Religion’s greatest trick isn’t that it wormed it’s way into the legal code of the US despite constitutional prohibitions, it is that it convinced people it was out of bounds to criticize the faithful for their beliefs. If I say hateful things, I am subject to censure. But if I intimate that my God believes hateful things and I’m just going along with it, then you must respect my beliefs.
Karen Pence, the Vice-President’s wife, played this dismal card during an interview with Brian Kilmeade on Fox, saying:
“I think in our country we need to understand you shouldn’t be attacked for what your religious beliefs are and I think kids need to learn that at a young age that this is okay no matter what faith people have, we don’t attack them for their faith,”
The normally secretive Mrs Pence was moved to say this in response to comments made by Pete Buttigieg about her husband’s bigoted behavior — especially his promotion of anti-LGBTQ legislation as Governor of Indiana.
Karen Pence added,
“I think it’s helping Pete to get some notoriety by saying that about the Vice President. But again, it just goes back to this religious liberty.”
No it doesn’t. It goes back to the belief you can make certain people second-class citizens because your God tells you it’s all right to do so. Slavery was justified by the Bible. And the pro-bondage crowd used the same biblical sophistry to justify their inhumanity.
Conservative Evangelical Americans add hypocrisy to their bigotry. For all their talk of religious freedom the only religion that ever makes the freedom list is their brand of intolerance. In the evangelical creed Muslims be damned, the Mormons can take a hike, and the Pope is nothing more than a mealy-mouthed secular socialist in a dress.
Only the Jews enjoy some protections and that is merely because Evangelicals need them to reclaim their biblical lands so that the End of Times can get going. And then in Evangelical eschatology the Jews go to hell. How detestably cynical.
A religion’s rules should only apply to the practitioners of that religion. If you believe that gay marriage is a sin then don’t get gay married. If you believe that gay sex is immoral don’t have any. But don’t tell others what to do.
If you are a baker, then sell wedding cakes to whoever wants one. And if your defense takes the form of ‘that means Jewish bakers will have to sell cakes with neo-Nazi messages on them’ it is an irrelevant. These kind of messages are hate speech and nobody has to propagate them.
And then there’s Mike Huckabee’s silliness. He claimed that asking Christians to sell wedding cakes for same-sex marriages is like “asking somebody who’s Jewish to start serving bacon-wrapped shrimp in their deli.” No, it isn’t. Nobody can be forced to sell something they don’t want to — they just can’t pick and choose who they sell to.
It gets worse.
Evangelicals have such a perverse and distorted view of homosexuality that the kids of holy-roller parents often lead lives of depression and desperation — sometimes leading to ‘reparative therapy’. In this psychological torture, disguised as a mental health treatment, people are convinced that they can change their sexuality. Call it mental snake oil.
Mike Pence was a huge fan of the procedure.
So Karen, if you religion encourages hate, the marginalization of people for an inherent and unalterable trait, and the abuse of teens, then people not only have a right to attack your faith — they have a civic duty to.