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We hear so often about Muslims as victims of abuse in the West and combatants in the Arab Spring’s fight against tyranny. But, in fact, a wholly different kind of war is underway—an unrecognized battle costing thousands of lives. Christians are being killed in the Islamic world because of their religion. It is a rising genocide that ought to provoke global alarm.

But a fair-minded assessment of recent events and trends leads to the conclusion that the scale and severity of Islamophobia pales in comparison with the bloody Christophobia currently coursing through Muslim-majority nations from one end of the globe to the other. The conspiracy of silence surrounding this violent expression of religious intolerance has to stop. Nothing less than the fate of Christianity—and ultimately of all religious minorities—in the Islamic world is at stake.

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On Friday, the Virginia Senate passed SB 349, which gives private adoption agencies the power to deny the placement of children with same-sex couples on religious grounds.

Known as the ‘conscience clause’ bill, the bill allows adoption agencies to deny same-sex couples the opportunity to adopt children, even if they are well qualified to do so. The Senate passed the bill along partisan lines 22-18 and the House has already passed a version of the bill. Governor McDonnell is expected to sign the bill the second it hits his desk.

Democratic state Senator Adam Ebbin says, “This bill authorizes every one of the 80 private adoption agencies licensed in Virginia to refuse to offer their services to any LGBT person based on a written moral policy, which they can make up tomorrow. The bill says they can do that no matter how qualified the prospective mom and dad is to become a parent.”

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Ebbin thinks this is a first stage in the state prohibiting gay adoptions outright:

“One of the most important reasons not to pass this bill is I’m sure that next year or soon thereafter we’ll be addressing a bill that seeks to directly do what this bill does do indirectly – and that is to achieve the ultimate goal to ban foster care and adoption by GLBT people completely,” Ebbins told his Senate colleagues.

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But this week, the vociferousness with which they insisted on their right to put up barriers to both their Catholic and non-Catholic employees getting desired contraception made it crystal clear to me that even where they know full well that their employees are not Catholic and explicitly don’t want to get pregnant, the Church actively hopes to obstruct their abilities to avoid pregnancy. The Church’s desired outcome is that the consequence of their refusing to pay for insurance that covers contraception would be that their employees will have babies they do not want to have. And that this will happen even to non-Catholics.

The full pettiness, moral childishness, and simplistic absolutist meanness of their position became most crystal clear when even after they were unconstitutionally absolved of having to pay for the contraception, they then balked at even being asked to refer their employees to others who would cover the contraception costs for them. Their response to the free wills of their employees would be a juvenile, obstinate refusal to cooperate with the exercise of those employees’ consciences in any way whatsoever that allowed them to determine the course of their own reproductive lives. These self-absorbed authoritarian absolutists cannot honor their employees’ wills even that much without “compromising a fundamental tenet of their religion”. Based on wholly abstract and formal considerations about it being wrong to ever thwart what is only one functional purpose of the sex act, they not only irrationally conclude that contraception is an “intrinsic evil” but go so far as to refuse any accommodation to others’ legal rights to it. Even though contraception harms no actual people whatsoever, even though it is actually medically vital for many people, even though they are dealing with autonomous adult employees with consciences and rights of bodily self-determination of their own, they see contraception as so intrinsically wrong that they cannot accommodate differing consciences from theirs at all, not even while making their abstract dissent known through all the normal religious channels available to them. Instead they want to paternalistically get in the way of their employees—doctors, nurses, teachers, etc.—being able to exercise their legal and moral rights according to their own consciences.

They refuse to make the minimally necessary public compromise that accepts that others are entitled to differing moral judgments on matters which incur no palpable civic harm or unjust treatment to anyone else. They worry that, like children, the employees (Catholic and non-Catholic alike) who they accommodate might take away the “wrong message” if they refer them to a place they can get the contraception they freely choose.

So, the only conclusion I am left to draw is that an essential and uncompromisable tenet of the Catholic faith is that the Catholic Church is religiously bound to put whatever obstacles she can devise in the way of Catholics and non-Catholics who don’t want to become pregnant, so that they must become pregnant anyway if they have sex and are fertile.

I am also curious about what barriers to people’s exercise of non-Catholic faiths (or atheism) that they feel entitled to put up, lest they be confused for tacitly approving of non-Catholicism in any case whatsoever.

