Not So Polite Dinner Conversation – marriage and a lovely example of TrueChristian hysteria

Whoo-hoo, marriage for all!   I hope that everyone who chooses to get married is as happy as my husband and I.

Rather than reviewing the SCOTUS decisions since others have done a better job than me, I found a typical opinion piece by one of the horrified TrueChristians, or as he puts it “orthodox Christians” (not to be confused with Orthodox Christians, of the eastern varieties). It’s much more fun to watch the schadenfreude and hypocrisy that such people create and reap for themselves.

First, a few thoughts though on the decision. The reason rights are enshrined in the Constitution is because states shouldn’t have that power. We fought a war over that. We’ve constantly been adding classes of people who get to enjoy those rights.   The dissenting justices were amazingly unprofessional sounding in their writings and ended up using nothing more than personal attacks and the logical fallacy “appeal to tradition”. All of their arguments would have been just great in defending slavery or denying women the right to vote. It strikes me as they lost their minds as soon as their religion was under fire for simply being wrong. They aren’t special snowflakes any more. Another thing that these idiots can’t quite get is that there are churches that have no problem with people who are gay and lesbian. All they want to do is enforce their particular religion on everyone.

Now, let’s get to the fun bit. An opinion piece out on the Time magazine website was written by Rod Dreher, a writer for the magazine The American Conservative. For a bunch of people who claim to hate big government, they sure want it when it can force their religion on others. We wouldn’t expect anything less. Dreher is the person who claimed that the Roman Catholic Church wasn’t at fault for allowing priests to molest children, it was the gays!

This post is full of sarcasm. Anything that resembles agreeing with these twits isn’t.

At least the fellow is smart enough not to claim that the sky is falling, at least “not yet”.   It’s always so embarrassing when “orthodox Christians”, and Orthodox Christians (not the same), and evangelical Christians, and Protestant Christians, and Catholic Christians, etc ad infinitum fail repeatedly in their predictions of how their god is going to get us, honest, really soon now.

We’re supposedly now in “post-Christian America.”  Funny how that seems to be not the case because there are churches still on many corners, still hundreds of media outlets that are entirely Christian, my local screaming preacher on street corner is still there.  Bibles are in every library and every bookstore.  Scads of websites and blogs, and golly, Mr. Dreher is still writing his very own and very TrueChristian opinions on the Time magazine website!  You know you are persecuted when you are in Time.

Now, in case Mr. Dreher has missed it, people who are bigots about homosexuals are already noted, and often ridiculed and indeed likely vilified.  Nothing new there.  You are more than welcome to say what you want, and you have and will be held accountable.  I have no desire to oppress you at all. In fact, I’m all for you showing me exactly what you are.

We have that Mr. Dreher is sure that there is a mysterious “the philosophical and historical groundlessness of the majority’s opinion “ e.g. giving rights to a class of people who did not have those rights before.  That’s quite the statement when that is patently untrue.  It seems that, like many TrueChristians, they ignore history when convenient.   It also seems interesting that another group of people also called giving rights to a rightsless group a threat to democracy, you know, back in the antebellum period in the US. In fact, you can read about that right here, in John C. Calhoun’s speech to the US Senate in 1837.

“The fundamental norms Christians have long been able to depend on no longer exist.”  Hmmm, what would these “norms” be? Oh yes, norms that his version of Christianity considers “norms”,which of course the only “orthodox Christianity” aka TrueChristianity.  It seems that plenty of Christians have no problem with marriage that isn’t just between a man and a woman. I hate to tell Mr. Dreher, gay marriage has been happening for a long time, within churches and without.  Still no sky falling. I can even assure him that an atheist like me can walk right into a church and I don’t burst into flames at all.

I am indeed impressed that Mr. Dreher did say this “To be frank, the court majority may impose on the rest of the nation a view widely shared by elites, but it is also a view shared by a majority of Americans.”  Which when combined with the claims that America is a supposed Christian-majority country, also made by people like him, shows that Christians also share the view that gay marriage is okay.

Mr. Dreher does seem to be afraid of churches losing their tax-free status if they are “dissenting”.  I’d be more than happy if every church lost it because they do nothing to earn it.  If you can’t exist without it being on the backs of others, then it doesn’t speak much for your god taking care of you as the lilies of the field. Alas, that doesn’t seem to be likely.

