"Sincerely held religious beliefs"

 For years, it’s really bothered me how conservative Evangelicals keep pushing for the legal right to discriminate against LGBTQ people based on their “sincerely held religious beliefs”. I just now figured out how to articulate why that grinds on me so much:

It's my sincerely held belief that Jesus of Nazareth, an impoverished Middle Eastern man famous for saying “Blessed are the peacemakers”, would have a problem with me contributing a hefty percentage of my income to bombing impoverished Middle Eastern men (which is what over half my tax dollars get spent on) – but if I decide as a result that I’m not going to pay my taxes, I can expect to go to jail.

It’s my sincerely held belief that if Jesus was walking the earth right now, he would break down the door of Joel Osteen’s “church”, flip all the tables, and start beating the smarmy bastard’s ass with a whip – but if I do the same, I can expect to go to jail.

It’s my sincerely held belief that the God portrayed in the Old Testament commanded that the community should stone adulterers to death – but if I start hurling rocks at Donald Trump, I can expect to go to jail.

It’s my sincerely held belief that Jesus was crucified because he wouldn’t stop haranguing the Religious Right of his day and calling out their hypocrisy. But if I storm into Congress and start screaming “Woe unto thee, Republicans and Democrats*, hypocrites!”, I can expect to go to jail.

It's my sincerely held belief that Jesus would want people to bring food and water to those who lack them – but Christians in this country actually HAVE gone to jail for giving food and water to starving, dehydrated people who were crossing the Mexican border.

Just because I have a sincerely held religious belief, doesn’t mean I get to be exempt from the law.

Why should Evangelicals be treated any different?

 

*(Also, if you don’t think the Democrats are ALSO religious and right-wing, you haven’t been paying attention. They’re just a little less extreme than the Republicans. They’re the Pharisees to the Republicans’ Sadducees, if you will.)

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Baby in the bathwater?

Image
A Christian minister asked a Christian president, who was elected by Christians for Christian reasons, to behave in accordance with Christian principles. And yet, the majority of the country's Christians are mad about it. And despite that, the rest of the nation's Christians continue to insist that there's a "real" Christianity that somehow the majority of Christians are failing to practice despite the fact that those Christians make their whole personality about how Christian they are. The decent humans that still adhere to Christianity - who are very much the minority of Christians - continue to believe that Christianity has an actual moral core and a message that can make its adherents behave in a more moral way. They continue to tell me that there's a baby I've thrown out with the bathwater by rejecting Christianity in its entirety.  And I get it. I used to think the same, for decades. I would "no true Scotsman" every Christian who behaved im...
Read more

On Kilmar Abrego Garcia, Evangelical Republicans, and Judas Iscariot

Earlier today, I posted this on Facebook: "Tonight, for Maundy Thursday, Christians all over the world will commemorate a time when an innocent man who had done nothing more than criticize people in power was imprisoned and ultimately executed without due process, due in large part to a mob of religious people demanding his destruction and claiming he was a danger to the rule of the emperor. And 80 percent of American Evangelicals will never, EVER realize that they are the Judas in this story." But on further reflection, I realized that this was unnecessarily harsh and insulting. ... ...to Judas. After all, Judas realized almost immediately that he had done something monstrous, something unforgiveable, and felt such remorse at the enormity of his betrayal that he could no longer live with himself. But Evangelical Republicans lack the moral clarity of JUDAS FUCKING ISCARIOT. No, they're something far worse. They're the crowd chanting "Crucify him!" and "...
Read more

A matter of principle

Ever since November of 2016, the question has haunted me: How did the conservative Evangelicals I grew up with so thoroughly lose their principles? And the correct answer is: They never had principles.  But for once, I don't intend that as an insult. I mean this as a distinction between two different ways of looking at morality. Evangelicals never had principles; they had RULES. Because that's how their churches train them to think. They (along with the Catholics, who have fallen into the same error) are religious fundamentalists. They don't treat morality as a set of flexible guidelines that can and should change over time; they treat morality as a set of rules that are "the same yesterday, today, and forever". If the Bible said it in 2000 BCE, then it's still binding 4 millennia later (except if there's another rule that negates it, such as the "no bacon" thing being negated by Peter's vision in Acts).  But there wasn't a "That wa...
Read more