You didn't think they were going to stop at
The War on Christmas, did you?
Or
The War on Christians, or
The Attack on Marriage, or
The War on the Easter Bunny?
Now, the Christian right-wing has dragged out its old warhorse - The War on The Family - and, this time, the group in its gun-sights are the unmarried, as well as those who tarried just a bit too long before fulfilling their Biblical obligations to marry and reproduce.
Of course, The War on The Family was branded and packaged decades ago, and 30 years later, is getting a bit long in the tooth. Time for a infusion of fresh invective, a new crisis to fabricate, a new enemy to identify.
Here's what Albert Mohler president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminar (that means `bigwig' in Biblebanger-speak), says: The "deliberate putting off of marriage even among some who intend some day to be married" is "the sin that besets this generation."
Wow, singleness is a sin now, eh? But wait. Since this apparently turned out to be too much even for the Christian fundies, particularly the younger set, Mohler had to quickly backpedal, er, clarify himself, re-stating what he really meant: "Singleness is not a sin, but deliberate singleness on the part of those who know they have not been given the gift of celibacy is, at best, a neglect of a Christian responsibility."
Didya get that? First, singleness is a sin, but then it's not, then it's a neglecting of Christian responsibility - not that failing to fulfill your god-given responsibility would be a sin or anything.
And fundie-world has picked up the battle cry.
Their publishing wing has swung into action, cranking out books and articles and blogs on the evils of delayed marriage, which include a thrilling collage of fears and phobias (some articulated outright, others lurking just beneath the surface): sexual activity among the unmarried, later child-bearing leading to smaller families, a failure to out-reproduce non-Christian (dark-skinned, Muslim) people, and the possibility that women might actually enjoy professional careers and financial independence and thus be less amenable to the stay-at-home joys of submitting to their husbands and pumping out soldiers for Christ.
But, then again, perhaps this is a turning point for the Christian right. Notice that they're now turning on their own -- the "aggressors" of this new battle in The War on The Family (that is, the victims) are their own Christian youth, the ones who are obviously too selfish and immature to take up their matrimonial duties in sufficient haste for the church elders.
Now, you can read this one of two ways:
A) The fundies are so confident that they've won the Culture Wars that they're now free - as all post-revolutionaries - to turn their guns on their own folk.
B) They've realized they've lost the Culture Wars and there's nowhere left to turn their guns but on their own wayward, unmarried children.
The question is: which one is it?