Wednesday, September 10, 2008

Message to OK-PNS: I'm not actually apologizing to you, per se.

I've already posted a couple of comments in response to the post by OK-PNS "accepting my apology."

It's interesting to me how the right wing can turn even a genuine attempt to give people a breather from angry politics into an opportunity to attack someone.

First of all, I will fully admit that there are things I've written on this blog that will offend people. Sometimes I use this blog as a place to vent. Sometimes in doing so I go over the line.

However, the line that OK-PNS pulled out of this blog from two years ago did not refer to all Christians, and even a casual reading of that post would show that. As I've repeatedly said, I don't hate Christians. I don't hate Christianity. The greatness of America lies in the fact that everyone has the right to worship as they wish.

What I hate are theofascists. I define that word as someone who seeks to impose a narrow, moralistic politics on the country based on extremist, exclusionary theology. The target of the post quoted by OK-PNS was Tony Perkins, who had made a horribly bigoted attack against the GLBT community in linking the very idea of tolerance to the Mark Foley page boy scandal. Surely we can all agree that Perkins crossed the line with that attack.

The Family Research Council, the AFA, and a lot of other groups on the hard Christian right, should be classified as hate groups. Even John McCain once called them "agents of intolerance" before he decided he needed them to win an election. Their ideology is one of exclusion, Christian superiority, and forcing a Christian-specific religious agenda into secular politics. That's the very definition of a hate group.

I've always said that religion should be used in a positive manner, to bring people together, to lift up society. Many Christians, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, etcetera, practice this kind of positive religion. Groups like the AFA do the opposite. Their goal is to attack, to divide people, to oppress those who want nothing more than the right to live in peace.

As I said in my comment to the OK-PNS post, I don't hate Christians. I hate hate groups.