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Stung by the SCOTUS ruling that the law applies to all Americans, a group of fundamentalist Christian pastors have thrown a collective tantrum and are now threatening people with their imaginary friend.
They had expected SCOTUS, with it's Trump-given right-wing majority, to join with them in victimising and persecuting people from the LGBTQ community by agreeing that they could be freely discriminated against when it comes to employment rights. Instead SCOTUS ruled by a clear 6-3 majority, that federal sex discrimination protections extend to gay and transgender workers, making clear that employees cannot be fired under federal law simply because of their gender identity or sexual orientation.
In an edition of their "Stand in the Gap" broadcast, the viciously homophobic American Pastors Network, through their attorney, David New, said:
Justice Neil Gorsuch, [had joined the ranks of liberal justices] who think that the Constitution is a novel from ‘Alice in Wonderland’ where words can take all different kinds of meanings.
Apparently, what incensed the group most was the interpretation of the word 'sex' to include homosexuals and transgender people when they believe the word is defined in the Bible to mean either a person with a penis or a person with a vagina and with heterosexual desires. (Curiously, the word 'sex' returns a zero count in a wordsearch of my Kindle edition of the KJV!)
Justice Gorsuch was Trump's nominee to replace Justice Antonin Scalia and was assumed to have tipped SCOTUS to the conservative right, especially on religious matters. He has apparently earned the displeasure of the conservative Christian right who had assumed he would rubber-stamp their prejudices into federal law.
New went on to say:
The only thing worse than this ruling is when they first decriminalized homosexuality and when they made homosexuality marriage a protected right under the 14th Amendment. [The ruling is] an attack upon Christianity [and] an attack upon Christian values and morals that this country was founded upon.
Fortunately, Gorsuch and 5 other Supreme Court justices knew their history better than these American Pastors and their attorney and remembered that America was founded on Enlightenment ideas of equality before the law in a secular society in which no religious view could predominate over another or be forced upon non-believers.
But not content with a tirade of abuse against the guardians of the Constitution for not doing their bidding, the host of the Network's TV vehicle, "Stand in the Gap", Sam Rohrer denounced the ruling as “horrendous”, and said it:
[R]edefined the biblical definition of the word sex to include a host of interpretations of gay sex, LGBTQ sexual preferences.... “[I]n effect almost kind of like raised their fist to God above in arrogance. [The Court was] forgetting the law of God.
But the role of SCOTUS is to to define American Law, not the Law of God, as interpreted by right-wing Christian pastors.
Rohrer then declared that the nation is on its way to experiencing greater judgment from God.
In other words, our imaginary friend is going to get you all for not doing what we said!
The show's co-host, the appropriately named, Gary Dull, then went on to wine about Supreme Court rulings in the early 1960s that prohibited official prayer and Bible reading in public schools:
God’s law, God’s teaching, the Ten Commandments, which is our moral code, really, all of that has been taken away by godless people. And what does that reproduce? It reproduces more godless people who have no respect for law, period, or certainly for God’s law. And you cannot shake your fist in God’s face and get away with it. I fear what’s going to take place in our nation—that there’s not a real repentance and turning back to God.
Rohrer and Dull, in clear dog-whistle signalling to the American extreme right then went on to discuss the possibility of a civil war in the USA in the near future.
Clearly, this self-appointed group of conservative fundamentalists would love nothing more than to overthrow the Constitution, violently if necessary, and establish a Levitican-style theocracy based on 3-4,000 year-old Bronze Age Middle Eastern tribal laws, with the judiciary doing their bidding so they can continue to abuse and deny basic human rights to people and groups of their choosing. Such a theocracy would be indistinguishable in practice from the government of Iran, Saudi Arabia and the Taliban-controlled parts of Afghanistan. Guess from who's ranks the 'Supreme Leader' would be drawn!
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