Tonight at an event featuring the embattled Texas attorney general, a senior counsel for a prominent religious-right group warned that religious war is coming to America. Here’s a tweet from Houston Chronicle reporter Lauren McGaughy, who is covering the event:
. @1stliberty‘s Dys predicting literal war btwn adherents to Judeo-Christian values and their enemies. Tells believers to “religify” #txlege
— Lauren McGaughy (@lmcgaughy) September 30, 2015
Dys predicting literal war btwn adherents to Judeo-Christian values and their enemies. Tells believers to “religify”
McGaughy is referring to Jeremy Dys, a senior counsel for Liberty Institute, a Plano-based group that claims its mission is “to defend and restore religious liberty across America.” A subsequent tweet from McGaughy quotes Dys as saying that “we have suddenly set up for all of us a clash of worldviews.”
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who is under indictment in Texas for securities fraud, spoke after Dys. The event — “The Texas Response: Pastors, Marriage, & Religious Freedom!” — is sponsored by Texas Values, the Austin-based lobby group spinoff of the Liberty Institute. It’s unclear at this point whether Paxton repudiated the prediction of religious warfare coming to America. But Paxton echoed the paranoia of religious-righters worried that they face increasing persecution. Here are two Paxton quotes reported in other McGaughy tweets:
“We don’t have to passively accept the (slow) marginalization of our faith.”
“We’re seeing far too many examples of tyranny in our country lately.”
Paxton has encouraged official resistance to the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in June in favor of the freedom to marry for gay and lesbian couples. But he has had to back away — in his official actions, at least — in the face of possible contempt charges from a federal judge.
We have had religious war in this country between Judeo-Christian values and their enemies since its founding. Fantasy-prone, religion-besotted, authoritarian, obsessive, extreme “movement Conservatives” now dominate one of the two political parties in this country. This is a matter of grave concern. These individuals speak of liberty, smaller government, lower taxes, and similar highly desirable goals, but what they secretly intend is coercion, disruption, subordination of women and minorities, war-mongering, and similar excesses. Check out http://www.salon.com/2015/09/27/it_is_time_to_get_very_afraid_extremists_authoritarians_now_run_the_gop_and_no_one_can_stop_them/ and http://www.salon.com/2015/09/27/make_them_shut_up_about_god_the_right_wings_religious_delusions_are_killing_us_and_them/ for more details!
In Heinlein’s ancient story “Gulf” a leader of the cabal that really calls the shots in the USA (Mrs. Keithly) calls for “a wave of religious hysteria that will wipe out the Bill of Rights” (a paraphrase, perhaps; I haven’t read the story in a decade of two).
The big problem, as I see it, is that the damned unreligious far, far right thinks that they are the majority, not the pitiful minority that they are.
I’ve been hearing for several years that the only solution to all of America’s problems is that we have to have a Christian everything.
Christians on the school boards, we’ve seen what disaster it is to have non-thinkers on the SBOE.
They want an evangelical president, they want everything that our Constitution says that they cannot do.
My hatred for funny-mentalist Xians knows no bounds.
They ignore what the Repugnant Party has done to this country. They fight every member of Congress that is not on their side.
The Repubnants have the worst record as far as passing NEEDED legislation goes. The ONLY thing they have done is to hurt women who need Planned Parenthood’s services.
They are the most craven group of any bunch ever sent to Washington.
There IS a cure! Get the cowards OUT of office!
The only religious war is being fought right now…on the floor of Congress. We are a SECULAR nation whether or not the fundies like it. Our laws are stated in the Constitution and other places, not from God.