The Christian Right’s Persecution Delusion

Believe it or not, the recent threat against my life has reinvigorated my desire to blog. I poked around on the WordPress forums to see if there was a procedure to deal with this sort of thing and I guess you’re not really “somebody” in the blogosphere until you’ve received death threats on your blog. So I guess this means I’ve finally made it! I’d better keep blogging so as not to disappoint all the people from New Jersey who claim they’re going to come to Montana to kill me.

One group of people at whom I roll my eyes even more than little kids who think they’re going to intimidate Marxist bloggers are Evangelical Christians who have the delusion that they’re being persecuted for their beliefs. Over at one of my favorite Montana blogs, 4&20 Blackbirds, there is a great discussion going on about the latest antics of one of these dorks, Senator Shockley, and his latest masterpiece of legislation which “basically…makes sure the protester isn’t harrassed by the persons entering the clinic” (obviously a clinic that performs services which religious wingnuts would want to protest, namely, abortions).

Besides the obvious logical response this raises — that if you set out to harass people, you deserve to be harassed yourself — I have to ask the question: who exactly are these poor mistreated abortion protesters who are being harassed and intimidated by women seeking abortions? Are there really a lot of women who just walked out of the clinic after having an abortion that go on a rampage?

Or is it just these fundamentalist Christian lunatics trying to justify their fantasy that they are persecuted for their beliefs by getting legislation on the books that would make the state government apparently agree with that delusion?

I have no problem with people having their right to demonstrate protected but it honestly makes me sick, as communist and an atheist, to hear these crybabies going on and on. I’ve said this before but I’ll just make a few comparisons here. Christian fundamentalists routinely get their type elected to government all the way up to and including the President of the United States. They have powerful lobbies that get legislation passed to push their extremist morals onto everyone else. Now, when was the last time a Communist Party member was elected to a national office? You know what we get? Thrown in jail. Look up the Smith Act. Go on Wikipedia and read the biography of Gus Hall. Last I checked no one has ever done 5 years in prison for being an evangelical Christian. I’ve never heard of states outlawing fundamentalist Christian churches or passing legislation saying that Christians can’t be public employees. Yet these things have happened, and in some cases continue to happen to communists.

This persecution delusion is so ridiculous. But the truth is that it’s a wondeful motivational tactic. The minions of these millionaire preachers get whipped into a fervor, thinking that their backs are against the wall and that they have to fight to save their way of life from an imaginary enemy, when the truth of the matter is that they are one of the most powerful and frightening movements in the United States today. Persecution? More like persecutors.

Hangnails are people too!

I was doing my obligatory blog-reading today and saw a link over at Left in the West that caught my attention. Apparently one of our state’s more prominent wingnuts, State Rep Rick Jore from the splendid town of Ronan, is proposing a ballot initiative that would amend the state constitution to define a fetus as a human being from virtually the moment of conception. Or, as it specifically states, “at all stages of human development or life, including the state of fertilization.”

The obvious intent here is to make abortion illegal. But I think that, logically, if we’re going to go through with this, we should also make the biting of hangnails illegal.

Let me explain myself. As a devout atheist I realize that a two-celled zygote has no more of a soul or spirit or consciousness than a little flap of skin hanging off my finger. Really, the two of them are pretty much the same thing in my book. So when I’m sitting in class and that little hangnail is just driving me crazy, and I bite the thing off and spit it out, that’s no different, in my opinion, than an early-term abortion.

And what about miscarriages? If abortion is murder, because a couple cells become a human at the point of fertilization, wouldn’t having a miscarriage be something on the order of letting your kid fall into a pool and drown? I guess according to good ol’ Ricky, you would become a parent at the time of conception, and any woman who has a miscarriage is a really bad mother, and possibly guilty of criminal neglect!

I am in no way, shape, or form anti-child. I am the father of a beautiful little girl and I wouldn’t trade her for the world. If I had to go back and do it again, I wouldn’t change that fact. But that’s my choice (and, ultimately, my wife’s choice in the end as it is her body in question), and others might make a different choice in different circumstances. But I do know one thing. This is not a human being:

Unless you’ve been beaten over the head with a bible enough to believe that God has bestowed a spirit upon those four little cells pictured above, you should understand how dumb this whole thing is.