“What do you think the Devil is going to look like if he’s around? Nobody is going to be taken in if he has a long, red, pointy tail. … He will look attractive and he will be nice and helpful and he will get a job where he influences a great God-fearing nation and he will never do an evil thing.”
– James L. Brooks, Broadcast News
From the 1977 Anita Bryant crusade against gay people to this latest assault on the rights of consenting adults, the Christian Taliban never gets tired of sticking their nose into their neighbor’s business. Most recently, it’s #SISEA and the PornHub purge along with the #VisaVictims and #MasterCensors crackdown. And just so I’m clear: revenge porn is horrific and should not be enabled. And child porn should be rooted out like cancer, with the perpetrators brought to proper justice.
The difference is, religious groups use revenge and child porn as an excuse to try to censor all adult content.
Most religious zealots are so smugly confident in their crusade, they don’t care who they hurt. They don’t even consider it. They believe that they know God’s mind better than anyone, and that it is their “sacred” duty to impose their values on others. So many of them are flaming hypocrites. While this has been the case for centuries, over the last forty years the media has shone a light on these holier-than-thou frauds.
While some of the following examples go back to the 1980s, they were sensational scandals that underscored the hypocrisy and the dangers that these leaders pose to the common good.
Pastor Steven Anderson in Tempe, AZ, is a relatively recent case of religious mania gone very wrong. Anderson equated gay people with murderers stating, “The biggest hypocrite in the world is the person who believes in the death penalty for murderers and not for homosexuals.” He went on to vilify gay people as child molesters: “The sodomites are recruiters and you know who they are after? Your children!” He later preached a sermon entitled, “God Hates Barack Obama.”
Ted Haggard was the pastor of the New Life Church in Colorado Springs, CO with 14,000 members—a Christian leader who used the bible to condemn homosexuality. In 2006 he resigned from his church leadership positions after a massive scandal involving homosexual prostitutes and methamphetamine use. He initially denied all of it but as a media investigation proceeded, he finally came out as gay.
This kind of hypocrisy is hardly anything new. In 1987, televangelist Jim Bakker was forced to resign over a sex scandal with church secretary Jessica Hahn. Soon after, Reverend Jimmy Swaggart was photographed in a motel with a prostitute and suspended from his ministry. Amusingly enough, during Bakker’s scandal, Swaggart appeared on Larry King Live and stated that Bakker was a “cancer in the body of Christ.” Both of these men preached against LGBTs.
However, nothing quite takes the fruitcake like the Westboro Baptist Church, whose leader Fred Phelps hosts websites GodHatesFags.com and GodHatesAmerica.com. They have a national reputation for picketing public events and funerals, often those related or peripherally related to gay people or soldiers in the military. They praised the 9/11 attacks on the United States and praised the existence of AIDS.
What is particularly troubling for America is when religious assholes meddle in politics. The Anita Bryant anti-gay crusade was the turning point in a whole new era of theocracy. Back then, televangelist Jerry Falwell gained unprecedented power by helping organize conservative Christians into a powerful voting bloc. This launched the “family values” crusade of the Republican Party bent on oppressing LGBTs and women.
Thirty years later this bloc still evidenced power when an organized effort between the Mormon and Catholic churches helped pass Prop 8 in California, which codified discrimination against gay people into the state constitution—specifically against gay marriage—an injustice that took a protracted court battle to finally overturn.
The tragic thing is that all of this hatred, hypocrisy and even insanity is painfully evident to people who would like to believe in some form of a Higher Power. By trying to bend society to their religious values, these fundamentalists end up turning people away from spirituality. When it avoids authoritarianism, spirituality has the potential to bring peace, to give people the courage and strength to get through challenging times, and to heal divisions among people.
There has seldom been a more critical time in world history when peace, courage, strength and unity are badly needed. Yet instead of working toward that end, people supposedly of spiritual faith are only driving people further apart and denying them the potential comfort of spiritual peace. In doing that, these religious people are far more effective agents of evil that all of the agents of “Satan” whom they rail against.
Ain’t that a bitch?
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