Christianist Sharia Law has come to America

Alabama Senate OK's church police bill

The Alabama Senate has voted to allow a church to form its own police force.

Lawmakers on Tuesday voted 24-4 to allow Briarwood Presbyterian Church in Birmingham to establish a law enforcement department.

The church says it needs its own police officers to keep its school as well as its more than 4,000 person congregation safe.

Critics of the bill argue that a police department that reports to church officials could be used to cover up crimes.

The state has given a few private universities the authority to have a police force, but never a church or non-school entity.

Police experts have said such a police department would be unprecedented in the U.S.

A similar bill is also scheduled to be debated in the House on Tuesday.

Gay 'Agenda' Not Even Close When It Comes to Religious Persecution

Religious extremist Bryan Fischer is like the professional anti-Semite whose entire existence is built around hating someone and then appealing to other haters in order to pay his salary. Fischer just hates gays instead -- though I often find anti-gay bigotry is often coupled with racism and anti-Semitism, with more than a dash of xenophobia.

Fischer, on his Two Minutes of Hate [note: satire] show, claimed "I firmly believe the homosexual agenda represents the greatest single threat to religious liberty we have EVER seen in the history of our existence as a nation."

It might be useful to remember what other threats to religious liberty have actually existed in the "history of our existence as a nation."

The Puritans fled to America, not because they weren't religiously free but because they felt they should be so "free" that they could impose their ultra piety on others by force. As the Puritan leader Richard Mather put it, they sought the freedom "to censure those who ought to be censured." By that, they meant Catholics, Quakers, Baptists and other Christians.

Rev. James Mayhew complained that the evil King of England had allowed sports on the Sabbath and "encouraged papists and popishly effected clergymen" instead of repressing them as the Puritans required.

The British monarch dared tell Puritans to stop killing Quakers. Puritans saw this as an infringement of their religious liberty, much as fundamentalists today believe that not being able to impose their beliefs on everyone is a violation of their (italics) religious liberty.

Anne Hutchinson started a Bible study, but the Puritans told her it was immoral for a woman to teach the Bible. She was imprisoned for her offense and the trauma caused her to miscarry -- something which the Puritans found delightful. She was banished from the colony as well.

The Religious Right’s Campaign to Strip All Citizens of Religious Freedom

Turn on any cable news show and you’ll hear conservatives, particularly from the Religious Right, giving long tirades about religious freedom and how the Left is seeking to strip it away from good God-fearing Americans. But if you watch how the Religious Right works in court, you know that it’s actually the other way around.

Religious freedom has been a strongly-held belief in America since the very beginning. All three branches of government have worked hard to preserve the rights of Americans to choose for themselves whether they wished to be Protestant, Jewish, Catholic, or an atheist. It’s a fundamental part of the system that our country built itself on: the right to believe as you will, and to change your mind about it.

Legislative bodies and the courts have centered those rights around the individual—allowing the individual to choose for themselves how they would or would not believe in a god, rather than imbuing an institution with the right to choose for them.

But how is this actually playing out in the courts and in the legislatures?If you were to believe the talking points of conservative punditryland, you might think that the right to believe (or not) as you will is under attack from the Left, and that no-good liberals (particular the gays) are trying to force Americans to accept their wicked ways and deny those good God-fearing citizens their right to worship in peace.

Hobby Lobby

In the Sebelius v. Hobby Lobby case before the U.S. Supreme Court right now, the owners of the private for-profit corporation Hobby Lobby chain are seeking an exemption from a provision within the Affordable Care Act that requires that the health insurance their employees receive include coverage for birth control methods such as morning after pills and IUDs. Hobby Lobby’s owners, the Green family (who happen to be evangelical Christians) say that they consider such birth control methods to be abortifacients—despite the medical and scientific community pointing out that they are not—and as such their company should be exempted from the Affordable Care Act because providing their employees with insurance coverage for such methods is a violation of their religious freedom.

Claiming My Religious Right

In the days of my youth, I knew little of the meanings of terms such as the "religious right" and the "liberal left." I was taught to believe in a loving God, and I have begun to understand that this is the greatest fortune of my birth.

I was raised by parents who believed in a loving God. The religious right that is the subject of this blog is not the religious right that comes to mind to classify a particular brand of faith—what I am speaking of is my right to believe in a loving God.

