Oh noes! ChristianToday.com reports that Louisiana lawmakers failed to pass a law that ostensibly would have protected churches and pastors from the non-existent threat of being forced to perform gay marriages against their will. Now the only thing protecting conservative Christians in Louisiana are the First Amendment, a number of federal laws that already protect religious liberty, and a couple centuries or so of legal precedent.
Eek.
CNSNews.com is reporting that a well-known actress is experience significant persecution ever since her latest film came out. Or at least, I think they’re reporting that. The headline very clearly states:
Melissa Joan Hart: ‘I’m Getting Grief for Playing the Good Christian Woman Who is Persecuted!’
Somehow, though, the article itself completely fails to mention any persecution actually being inflicted. In fact, it looks like carelessly dashed-off marketing material for the film. But I wonder how that ad copy would sound if we made just one small change in the premises?
Here’s a mini mystery for you this fine Tuesday morning.
BLACKS: This is wrong. We’re being singled out by the police, harassed, beaten, even murdered. And the murderers are getting away with it. #BlackLivesMatter!
GUESS WHO: (*shrug*) Ah, quit whining, #AllLivesMatter.
PALESTINIANS: We need help! Israelis are bulldozing our homes, occupying our land, and murdering our children, and getting away with it. #PalestinianLivesMatter!
GUESS WHO: (*shrug*) Ah, quit whining. You probably deserve it. In fact, let’s take literally billions of US taxpayer dollars and give it to Israel, no strings attached.
STARBUCKS: This holiday season, we’ll be serving coffee in red cups.
GUESS WHO: Will they say “Merry Christmas”?
STARBUCKS: No, they won’t say anything.
GUESS WHO: Oh you evil people! How dare you subject us to such horrific persecution? Have you no decency? We won’t stand for it! It’s an absolute outrage! (Etc., etc., etc…)
Need a hint? Hmm, maybe not.
(Note: any similarity between GUESS WHO and any person(s) now living or dead is entirely their own fault.)
Here’s an interesting meme floating around Facebook right now. It’s a quote from 1902 by William Booth, the founder of the Salvation Army.
The chief dangers which confront the coming century will be religion without the Holy Ghost, Christianity without Christ, forgiveness without repentance, salvation without regeneration, politics without God, and heaven without hell.
The accompanying comments say “It’s a sobering word with warning still relevant for today” and “Was he accurate or what?”
Yeah, if it’s one thing the world saw in the 1900’s, it was politics without God and heaven without hell. Ironically, this was posted by “Church of God,” and while I’m not sure which Church of God, there’s a major Pentecostal denomination by that name. That’s “Pentecostal” as in the “Spirit-filled” Pentecostal revival that began about two decades after Booth warned about the rise of “religion without the Holy Ghost.” And Christianity without Christ? Really?
He did get one thing right. There is no salvation without regeneration. Of course, there’s no salvation with regeneration either, since regeneration is as big a myth as the hell we’re supposed to be saved from and the savior who’s supposed to do it. But oh well.
According to an article on christianexaminer.com, Billy Graham’s son Franklin is eagerly jumping on the bandwagon of conservatives denouncing Obama for bringing up church history and reminding us that not all Muslims are terrorists.
Franklin Graham said former New York City Mayor Rudy Guiliani “has taken a lot of heat” for questioning whether President Obama loves America, and declined to weigh in on whether it was “true or not.” But Graham said what he did know is “the president defends Islam and chastises Christians, rebukes our allies and befriends our enemies, and fully supports gay marriages and abortion but denies the religious freedoms of those who don’t agree.”
Got to love that bit about not passing judgment on whether it’s really true or not. Who cares about truth when there’s rabble to rouse, eh Frankie?
WTAE News reports that a federal appeals court has rejected lower court rulings that granted Christian organizations a right to meddle in their employees’ personal medical coverage.
A federal appeals court has reversed lower-court victories by two western Pennsylvania Catholic dioceses and a private Christian college that challenged birth control coverage mandates as part of federal health care reforms.
The 3-0 ruling Wednesday by the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals panel found that the reforms place “no substantial burden” on the religious groups and therefore don’t violate their First Amendment right to religious expression.
The organizations in question had argued that their religious convictions required them to deny their employees coverage for birth control or abortions. The law, however, allows them to opt out of the mandate to provide such coverage, in which case someone else would provide it. That didn’t satisfy the Christian organizations, however, because they wanted the power to ensure that nobody could provide their employees with coverage that was inconsistent with the organizations’ religious principles. In essence, they asserted that their religious freedom gave them the right to meddle in their employees’ private, personal medical care. Fortunately, the appeals court didn’t buy it.
According to usnews.com, presidential hopeful Mike Huckabee is trying out some new(-ish) ways to spin gay marriage into something Republicans can exploit without shooting themselves in what remains of their bullet-riddled feet.
Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee on Sunday said being gay is akin to choosing to drink alcohol or use profanity — lifestyle choices he says are appealing to others but not to him.
The former Baptist pastor, who is weighing a second run for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination, also claimed that forcing people of faith to accept gay marriage as policy is on par with telling Jews that they must serve “bacon-wrapped shrimp in their deli.” That dish would run afoul of kosher rules in the same way Huckabee sees asking Christians to accept same-sex marriages.
Ooo, so close, but he fumbles on the one yard line.
Subtlety has never been a strong suit in America’s Christian supremacists, but you have to admire the feckless honesty of this guy:
Perhaps at no other time in America’s history has religious freedom suffered under such a sustained assault as today. And by “religious freedom,” I mean Christianity.
That’s it in a nut-case, er, -shell, isn’t it?
The Right Side News (“The Right News for Americans”) has a couple of questions, and three answers.
Why are Christians, as a new Pew report documents, the most persecuted religious group in the world? And why is their persecution occurring primarily throughout the Islamic world?
No, none of the three answers is “Because the Pew report went out of their way to make it look like Christians are more persecuted than they really are.” But there’s some interesting stuff in the answers Right Side News did publish.
State Representative Rebecca Hamilton (OK) reports an alarming statistic:
According to the Center for the Study of Global Christianity, one hundred thousand Christians have died for their faith each year in the last decade. That works out to 11 Christians martyred for their faith every hour for the past ten years.
Can you imagine the outcry if this was one the groups that fashion says we should care about? Just consider the sentence 100,000 _______ were murdered because of they were ______ each year for the past ten years. Supply the name of any group whose rights we hear daily that we are supposed to care about.
Right, nobody cares when Christians get murdered, except of course for hundreds of millions who do care, and especially all those liberals who are clamoring for an end to all religious persecution regardless of who the victim is. Sheesh. But what about that statistic? 100,000 Christians murdered for their faith every year for the past 10 years? One new Christian martyr every five minutes? The recent church bombing in Pakistan killed about 80-some Christians, and that was big news because 80 seems like (and is) a lot. One million murdered Christians, just since 2003, seems a bit high.