How should we then rule?
by Tom Sullivan
For a sub-sect of Christians, it is an attack on "religious liberty" when they can no longer tell equally free Americans how they can and cannot live. As Yul Brynner said, playing Moses, their god "IS God." The Big G, the top dog, the Big Kahuna. Freedom of religion in America is fine, and all, so long as other, lesser faiths understand whose god IS God.
Fear of losing that top-dog status is behind the insistence by conservative Christians that America was founded as a Christian nation. White fear of having to share power with former slaves was behind decades of Jim Crow and KKK terror. Thus, it is "erasing white history and white culture" to take down a flag flown as a constant reminder of just whose race is boss.
"Religious liberty" has become the catchphrase for people who find their ability to lord it over their neighbors eroded by America extending freedoms they enjoy to "lesser thans" whom they fear. The Supreme Court's ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges to extend the blessings of legal recognition of marriage to same-sex couples has them freaking out. The American Spectator calls the ruling "the Dred Scotting of religious liberty."
It's as peculiar a conception of liberty as it is a peculiar definition of persecution. Especially for a group so flush with cash and influence. Talking Points Memo reports on the Hobby Lobby Bible museum planned for just off the Mall in Washington. Among other things, it will be there as a staging area for lobbying efforts and marches by the Christian right:
The museum will be a living, breathing testament to how American evangelicalism can at once claim it is under siege from secularists, the LGBT rights movement, or feminism—yet also boast of acquiring a prime private perch, strategically located at the nation’s epicenter of law and politics, and nestled among its iconic public monuments. If you ask its creators, it’s meant to protect American Christianity from persecution. But it may be the most strident example yet of how that expression of religion, which in many ways is running counter to trends in American public opinion, continues to flex its political—and financial—muscle.
The founders of the Museum of the Bible are the Green family, the owners of the arts and crafts store chain Hobby Lobby, whose litigation against the federal government over contraception coverage in the Affordable Care Act turned their franchise into a new ambassador for the overt expressions of Christianity in public spaces—including workplaces, museums, and even the nation’s courtrooms.
How it is any of an employer's business how employees spend the compensation they’ve earned and, in a contractual arrangement, the employer agreed to pay? Well, when you feel employees are lessers, not equals, and your god IS God, it all makes sense. George W. Bush wanted to give people a tax cut from the Clinton surplus because it was "your money." For outfits like Hobby Lobby, your compensation (cash and benefits) is not really your money if it's paid from their accounts. It's still their money, and an infringement on their "religious liberty" not to be able to control how equally free employees choose to spend it.
We're still waiting for the religious liberty people to get incensed over the string of recent suspicious fires at African-American churches in the South. The count is up to seven.