Yesterday, American Family Radio morning host Sandy Rios let it be known she's none too pleased about those who dare to speak out against her. In her eyes, anyone who does so is really attacking God--and will have to answer for it in heaven. People for the American Way got a clip.
Don’t you guys understand – those of you listening, who are listening to me because you think you’re my enemy – you’re really an enemy of God? Don’t you understand who you’re up against? You think you are actually going to hurt my feelings by those comments? You’re not hurting my feelings. You make me worry about you because you don’t understand who God is and you don’t understand His righteousness and you don’t understand that you’re condemning yourselves with that stuff. So I worry for you, I don’t worry for me, I’m not afraid of death.
This removes any doubt about where Rios' moral compass is. For those who missed it, while she was on vacation earlier this month, ultraconservative Catholic activist Austin Ruse filled in for her and declared that to his mind, left-wing academics needed to be "taken out and shot." Incredibly, on her first day back, Rios claimed that Ruse was actually
speaking "words of life." So let me get this straight, Sandy. When we call you out for even attempting to parse what any halfway decent person would consider to be wholly unacceptable remarks, we're enemies of God?
I know the pitch of this dog whistle. As many of you know, I was deceived into joining a campus ministry in my freshman year at Carolina that was aligned with one of the more notorious affiliates of the New Apostolic Reformation. I left that chamber of horrors in my second semester, and when I started speaking out against them, their most common response wasn't that I was wrong. No, no--I had no right to speak out against them, and if I didn't have anything positive to say I shouldn't say anything at all. I can't even count the times I was told "be careful what you say," "someday God's gonna shut your mouth" or words along those lines. This coming from a group that at the very least condoned outright lying about its true nature in order to get people to join, hounding people about getting saved. And yet, their sense of good and evil was so badly warped that when I spoke out against them, and even went to the lengths of pretending to have become one of them again to get evidence of what they were doing, they thought I sold them out.
Let's not sugarcoat this, folks--this kind of mentality is fascist, plain and simple. And if saying that makes me an enemy of God, then I really don't mind--this loud-and-proud charismatic Christian Dem fired that God a long time ago.