Droppings from the Catholic Birdcages: The Gays Get Human Rights, and the Blood of Christian Martyrs Will Run in the Streets

A teacher fired by a Catholic school for marrying his partner files suit to contest the discrimination, and some commentators at the National Catholic Reporter site speak of a "militant homosexual war on the Catholic church" that's now in full flame. Others think less of flames than of guillotines and the blood of martyrs running in the streets:

The gays and their allies in the courts - who have been rapidly increasing in number - will drive the church out of business if they can, since the teaching is eternal but the money isn't. 

They won't stop there. 

Cardinal George has predicted that he will die in bed, his successor will die in jail, and **his** successor will die a martyr in the public square (Seattle or San Francisco will undoubtedly compete to get there first). 

The important feature of the Cardinal's prediction is this: The martyr-archbishop will not get a bullet in the back of the neck in the basement of the Lubyanka, like dissenters from Number One [See Koestler, Darkness at Noon] - he will be executed in front of cheering crowds on a bright, sunny day, just like the martyrs of the Elizabethan period, the French Revolution, and the Cristero Rebellion. 

I wonder, will they hang, draw, and quarter him, too? And how many "Catholics" will be cheering them on, there in the square?

At the same time that these Catholic defensores fidei are making these astonishing remarks about what it portends when gay people have legal protections long afforded to everyone else, evangelical spokesman Rev. Franklin Graham, son of Rev. Billy Graham, informs members of the Family Research Council's Watchmen on the Walls conference that he and other pastors may have their heads chopped off if they keep preaching the truth God has given them to preach to homosexuals — namely, that God makes the rules and the gays are going to hell if they don't repent.

At the same time, Ed Whelan decries the recent statement of Judge Jones in Pennsylvania that discrimination against gay human beings needs to be tossed onto the ash heap of history. Whelan hears ominous overtones of Jacobinism in this statement. 

Hint: guillotines again. Blood in the streets. Christian martyrs and war against the Catholic church — by gay people expecting to have human rights like everyone else, and by women seeking access to healthcare that covers their medical needs with as much ease as men's medical needs are covered.

Astonishing, isn't it? When a group of privileged men who imagine that their rules and prejudices are God's rules and prejudices writ large feel they are beginning to lose control, suddenly they are the persecuted martyrs?

Not the group of human beings they've long targeted, kicked in the teeth, vilified, used as a parable of the sinfulness of a modern civilization they imagine is outside their control when women gain rights . . . . 

Astonishing. Mendacious in the extreme. And very sick.

You'd think, maybe, that these privileged straight white men would begin to wonder now, as they are exposed as bigots who have stood on the wrong side of history while shouting God and bible, if the angry male God they've made in their image has anything to do with the Christian God at all, wouldn't you?