In all the debates this week about whether or not the Catholic Church hierarchy’s conscience deserved accommodations, the content of what their conscience amounted to was never looked at logically in the mainstream media. Not once in numerous mainstream media interviews I closely followed did anyone just come out and say it: the Catholic Church is working to make sure their employees, regardless of faith, get pregnant even when they don’t want to. That is the only difference in the world that their policy they fought for could actually make. And they made it indisputable that they indeed have this desire when they whined about not just paying for the insurance but even about having to direct their employees to other federally mandated options for them.

And it is also worth noting the silence of the Catholic hierarchy about the self-professed Catholics Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich flouting the pope’s teachings that “justice requires guaranteed universal access to health care”, that at least minimal health care is “a fundamental human right”, that “justice in health care should be a priority of governments and international institutions”, or that governments and other agencies should dedicate “the equipment, resources and energy so that the greatest number of people can have access” to health care.

Amazingly, no one in the Church hierarchy, in the “liberal” media, or on either side of the political aisle in Congress has accused Santorum or Gingrich of waging war against religion for going around the country expressing gross hostility towards all government involvement in health care. Strangely, no one has suggested that their policies evidence a secret hostility towards the Church or religious people. Strangely, no one ever asks Santorum or Gingrich whether their defiance of the pope’s teachings represent a secularist hostility towards faith.

When Obama had planned to follow all sorts of state precedents which had received little to no public outcry and apply a moderate exemption policy which allowed the Church to prevent its distinctly religious employees from getting contraception coverage but not those it hired for secular purposes, it was legitimate to cast him as expressing a personal animus against Catholicism and against faith itself. It is being actually suggested that even after he entirely caved to the Church merely clearing its throat that Catholics will still leave this episode with cause for “suspicion” of him. Where are the calls for suspicion towards Santorum and Gingrich when they equate the government aided health insurance the pope calls for with a deeply immoral and intrusive socialism?

In fact, where are the Church’s deep expressions of gratitude and moral approval for Obama for so substantially advancing the cause of universal health care which the pope called for and for doing it in a way that even made it so that women couldn’t get any federal support for their legal abortions that the pope disapproves of? Where is the mobilized army of Catholic bishops and voters to support him for this or for his ending of the torture regime of George W. Bush, which also flouted Church teachings? Or for his expansion of “faith-based initiatives” to the benefit of the Church?

Apparently, the Church actually cares a little bit about the health of every individual being treated as a “precious asset” (as the pope called it). But not enough to demonize political opponents who disagree with them on the point.

But what the Church really cares about and takes as the litmus test of its full and free exercise of faith is its right to prevent those who don’t want to have children from not having them. That’s a part of the non-negotiable core of Catholicism, apparently. And anyone who stands in the way of that (or who, you know, thinks about opposing it until the Church whines for ten seconds and then gives in) is a dangerous threat to religious freedom everywhere.

In a post yesterday, Ophelia Benson rightly took to task the Obama administration’s foolish decision to cave (again) to the religio-political fundamentalist right wing. He keeps making huge accommodations so that they cannot legitimately demonize him and they keep grabbing all the concessions and just go about finding new issues to demagogue and demonize him with, so they can get more out of him—while ignoring the myriad compromises he has made and painting him rather as a left wing secular extremist.

He expanded Bush’s “Faith Based Initiatives”, he participates piously in unconstitutional National Prayer Breakfasts, he let his Republican-inspired health care reform plan give no federal help for any abortions, in a move that displayed massive, party-betraying deference to the power of Catholic bishops, and was rewarded for all of this with being accused of “warring against religion” and “giving Catholics reasons to be suspicious of him” for simply trying to insist they at least had to follow the new law and provide insurance that covers contraception.

And within a week of an angry letter from the bishops about this, he folds nearly immediately. And his reward? Stories in the media about how Catholics are walking away from the whole exchange worried about his commitment to respecting their religion, and with bishops who say it is still too demanding of their consciences to be asked to point their employees to the necessary supplemental contraceptive coverage.

