Thursday, June 12, 2014

As Southern Baptists, Catholic Bishops, and Mormons Keep Gays in Crosshairs, Other Public Figures Talk of Bloody Revolution



While the men leading the Southern Baptists, U.S. Catholics, and Latter Day Saints are shoring up the battlements and notching their arrows for stepped-up war with the gays (and the culture at large, since it's caving in to the gays), this is what's going on at a broader level in our culture — and is not being addressed by the men leading the Southern Baptists, U.S. Catholics, and Latter Day Saints:


People running for elected office in these United States are openly and unabashedly calling for gay folks to be stoned to death, because, well, you know, the bible. And God.

While other people who advise important folks running for office in these United States are egging on  violence and calling for "a contemporary religious war against the supposedly pagan government of the United States" since, you know, the gays:

The accelerating advance of LGBTQ rights, especially marriage equality, has become a flashpoint for the Christian Right’s revolutionary impulses. In the wake of the Supreme Court’s striking down part of the Defense of Marriage Act in United States v. Windsor in 2013, Peter Leithart took to the influential blog of the journal First Things (founded by the late Neo-Conservative Catholic thinker Richard John Neuhaus) to declare that the decision "presents American Christians with a call to martyrdom."

And as they talk about bloody revolution — because the bible, God, the gays — they have begun to flirt with toxic neo-Confederate fantasies about secession being spoonfed to them by  influential Opus Dei priest and D.C. operative Rev. John McCloskey, who has declared that "the United States is no longer a Christian country."

Because the gays.

But not a peep that I've heard (have you?) from the men running the Southern Baptist Convention, the U.S. Catholic church, or the Mormon church about the danger of such overheated rhetoric on the part of other men who are, after all, right in bed with the men running these various churches in their shared distaste for the gays and their hunger and thirst to see heterosexual men crowned as the lords of creation. Nor any peep that I've heard (have you?) from the Catholic "liberals" who tell us what we need is more rationality and civility in our discussion of gay issues — not a peep to suggest that calls for bloodshed and dividing a nation around issues of sexual orientation might be more than a little bit irrational and uncivil?

While real human lives, the lives of fellow human beings, are in the crosshairs of these calls for bloodshed . . . .

The graphic is Laura James's "Love One Another," and is available as a print and in other media forms from Laura James Art Shop.

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