The Zealot References Are Valid

I talked earlier this week about Republican religious zealots who have no tolerance for anyone who isn't Christian enough or who isn't conservative enough in their Christianity for them. Anyone else found wanting is at best a second-class citizen and at worst open persecuted by these maniacs. Yesterday's story about the problems some of these nut jobs have with the Speaker of the Texas House being Jewish is just the beginning.

This week's story about taxpayer money being used for a Creationist Noah's Ark theme park here in Northern Kentucky was bad enough an example of this hypocrisy, but I had missed the connection with that and the whole fundamentalist outrage over wanting the entire Smithsonian museum funding revoked over an exhibit that dared to acknowledge that LGBT Americans exist.

Luckily, Stephen Prothero at CNN's Belief Blog notes the dangers of trying to legislate a national religion.

I write not to raise First Amendment questions about elected officials transforming themselves into self-appointed curators, but to ask whether these officials are really concerned (as they claim) about the use of taxpayer funds to weigh on matters of the spirit.

In a press release yesterday, Gov. Steve Beshear of Kentucky announced that his state had entered into a deal with the folks behind the Creation Museum to break ground for Ark Encounter, a $150 million theme park complete with “a full-scale model of Noah’s Ark.”

Rather than speaking of his state's support of this group’s creationist agenda, Gov. Beshear spoke of employing 900 workers and drawing 1.6 million visitors a year. According to the Lexington Herald-Leader, however, the tax breaks offered by the state to Ark Encounter, as the theme park is being called, “could surpass $37 million.”

The entire exhibit at the National Portrait Gallery (of which the brief clip by the late artist David Wojnarowicz was a small part), cost, by contrast, $750,000, and all of that from private donations.

So my question to Representatives Boehner and Cantor, and to Glenn Beck and others who are working themselves up into a lather over this supposed attack on Christianity, is this: Are you equally outraged over millions in tax breaks to a group promoting fundamentalism? 

Would you be outraged at all if the clip in question concerned not an "antsy Christ" but an "antsy Buddha" or an "antsy Christopher Hitchens"? And how loud would the outrage be in Washington if Kentucky's governor was offering millions in tax incentives to a Hare Krishna theme park? Or a Disney Land of Atheism?

It's these same fundamentalist zealots that constantly accuse Obama of being a "secular fascist" and question his faith. It's the same zealots who declare that their religious beliefs are under attack by a country that wishes to persecute them, warning that everyone else is coming to destroy them in their own paranoid shrieking.

But it's these same zealots who use their secular political power to actively legislate against anyone who is not like them, based solely on their rabid beliefs that everyone must agree with their narrow definition of Christianity. We hear it all time: America is a Christian nation.

That's not true, of course. But this stale bigoted twisted version of Christianity that has no room for anyone else in America to exist gets special protected status when it comes to our government, and its adherents wish only to legislate those views upon all America because they believe it's the right thing to do.

This dangerous religious hypocrisy needs to be stopped.