Are You Being Martyred?

 

I have noticed a funny old thing about the Christian right in the US--even when they have been extraordinarily catered to and cosseted, they will still cry "Martyrdom!" when any resistance to their domineering world view exists. They claimed other people getting gay-married somehow violated their rights. Yeah--and that thought persisted.  And I think they feel exactly the same thing about the claim of people who are not the "right kind" of Christian or maybe not any sort of Christian at all (like, for example, Jewish people) who maintain that abortion should still be a right for people who have no religious barrier to receiving or providing that care. 

How dare you punish real Christians by not following their precepts and thus showing disrespect for their insights into the One True Religion? We've come a long way from Christians being pitched into the Coliseum to confront hungry lions, but you can't stop these whiny folks from vociferously complaining that they are being faced with the worst of martyrdoms--being ignored!

I guess I'm just being hypercritical of things like this New York Post piece where a Christian complains bitterly of being--criticized for being a bigot. She calls it a "punishment" for being a Christian when she doesn't quite seem to grasp is that claiming one is a Christian doesn't actually make you a great person, especially when your "problem" is being exposed to the reality that other people exist. Bisexual people exist in real life, so they can exist in fictional material as well--it isn't harmful. Religious minorities exist who don't need to be coerced into group Christian prayer--the Supreme Court is actually badly wrong and historically off with this decision (it's been a dumb year for the Court, because some of these characters don't belong here). 

It isn't a martyrdom for someone to acknowledge that people who are not like themselves even exist. Coexisting with people who think you are wrong about something isn't an attack on your religion. If she wants to set herself among the saints, she should be made of sterner stuff. 

In the meanwhile, professed Christians are even trying to tell us that the Sturmabteilung of the Orange Fuhrer aren't really so bad, after all. Girl, what? They are street fighting dipshits who are led about by conservative concern trolls to enforce with muscle what words won't do because words can't. Get stuffed. Your pretty face and pretty words aren't going to cover up for that. Sorry. No. And your religion still less. 

The religious right were the driving force of Trumpism and should be understood as the face of the insurrection.  Waving one's faith around the Proud Boys to give them a "halo" of respectability should be less than useless.

See, after all is said and done (not that I think all either has been said or done, just yet), the religious right has a lot to answer for. Far from being martyred, far from even being persecuted, in the full zealousness of their religious bigotry, they decided not to render unto God the things that were God's, but to render unto Trump the things that belonged to all of us. 

Trump. A cheapjack Herod not above slaughtering innocents.  With the assistance of folks like Mike Flynn, who collected over and above his thirty pieces of silver for what he did to the body of this country and is still doing.  

No, Christians, you aren't being martyred. Not when your fellowship can teach both sides of the Holocaust or deny Jews municipal services. Not when not so long ago (in the pre-Trump era, Christians like Mike Pence (who is not a hero) tried to deny equal treatment under the law to LGBT people for religious purposes--giving bigotry a sanction and opening up the fora to even racism because why not accept any claim made by someone declaiming their special religious rights?  Like denial of marriage to unequally yoked?

That's why I don't think Lawrence and Obergefell are the stopping points, The illogical but permissible extremes the SCOTUS will visit will go to Brown and Loving. Nothing is off limits. Once anyone is a second class citizen, anyone should worry. 

The religious right pretends they are afraid of being thrown to the lions, because they lionize those who would maul other people's freedoms. For religious minorities (like atheists) for sexual minorities, for anyone who isn't a Christian zealot, attention to their radicalization must be paid. They mean to do away with education and science and trust in institutions that aren't the church. Opposing this is no martyrdom for them, and no bigotry for those who see through their game.