It is a right that was stolen from me, but it is a right I have claimed once again.

I don't believe that is in my prerogative to force my religious beliefs on another, nor is it a requirement for anyone to embrace the spiritual nature of the universe. I also do not believe that the Creator of the universe would require someone to believe before they are worthy of unconditional love—adding the requirement of believing in God in order to qualify for unconditional love kind of negates the unconditional part. It is my right to believe in unconditional love.

Yet why is it that we are so eager to put conditions on God's unconditional love? You have to be straight. You can't be transgender. You have to be Christian. You have to believe. No, none of these things.

All that is required to receive God's love is to be, and if God loves you as you are, so should I.

During the first 30 years of my adult life, I came to believe in a God with whom I found no favor because I was transgender. "Just don't be that way"—this is the message of a dark religiousness, as though that idea never occurred to me. There is the reality of the tens of thousands of prayers I sent to God, asking to be fixed. Begging to be made right. Praying to be made whole.

If God created any of us, then God created me too. If God created me as a transgender human being, who is anyone to tell me that God didn’t do that? The question of dark religiousness is “Do you think God made a mistake?” My response is, "No, I don’t. Do you?"

Virginia Marriage Equality Decision Exposes Religious Right’s Hatred of America

We predicted it yesterday: Religious Right leaders would say in response to the Virginia marriage equality ruling that more rights somehow equals fewer rights, and Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council (FRC) did not disappoint. It was Valentine’s Day so Perkins sent his love to Judge Arena L. Wright Allen, calling her, among other things, “arrogant” and an “activist judge” (that’s what Jesus said to do to your enemies, right? Lay some hate on ‘em?):

It appears that we have yet another example of an arrogant judge substituting her personal preferences for the judgment of the General Assembly and 57 percent of Virginia voters. Our nation’s judicial system has been infected by activist judges, which threaten the stability of our nation and the rule of law.

Actually, Judge Wright Allen substituted the Constitution for the judgment of 57 percent of Virginia voters. The Founding Fathers feared this – the tyranny of the majority – and wrote the Constitution to account for such “excesses of democracy” as they were called. As they knew – and as Judge Wright Allen knows, a majority doesn’t trump the law of the land, but they can trump right and wrong if the law does not protect the interests of the minority as well as the majority.

In the words of James Madison:

The lesson we are to draw from the whole is, that where a majority are united by a common sentiment, and have an opportunity, the rights of the minor party become insecure. In a republican government, the majority, if united, have always an opportunity. The only remedy is, to enlarge the sphere, and thereby divide the community into so great a number of interests and parties, that, in the first place, a majority will not be likely, at the same moment, to have a common interest separate from that of the whole, or of the minority; and in the second place, that in case they should have such an interest, they may not be so apt to unite in the pursuit of it. It was incumbent on us, then, to try this remedy, and, with that view, to frame a republican system on such a scale, and in such a form, as will control all the evils which have been experienced.

Sandy Rios To Gays and Liberals: 'God Will Even The Score'

LGBT people and their allies have scored decisive and historic victories in recent months, both here in the United States as well as around the globe. Such rapid progress is almost certain to prompt a verbal backlash by opponents of equality. However, one recent comment made by ultra-conservative and vocally-homophobic radio host Sandy Rios proved to be a bit more ominous than usual:

"I would not want to be in the shoes of any of the left right now. I would not want to be in Barack Obama’s shoes. I would not want to be in the shoes of homosexual activists. I say that with humility and with fear for them because God will even the score, he will sort things out, he will be God and he will not be mocked. Whereas they think they are getting away with breaking all kinds of moral laws and mocking everyone in the process, they just don’t know God, they don’t know who they are up against and we do. And that should bring out some mercy in us because I wouldn’t want to be—what did that old evangelist say: ‘it’s a fearful thing to fall into the hands of an angry God.’"

Thankfully, Rios' diatribe does not appear to be a veiled threat that references any specific retribution that should come from this so-called "angry God". Nevertheless, these comments come as part of a trend of especially violent comments that Rios has been making as of late. She has also recently expressed her support of the massacres taking place in Egypt, saying that she was "grateful" and claiming that the more than 600 victims were not "innocent". She also expressed an opinion that Muslim-Americans do not deserve to be protected by the First Amendment.

It's Sad!

Tweets of the Day

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