When Barack Obama dove into the Ground Zero Mosque Debate, he expressed a fundamental American tenet: to be kind and tolerant of everyone. Of course, he qualified his statement by implying that he didn't necessarily agree with the wisdom of building an Islamic cultural center just blocks away from New York's infamous site, but the sentiment threw the Christian Right into a near-violent tantrum of Islamophobia. Bryan Fischer of the American Family Association pre-empted Obama's statement by saying that absolutely no mosques should be built at all:
"Permits should not be granted to build even one more mosque in the United States of America, let alone the monstrosity planned for Ground Zero," Bryan Fischer of the American Family Association wrote this week on the AFA website. "This is for one simple reason: each Islamic mosque is dedicated to the overthrow of the American government."
That's what you get when you elect a man named Barack Hussein Obama about whom you know nothing other than the fawning, worshipful puke served up by the liberal media all through the campaign and for most of his first year and a half in office.
The rhetoric of the Christian Right is getting dangerously vitriolic. Forget the calls for the death of Obama: these were considered to be the squeakings of church mice like James Manning and Wiley Drake (and Pat Robertson's edicts have been on the wane for the last decade). No, the Lou Engles and covert Reconstructionists don't put their faith in imprecatory prayers, but instead focus their prayers (sung by rock bands) on a Christian-only nation ridding its country of perceived enemies whether they be Muslims, gays, atheists, feminists ... o.k., it's a rather long list.
Bryan Fischer's pronouncements - that we should deport all Muslims, that gays are a threat to the entire country, that Christians are commanded by God to be "good" but not necessarily "nice" - are foolhardy statements that nonetheless reflect the inner core of today's extreme Christian Right. If people distance themselves from Fischer, it's only because they don't want their true agenda to be known just yet. Sound like a conspiracy theory? Maybe, but even the most far-out theories can have a grain of truth in them.
Today, more and more people are taking on the titles of "theocrat" or "Reconstructionist" with only a slight brush to the side: i.e., they don't take as much offense at those labels as they used to. Yes, I've read The American Spectator article on the misuse of the term "Reconstructionist," but I still think that Sharron Angle is a Reconstructionist ....disguised as a complete ditz.
Love The Sinner
Most of the CR believe that if you repeat the "Love the Sinner, Hate the Sin" slogan a certain number of times, anyone will believe your intentions are good. The LSHS ideology has been around a long time: it's good PR. But they also know that only a miniscule portion of their adherents believe it, much less practice it. LSHS grates against human nature: which one of us loves the person who stole our food? our shelter? our clothing?
Pat Robertson, The 700 Club television program, January 14, 1991:
You say you're supposed to be nice to the Episcopalians and the Presbyterians and the Methodists and this, that, and the other thing. Nonsense. I don't have to be nice to the spirit of the Antichrist. I can love the people who hold false opinions but I don't have to be nice to them.
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