When you publish a small town newspaper in a conservative, faith-based community, it takes “stones” to run a weekly column from John David Rose, especially when the man is in top form, as he was in yesterday’s piece.
Freedom-hating Christian fanatics seek to write their peculiar, strained interpretations of “holy writ” into our body of law, democracy be damned.
The threat is not overblown, it’s real.
A secretive theo-political movement set out a decade ago with the goal of imposing Old Testament law upon the United States. Now working under a number of guises, their enemy is democracy, their objective theocracy.
One of the “25 articles” of a coalition of Christian fundamentalist leaders declares: “We deny that anyone, Jew or Gentile, believer or unbeliever, private person or public official, is exempt from the moral and judicial obligation before God to submit to Christ’s lordship over every aspect of life, thought, word and deed.” The coalition’s “biblical blueprint” for the United States advocates the death penalty, preferably by stoning, for homosexuals, adulterers, blasphemers, astrologers, witches, teachers of false doctrine and incorrigible children.
Fundamentalist leaders like James Dobson (Focus on the Family) and Robertson (Christian Broadcasting Net work) and others of their ilk, Christo fascists in clerical disguise, use the tithes of bedazzled followers to enrich themselves and intimidate media, mainline churches and those who dare oppose them in what they characterize as the struggle between good and evil, God and Satan.
The editors and publisher of Bluffton Today deserve some kind of award for bravery, and for their faith in the U.S. Constitution, which protects the rights of a free press. Maybe the Pulitzer crew could create a new category for just this type of thing.