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| Conservative Republicans and the religious right are claiming that the Respect for Marriage Act will cause Christians to be persecuted in America. However, they have a bad track record when it comes to predicting how pro-LGBTQ legislation will harm Christians, such as when they falsely claimed that hate crimes legislation would cause pastors to get arrested in pulpits for preaching against homosexuality. Hate crimes legislation was passed and that claim didn't come true. |
Wednesday's crucial vote of the Respect for Marriage Act has made conservatives, Republicans, and the religious right all lose their collective minds. According to Peter Montgomery of People for the American Way, they have been lobbing all sorts of hysterical claims about the act. But if you ask me, their hearts don't seem to be in the effort.
In spite of the historic support for the Respect for Marriage Act from the Mormon Church, Sen. Mike Lee of Utah dismissed the bill’s religious liberty provisions, telling the Family Research Council’s Tony Perkins that the legislation would lead to “the destruction of religious liberty in America.”Sean Feucht, the missionary musician turned right-wing political activist, warned the church to “Prepare For Persecution!” and claimed that passage of the bill would signal “an attack on the church.”Liberty Counsel, a religious-right legal group that branched out into anti-vaccine conspiracy mongering during the COVID-19 pandemic, may take the cake for most desperate-to-get-clicks claim that “This Depraved Law Would Allow Pedophiles to Marry Children.” That claim was given a boost by the Pentecostal-oriented media outlet Charisma.Liberty University’s Standing for Freedom Center warned that the legislation “disrespects the religious liberties of millions of Americans who may face judicial assault if they refuse to oblige the left’s tyrannical narratives.” The Freedom Center’s Ryan Helfenbein retweeted its claim, adding his own warning that “We are opening the door for massive religious persecution on a scale never seen before in America.”Concerned Women for America called it an “attack” on people “who affirm Biblical morality when it comes to marriage and sexuality.”Pundit Todd Starnes denounced the Republican senators who “just declared war on the church” by voting to allow the bill to move forward, and he claimed that the bill would “put a target on every Christian church in America.”Under the utterly false headline, “Mitt Romney pushes Polygamy on all 50 states, ”religious-right activist and former Colorado state legislator Gordon Klingenschmitt claimed that the bill would “legalize Polygamy, child-marriage, and Gay ‘Marriage’ in all 50 states.”
It all reminds me of Donald Trump's speeches, i.e. repetitive nonsense which is at first shocking but then gets boring after a while. Montgomery points out that the right played the same game in 2009 about hate crimes legislation:
Consider, for example, the frenzied opposition to the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act, which passed Congress in 2009 and was signed into law by President Barack Obama. The legislation strengthened an existing federal hate crimes law by including crimes motivated by a victim’s actual or perceived gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, or disability.If the apocalyptic warnings from far-right religious and political leaders during debate on the bill had any grounding in truth, the years since then would have brought about the criminalization of Christianity, prisons filled with pastors who preached against homosexuality, and conservative Christians piled into boxcars and sent to concentration camps. Influential Christian nationalist “historian” and serial liar David Barton told a California church that sponsors of the hate crimes law—which explicitly targets violent crimes—wanted to make it a federal crime for preachers to read Bible verses denouncing homosexuality. Religious-right leaders and far-right members of Congress falsely claimed, without the slightest evidence, that the law would create legal protections for bestiality and pedophilia.More than a decade later, of course, none of that has happened. No preachers were dragged from their pulpits. Far-right Christian leaders are still quite free to rage against legal equality for LGBTQ people, and political operatives are free to run political campaigns that smear us with dishonest propaganda. Freedom has survived, and the campaign against the federal hate crimes law has been exposed as a lie.
