasons having to do with his interpretation of how the end times will go down). When Paul dropped out of the race, instead of endorsing Republican nominee John McCain, or even Libertarian Party nominee Bob Barr, Paul endorsed Constitution Party presidential nominee Chuck Baldwin (who promised, in his acceptance speech, to uphold the Constitution Party platform, which looks curiously similar to the Ron Paul agenda, right down to the no-exceptions abortion proscription and ending the Fed).

At his shadow rally that year in Minneapolis, held on the eve of the Republican National Convention, Paul invited Constitution Party founder Howard Phillips, a Christian Reconstructionist, to address the crowd of end-the-Fed-cheering post-pubescents. (In his early congressional career, Julie Ingersoll writes in Religion Dispatches, Paul hired as a staffer Gary North, a Christian Reconstructionist leader and Rushdoony’s son-in-law.)

At a “Pastor’s Forum” at Baldwin’s Baptist church in Pensacola, Florida, Paul was asked by a congregant about his lack of support for Israel, which many right-wing Christians support because of the role Israel plays in what is known as premillennialist end-times theology. “Premillennialist” refers to the belief that after Jesus returns, according to conditions on the ground in Israel, the righteous will rule. But Christian Reconstructionists have a different view, believing the righteous must first rule for 1,000 years before Jesus will return.

They also believe, according to Clarkson, “that ‘the Christians’ are the ‘new chosen people of God,’ commanded to do what ‘Adam in Eden and Israel in Canaan failed to do…create the society that God requires.’ Further, Jews, once the ‘chosen people,’ failed to live up to God’s covenant and therefore are no longer God’s chosen. Christians, of the correct sort, now are.”

Responding to Baldwin’s congregant, Paul explained, “I may see it slightly differently than others because I think of the Israeli government as different than what I read about in the Bible. I mean, the Israeli government doesn’t happen to be reflecting God’s views. Some of them are atheist, and their form of government is not what I would support… And there are some people who interpret the chosen people as not being so narrowly defined as only the Jews — that maybe there’s a broader definition of that.”

Again, if you hang around folks that basically want to tear apart the constitution and insert their own religious views in place of secular law, you’re not a conservative.  You’re not a libertarian.  Hell, you’re not even really supporting our Constitution and basic shared American Values.  Again, these are the people that say there is a religious war because they’ve basically started one.  They and their Republican Toadies need to be stopped.

I wont even get into the Romney/Mormon thing because BostonBoomer has already covered a lot of that.  These are not just simply pious folks that you meet at your local church potluck.  They are all fanatics and they deserve all the blowback we can muster.  It would be one thing if they all weren’t so politically active and they didn’t have such a huge impact on one political party.  Again, this isn’t just the practice of religion, this is the practice of a zealotry akin to political terrorism.  We need to recognize and call it exactly that before our rights are crushed by their very narrow interpretations of what’s science, what’s American, and what’s moral.