Mr. Dreher is sure that the First Amendment will only offer the barest of protection to him and his fellows.  It’s seem to do quite well, to the point that those like Mr. Dreher want to keep those protections from anyone but themselves. How many times have we heard “It’s freedom of religion, not freedom from religion”?

Then we get the claims of persecution!  Oh noes, if a TrueChristian doesn’t get special treatment and gets to say what he wants without anyone saying he’s wrong, it’s persecution!  Amazing on how that attitude devalues the actual persecution that some Christians actually experience.  It’s also fun to watch Christians like Mr. Dreher finds it such a horror to be shunned and persecuted, but not one of these people spoke out against that when they were the persecutors.   It’s perhaps even more amusing to watch them whine if someone is removed from a job, Brendan Eich, because of what they chose to do by a company that can do whatever it wants.  Of course, Mr. Dreher forgets that homosexual people have been under that threat before and still are.  Oh the humanity!    The SCOTUS majority decided that homosexuality is equivalent to race, and before it decided that people of color were equivalent to other races, and gasp, it decided that women were equivalent to men (at least to vote, still waiting for the ERA).

Mr. Dreher also goes after the fact that gay and lesbian couples don’t want to change the institution of marriage, but want the same rights. He is of course sure that they just want to ruin marriage, but of course has little evidence of this. He cites Dan Savage and his “more recent writing” to “loosen the strictures of monogamy”. Mr. Savage wrote about this in 1999 (strong language) ah only a mere 16 years ago. But to take Mr. Savage as speaking for all homosexual people is, well, as silly as thinking that Mr. Dreher speaks for all “orthodox Christians” or any Christian but himself. I’m sure he unfortunately speaks for quite a few. Dreher, of course, makes the sky is falling claim that “marriage inevitably loses its power” if just anyone can do it. He of course can’t support that claim with any facts at all.

Dreher tries to lay the “fault” for this on the dreaded “Sexual Revolution”, that it was back then when marriage “really” came under attack. You know, when women were considered equal, didn’t have to keep a drink ready for husband dear and people suddenly slept in the same beds (at least if you watched TV). Of course, Mr. Dreher fails to mention that the worst people who disrespect marriage and dare to get divorces is guess who? Yep, conservative Christians and here too.

We do have Mr. Dreher walking back his claims of persecution, that him and his “orthodox Christians” will have live with “at least a mild form of persecution”. These poor “exiles” (the wannabe martyr complex coming through) will have to accept not being able to force their religion on others. It does show the fear that is needed to be ginned up by the conservative religious, that they must fear anyone who dares to disagree with them, by somehow changing their faith and how they teach their children.   As always, extremists always become more and more insular. I do hope for that, for the other way that they go is becoming more and more violent.

He recommends something called the Benedict option, like St. Benedict and Benedictine monks (cue the horror from the anti-Catholic Christians). The idea is to form monasteries, which will be a bit hard to have any marriage at all. Alas, he thinks that monasteries helped refound civilization after western Roman empire ended and we know that is at best a questionable claim, considering that these monasteries destroyed many of the books of the ancients and encouraged the genocide of anyone who did not agree with them.

Just consider a community of Christians as Mr. Dreher wants. Which version would win? We have Dreher who insists that he and those who agree with him are the only “orthodox Christians”, the only TrueChristians. Would Dreher’s communes kick out anyone who questions those in charge? That’s what happens to monks who don’t behave and what happened to early Americans who dared to question their leaders. Would they reject all of those modern conveniences that the science that they hate supports? And if the convenience was invented by someone they didn’t like or even touched by the gay? Oh noes! Of course, we can be assured that hypocrites like this would never give up such things. Their moral outrage goes as far as their personal comforts, just look at how they pick and choose their supposed manual on how to get God’s approval.

This threat to take their balls and go home is quite like the idiocy when we had American Christians claim that they would go to Canada to protest, of course forgetting that Canada already has approved of equal marriage. We’ve had threat after threat of how TrueChristians would pick up and leave American society; that’s been happening since the first Puritan came to the US intentionally trying to keep those “others” away from them. We see just how well that worked out. I’m more than happy to see” the decline and fall of the traditional American social, political, and legal order”. We’ve only been getting better.