Bravo, President Obama. Way to protect yourself from villainization. I’m sure you have finally persuaded Republicans of your eminent reasonableness and they will stop calling you a radical Muslim atheist secularist socialist communist Nazi at war with religion, posthaste. And I’m sure the principle of secularism will survive all these endless accommodations to religious leaders who want tax free land, government subsidies, the unfettered and unfair right to interfere with legislation while receiving non-profit tax status, the right to have laws written so as to impose their religious beliefs on non-believers, and to have special exemptions from whatever laws they do not want to follow.

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For related coverage: Libby Anne, our exciting new Freethought Blogs neighbor at Love, Joy, Feminism, is an escapee of the repressive American Christian fundamentalist patriarchy/quiverful movement. Her thoughts and her rage over this issue are especially righteous and especially poignant.

Chris Hallquist, another exciting recent addition to the Freethought Blogs stable whom I’ve yet to properly welcome, is properly scathing against the Church and baffled as to why rank and file Catholics, who clearly must see the anachronisms, obtuse regressiveness, and corrupting authoritarianism of the hierarchy’s behavior, continue to identify as Catholic nonetheless.

Also, I had many more thoughts on this issue earlier in the week in my post: Religious Privilege and Grievance-Based Catholic Identity Politics on Full Display.

I also debated a Catholic theology student for three posts:

“Should Catholic Employers Be Exempted From Paying For Health Insurance Covering Contraception?”

“What Are The Limits of Church Authority In the Public Sphere?”

and

“Must (or Can) the Religious Engage in the Secular Sphere ‘Non-Religiously’?”

So does this mean that the 2012 Obama campaign will be going, unchastened and undisillusioned, back to its ’08 roots? While the right wing casts its lots with ugly resentment, demonization, regressiveness, and identity politics of the most mean-spirited and authoritarian kind, Obama’s pitch will remain hope and hero-worship—still of the substance-free kind? If so, it makes sense. He tried details- and compromise-based governance and his abysmal failure to win seemingly any messaging wars in his first term with more sober speeches and professorial dialectics probably indicates that this sunny Reaganism is probably his shrewdest route, tactically. If the Republicans will refuse to run against him as he really is and instead run against him as a symbol of everything their voters ever feared in the world, then he is simply going to go back to running as a symbol of everything that his base hopes for too. And he’ll hope that those in the middle are more effectively seduced by hope than by fear. In America, that’s probably still a good bet.

At least if the unemployment rate lowers or stays reasonably close to where it is now.

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Here’s a guy who apparently never learned how to instill discipline in his daughter with love. He cannot reason with her or teach her healthy negotiation skills. He takes the natural process of teenage rebellion extremely personally. He cannot allow her the privacy to develop a self distinct from him. He cannot harness the 20 years or so more wisdom he should have on her to defuse her emotional outbursts in a way that turns them into constructive interactions. He can neither model adult behavior for her, nor train it into her. He cannot handle his daughter daring to mouth off about him to her friends on Facebook without feeling so embarrassed that he has to seek not only to publicly humiliate her, but to do so with a gun—fired with cathartic relish and sarcastic jokes at something she cares about and something which to him must be an avatar of her.

I admit, I’m not a psychologist. So correct me if I’m wrong and I’ll amend this post. But is it possible to destroy someone’s stuff so violently without simultaneously venting (or at least indirectly conveying) a desire to destroy that person? I’m not saying he would actually do it, but isn’t he, with full premeditation, deliberately displacing his rage towards his daughter in a way aimed at making her feel his violent feelings towards her? I guess if he doesn’t actually assault her physically (yet) that counts as a meager point for “progress”. (Like how we’ve learned it isn’t torture if there is no long term physical damage.)

This is just a symptom of the sickness of America’s self-righteous, gun-fetishizing, “throw away the key”, “blame the poor”, “torture the suspect”, “beat the spoiled children” authoritarianism. To so much of the American psyche, reason and love are not solutions. The only solutions are “last resort” bullying crackdowns of dominance and humiliation.

This man is not alone. This video got 100,327 likes and only 7,437 dislikes on YouTube because today’s pampered spoiled kids need to learn “disc’pline” and to treat their hard working parents with some respect like in “the old days”. The good taxpayers and citizens and parents of middle America have been too just too indulgent with so many ungrateful leeches and parasites. Some day it’s time to slam the prison bars shut more mercilessly, shock and awe the enemy more ruthlessly, and employ your guns more domestically.

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Towleroad has more on the video.

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via End Hereditary Religion.com

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