“The
enemies of faith are persecuting us!....”
We
are hearing that a lot from Christian extremists these days.
This mythology of persecution goes back, of course, to the Sermon on the Mount, in
which Christ said that those who were persecuted for his sake were blessed. On
the surface it seems like an admirable sentiment, supporting people who are
persecuted for their beliefs. But some of today’s far-right Christians take it to absurd extremes
– in other words, “when people who aren’t as extreme as me tell me I’m crazy,
that really means I’m even more holy! The more crazy people say I am, the
closer I am to God!” Which simply reinforces the fact that religious belief is
a half-step away from delusion, which betokens the most serious forms of mental
illness.
The
world is persecuting you? Really? Are we tying you to a pole and setting you on
fire, like you people did to us in the Middle Ages? Dragging you off to the
Vatican to torture you? And your faith in miracles, and your voodoo-like
prayers for supernatural intervention and the assistance of dead saints, is obviously witchcraft and paganism
– are we hanging you for idolatry like the pilgrims did?
Can
you conceive of anything more sad, than religious people executing hundreds of
witches, for centuries, for allegedly doing things which are scientifically and
logically impossible? Hundreds of thousands of innocent people jailed,
tortured, killed?
Here’s what real persecution looks like. Just recently,
Jesus-impaired officials at America’s schools have expelled one girl for being
a lesbian, fired one teacher for having an abusive husband, and thrown one
female football player off the team for, you know, being a girl, which they
somehow hadn’t noticed before. More legislatures are trying to throw atheists
out of their high schools.
Real persecution looks like legislators trying to put both
abortion patients and their doctors in prison, and even trying to make women
prove their miscarriages were really miscarriages; legislators trying to force
vaginal probes into women; putting our girls at risk for cancer by preventing
them from getting HPV shots, and putting them at risk by denying them sex
education; hospitals denying women treatment for reasons of “conscience”;
carpet-bombing women’s clinics with so many regulations and fees that they are
forced to close shop; making our kids stupider by impeding the teaching of
real-world science; lowering the veil of ignorance by trying to ban books.
It’s trying to kill off gays by retarding AIDS research. It’s
working to keep gays and lesbians from getting equal rights on insurance coverage,
compensation for service-related deaths, income tax filing status and
deductions, tax-free property transfers, Social Security, veteran’s pensions
and disability, disabled vets tax exemptions, and relocation benefits for
military families, survivor benefits and continuation of health care for
surviving spouses, organ donor issues, next-of-kin status, parental rights,
access to school records, alimony, child custody, adoption, foster care,
homestead laws, water rights, VA benefits, housing assistance, educational
loans, farm price supports, name changes, domestic violence laws, spousal
privilege for criminal witnesses, prison and hospital visitation,
conflict-of-interest rules, medical decisions, funeral decisions, condominium
laws, bankruptcy, child support, shared
property, prenuptial agreements, and wills and inheritance.
Real persecution is trying to ram new legislation down our throats
week after week, on abortion,
school vouchers, school prayer, intelligent design, putting the Commandments in
courtrooms, stem cell research, euthanasia, cloning, civil unions, HPV shots,
contraception, sex education, faith-based initiatives, banning books, and
assisted suicide. It’s forcing atheists to pretend to be Christians to get
elected into office. It’s hijacking the entire Republican party and forcing
their leaders, on pain of primary challenges, to do things they know are
morally reprehensible and destructive. It’s telling America that fear and hate
are cool.
Real persecution is the Baptist hardliners declaring war on the Boy Scouts
and closing troops because the Scouts don’t hate gays enough; it’s Westboro Baptists
protesting military funerals because the rest of the country has rejected their
homophobic delusions.
It’s trying to hang atheists in Bangladesh and jail them in
Kuwait; it’s oppression across the Muslim world; it’s Catholic rules on divorce
and contraception and abortion imposed on nonbelievers in Europe and Latin
America; it’s rabbis impeding the marriages and divorces of the non-Orthodox in
Israel; it’s riots and violence if Europeans draw a picture of Muhammad two
thousand miles away from the Muslim world.
The real persecution is coming from Team God, not from us.
But when we say happy holiday so that everyone can share in the
holiday season, or politely ask you to keep your Christian nonsense out of our
schools and legislatures and our hospitals, then we’re the tyrants, right?
The Jesus People in
Kansas have come up with a new wrinkle. They are fighting the teaching of
evolution in school, by claiming that it really means teaching the “religion of
atheism”. They are now implying that science is a religion which should be
banned from their schools, on first-amendment grounds. The state board of education
in Kansas, hardly a hotbed of godless radicals, is being sued by the God
freaks. Meanwhile, as we know, Catholics are trying to use a similar mechanism
to deny women contraception in hospitals, again resorting to the first
amendment.
Just absorb the
precedent they’re trying to establish here, and imagine a world in which they
are allowed to take that to its logical conclusion: any time a legislature or
school board does something the conservatives don’t like, they can try to slap
the “atheism” label on it, and get it banned on first-amendment grounds. It can
be anything, no matter how remotely disconnected to religion, requiring only a
claim that it’s in conflict with their reading of scripture, or even if it’s
just morally wrong in their eyes: “our beliefs tell me that welfare is wrong,
and allowing immigrants to become citizens is immoral” etc. “You can’t pass
that law because I say God doesn’t like it!” And then they can use the
separation of church and state to turn us into…Iran.
Anybody
who disagrees with you must be declaring “war” on you. War on traditional America, war on marriage,
war on Christmas….We’re not declaring war on you. We just want to take part in
the same things you already have. We can share marriage without hurting your
marriage, we can share the holidays without ruining your holiday…You’re
mistaking “war” for “disagreement”. Our stubborn insistence on living our lives
our way, and not yours. You believe that your
religious liberty includes the right to take our liberty away, and not just on
religion, on everything from law to education to medicine. Your religious
liberty is just that, liberty of religion – not liberty to do whatever you
like, in any area, and then force us to do the same, in any area.
So you don’t like being forced to play by the rules, when you
spill over the boundaries of the religious world and try to impose religion on
science and medicine and law? Be glad we’re not forcing you to pay your fair
share in taxes.
Keep your religion in church on Sunday, and stop annoying the rest
of us. It’s, you know, persecution. The real kind.
And by the way, screaming “censorship!” at anyone who disagrees
with you, is called….censorship.
