After Losing On Same-Sex Marriage, Conservative Christians Find A New Enemy
For decades, conservative Christians who oppose LGBT equality have singled out the federal government or secular atheists as their preferred enemy in public settings, blasting both groups for supposedly attacking “traditional marriage” or infringing on their religious liberty. Yet in the months surrounding the recent U.S. Supreme Court decision to legalize same-sex marriage across the country, right-wing Christians have become increasingly willing to cast blame — seemingly hypocritically — on a group they have often dismissed or outright ignored: Progressive Christians, especially those who support marriage equality.
The first hints of a growing front against liberal Christians came in May, when a coalition of conservative churches in Fountain Hills, Arizona publicly ganged up on a local progressive Methodist community. Unhappy with the church’s teachings, eight congregations launched a campaign entitled “Progressive Christianity: Fact or Fiction?,” a coordinated teaching and preaching series that included op-eds, a half-page advertisement in a local newspaper, and a massive banner with “progressive” written in jagged red letters and hemmed in quotation marks.
“The progressives are at it again, and for a small fee you can join the primary proponent of this apostate religious movement to get answers,” Tony Pierce, a pastor of First Baptist Church of Fountain Hills and one of the participants in the effort, wrote in a letter to the editor. “The good thing about the progressive movement is it gives people a clear choice. The ironic thing about progressive Christianity is that it is neither!”
The source of their outrage? Rev. David Felten, the left-leaning pastor of Fountains United Methodist Church. He reportedly stoked ire by preaching a variety of progressive concepts to his parishioners, such as theological support for interfaith dialogue, scientific discovery, and, of course, LGBT equality.
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http://thinkprogress.org/lgbt/2015/07/21/3682661/christians-attack-liberal-christians/?
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Or was that the extent of the response?
... and I knew people who objected to same-sex marriage back in the day due to their religious beliefs. They felt that same-sex unions were not Biblically-sanctioned, and therefore not acceptable.
However, those who objected on those grounds never saw same-sex unions (common law partnerships, or openly living as a "couple"
as being a "threat" to their own marriages, or to the state of marriage as a whole.
This whole concept of "traditional marriage" being somehow "threatened" by same-sex unions has been systematically ginned-up by Republicans over the past two decades, in order to keep their Christian base voting for them.
By insisting that someone else's same-sex marriage would be a threat to heterosexual marriages, the GOP were able to step up and say, "We are the party who will 'protect' your marriage from this 'threat'."
It proved to be the perfect strawman - insist there is a "threat" which never existed, and then claim to be the hero who will keep that threat at bay.
As I've said, back when I was young, I knew people who didn't want to accept gay marriage. But they never, ever saw it as a threat to their own. It was always a matter of "those people can do what they want to do - it's no skin off my back."
I suspect that now that same-sex marriage is law and there will be more and more of them, a lot of people are gradually going to realize that there was never any threat to their own "traditional" marriage in the first place - which means the GOP, and their "Christian" pulpit-pounding enablers, are going to have to come up with new boogeymen with which to scare the populace into fearful submission.
Must suck to have yet another persistent "threat" exposed as having been non-existent all along. But they'll come up with new ones, and they're working on it even as we speak.
Ironic, unintended consequences...
