By Brody Levesque (Washington DC) Dec 11 | As a young reporter during the Reagan years here in the United States, I bore witness [ pun very much intended ] to the rising influence of the self-labeled Evangelical Christian movement as it became an integral part of the politics & policies of the Republican Party. Led by so called super preachers like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, who decried what they viewed as an attack on American Families by the "evil" homosexuals and their supporters the evil abortion rights left. [ Aka: The Democrats ]
By the time Bill Clinton was sworn in as the 42nd President of the United States in 1992, the Christian Right as it had become known, was the bedrock of Republican Party ideology and belief. Towards the end of his presidency and especially during the time period of his impeachment trial, the Ultra-Christian right was so powerful as a potent political force, many individuals found themselves being labeled evil & immoral should they have the audacity to cross them, in particular Gay activists.
The "selection" of George W. Bush as the 43rd President of the United States and the ensuing eight years that he was in office, often backed at least initially in his term in office by a Republican majority on the hill in both houses of Congress, furthered the political and social agenda of the Ultra-Christian Right. After the events of September 11th, a new phrase was coined by opponents on the left and the LGBT activists, the "Christiban," a nod to the Islamic Taliban extremists.
What has happened over this nearly 28 year period from Ronald Reagan to George W. Bush, was that a small and quite powerful minority imposed their will via the ballot box to create social and moral imperatives that were modeled after their own particular and peculiar brand of Christianity. The problem for the average American was that they succeeded, hence an extremist view emerged, cloaked in the hypocrisy of organised religious doctrine that held one should 'Love Thy Neighbor As Thyself' save if you happened to be homosexual or an abortion rights supporter.
Now, there are so many heads to this mythological beast come to life. There is Focus on The Family, Americans for Christian Values, etc, the list goes on. All of whom are quick to point out that one should love the sinner but hate the sin. The problem is that is not how it works in reality at all. Most of vitriolic diatribe spewing forth would fit, any reasonably intelligent person's definition, of hate speech. These groups will twist the "Holy Scripture" and "define" it in such a way as to make the interpretations way beyond the true content and context of the original text. Of course, even serious theological and biblical scholars will point out that the translations from the ancient Aramaic and Greek that the good book was originally written in, to English or other modern languages have contextual and definition issues to begin with.
What is probably the worst aspect of all of this is that the Christian Right have made their fellow LGBT Americans the "Bogeyman" and have blamed the ills of American society on the breakdown of "Family" values and of course look no further than the LGBT community as the leading cause.
Then there's this terrible reality, the "Christiban" influence has spread to other nations, in particular sub-Saharan Africa, where for the past month, there has been extensive media attention paid to a rather onerous piece of legislation being considered in the Ugandan Parliament, that at the least, would have provided for capital punishment for a person being convicted of homosexuality and HIV positive. One of the principal influences has been California based "Super-Pastor" Rick Warren who essentially said that he supported his fellow Christians in Uganda and did not address this bill until a massive campaign on the Internet and in the traditional media forced his hand.
This so-called Christian pastor is the successor to Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson by virtue of his influence over Republican lawmakers at all levels of government, local, state, and federal. He's also made it abundantly clear that his opinion is that homosexuality is a "behaviour" a "choice," and based on other public pronouncements he's made, against Christian belief.
Fortunately, Warren's detractors have included a prominent journalist and commentator, Rachel Maddow, whose MSNBC coverage along with a focused group of Bloggers and others forced Warren to admit that this bill was evil.
Here is what I see as a larger issue and problem. Even though he has backed off in this instance, Uganda truly is only an opening shot in the war Warren's declared on the LGBT community for harsher forms of treatment. While he publicly and politically cannot state that he endorses this type of thinking, the problem is that his silence and whatever he espouses in private, have shown him to be a proponent of this type of hate speech.
His politics, not unlike the rest of the "Christiban," prove that having a secular nation is an absolute necessity as apparently, not unlike his Islamic counterparts, especially the Mullahs in Iran, I guess stringing a few homosexuals up to die is okay by him. Thankfully, U. S. Constitutional protections prevent that.
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The thing that has surprised me, and perhaps it ought not to have, is the gullibility of the populace. I find it hard to believe that people are so easily swayed by rogues and charlatans, and yet I see that they are.
In the 1930s there was a rather poor Austrian artist who had not had a pleasant time in the 1914-18 war, and who started to blame everything ion The Jews. And, because Judaism is substantially different in so many things from good, clean, moral Christianity (I use the adjectives loosely) it was easy to see The Jews and to blame them. As a generalisation they tended to have a good head for business, so tended to be in senior positions. Like The Bankers of the current financial disaster they were easy to blame.
Today the bogeyman is the homosexual. We're harder to spot, but we're a minority with as little real hope of defending ourselves as The Jews in The 1930s (I am capitalising for effect).
We may be harder to spot, but we do self identify. Look at the Twitterati regarding the Uganda bill. I have a string suspicion that 90% of those who are aghast are not classically heterosexual. Same with so many of those referring to Rick Warren. So Warren and others have a database now of those whose "lifestyle" they are against.
And he and others can inflame their sheep-like followers into doing pretty much what they want. How lucky they failed to prevent Obama's election as President of the USA. So what if a splinter group goes off on a Ku Klux Klan style planting of burning crosses and lynchings?
He would never support that either, now would he? Nor would any decent person. In the same way that no decent person ever supported that when blacks were being lynched.
But why do there have to be victims? What is it that these Holier Than Thou people get out of their identification and victimisation of homosexuals?
You're the journalist, Brody. There's something here for you, if you care to run with it. I'm looking forward to seeing you guest on Rachel Maddow's show and on Bill Maher's
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