The Texas Home School Coalition is a religious-right front group more interested in promoting a political agenda and fighting the culture wars than in ensuring kids get a good education. An email today from the group’s leader, Tim Lambert, demonstrates that point pretty clearly.
The email to the group’s list touts a series of events around the state designed to rally opposition to protecting lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) people from discrimination. As we reported last month, the tour also targets “adversaries” who support access to safe and legal abortion care for women in Texas. Neither of these issues has a thing to do with homeschooling.
Lambert’s email today focuses mostly on opposing the Houston Equal Rights Ordinance (HERO), which includes protections against discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity as well as race, sex, age, military status and other characteristics. Lambert’s email claims that the ordinance represents a “radical homosexual position,” essentially arguing that protecting people from discrimination somehow threatens freedom:
I hope you will come to one of these gatherings in your area and listen to men and women of faith who are challenging Christians to become engaged in the battle for our culture and to protect our freedom.
Lambert also argues that passage of HERO last year and decisions in the courts (presumably including the recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling in favor of the freedom to marry for gay and lesbian couples) are the result of Christians not voting:
This means that a majority who hold biblical positions on many of the issues that are now rejected by more and more court rulings in this country are choosing to not take part in the process of setting those policies, because they are not participating in choosing officials who make those policies. Simply put, those with traditional biblical and Judeo-Christian historical values are not voting.
Well, we have news for Lambert. Many Christians and other people of faith support HERO. They believe discrimination is morally wrong and that we should all treat others as we wish to be treated — with equality, respect and dignity. And they have been speaking out in increasing numbers, including during this year’s legislative session in Austin, in favor of equality for all Texans.
The Texas Home School Coalition, like other religious-right groups, is using faith as a political weapon to divide Texans. Parents who home-school their children should feel betrayed — because they have been. The religious-right activists who claim to have their interests in mind are really interested only in using them to advance an extreme and dangerous political agenda that harms others simply because of who they are, whom they love or the medical care they seek.
I am not a Christian, however I have read the Christian books in several different versions and really like the NIV by Zondervan.
It is a shame that certain groups of Christians have never bothered reading those books, they’re very interesting. They do not give a damn about anything their guy had to say or if they ever did read it, they ignore what is said.
If I were to write my version, I would write it the way Christians practice their religion.
I’d write PRAY IN PUBIC AND IF OTHERS ARE OFFENDED, TOUGH, WE DO NOT THINK THAT THE UNITED STATE’S LAWS MEAN ANYTHING SO WE WILL JUST BREAK THE LAW ANYWAY.
Hate those who are not like you, instill FEAR AND HATRED into everything you do.
And there are a lot more things I’d write but I’m not going to waste my time.
Hate and Fear are the tenets of their filthy faith.
If someone is hungry and comes to your church, send them away, don’t they know that they have to spend what money they have on building larger and larger churches? That, plus what preacher can live on less than a million dollars a year?
If you are hungry or need medical care go to the city or the state. After all, if you were a real Christian, you wouldn’t BE hungry, the lord will feed you like the birds and bees.
Who would Jesus throw out of the church?
To their credit there are many churches, mostly poor themselves, who do good works. They feed the hungry, put clothes on other people’s backs. Those people I love as I love my place of worship.
The rest of them have their reward.
Bev. They think that they once established a pan United States Christian fundamentalist and conservative evangelical culture and government in the United States—and that is is now being taken from them. The truth of the matters is that they were never in charge of American government, and they were never in general charge of American culture or religion either—especially being as how fundie culture only dates back to the early 1900s and everything was mostly secular after 1925 because they got their bottoms paddled in the Scopes Monkey Trial, which they won technically but lost by a landslide in the general court of American and world opinion. Their need to rule and control others appears to be insatiable, and the answer is to work hard to ensure that they never get anything they want. As my Uncle Malcolm used to say, “I wouldn’t give them a blade of grass if they were a goat grazing on a concrete pasture.”
I just began reading “One Nation Under God” by Kevin Kruse. It is highly recommended and details the dramatic change wrought by Eisenhower and Billy Graham. They started with ostentatious prayer meetings on inauguration day and did what they could to insert religiosity into government. I had been unaware how abruptly our country veered to the religious right.