I couldn't let this one pass without commenting on it. The new US Attorney General, Jeff Sessions (himself an evangelical Christian) announced on Monday the setting up of a "Religious Liberty Task Force" a group of people that are supposedly going to "make sure that Government employees know their duties to accommodate people of faith".
A more transparently partisan and clearly hypocritical idea you will struggle to find, it's clearly and simply a mechanism by which religious people (i.e. Christians) in the USA will be permitted to discriminate based on whatever religiously inspired objections to anything that they care to pull out of their arses. Much like the vain attempts of Trumps lawyer Rudy Giuliani to persuade people that committing a crime is not illegal, especially when it involves his boss colluding with Russia, this thinly veiled rouse is clearly a slippery slope aimed at re-establishing Christianity and, more worryingly, the more evangelical elements of it back into the US Government and legal institutions. It's a hypocritical ploy because it's clearly aimed at securing votes but also because, although it's positioned as a "Religious" task-force in his speech Sessions let slip that this was simply making good on campaign promises to "protect Christians".
I predict it won't be long before legal rights, won through fair and lengthy campaigning, are being denied to (Christian hated) minorities like LGBT people, particularly in the Bible belt, no more wedding cakes for gays!. Government institutions will only be able to stick their heads in the sand for fear of falling foul of the Christian Taliban that's seeming grasping ever more tightly to power over there. It leaves only organisations such as the ACLU and the (ever eroding) American legal system to fight for minority interests and a the simple idea that people should be treated equally whatever the do or don't believe with respect to the supernatural.
So much for the land of the free.
No comments:
Post a Comment