Religious Bigotry

Defending the freedom of legal religious bigotry, Trent Franks, Arizona’s Grand Dragon, remained loyal to Bush and voted against allowing gay American citizens protection from discrimination. His “reasoning” is that religious groups should be allowed to treat any gay citizen of the United States as subhuman. In a statement issued by his office, Franks-in-stein stated that ENDA fails to protect the prejudicial hiring prerogatives of faith-based organizations including some religious schools. In other words, conservative religious organizations should be exempt from Civil Rights Laws. Religious bigotry has a long historical tradition; from the inquisition to the Holocaust to segregation.

Justifying segregation, Buckner H. Payne, a Nashville publisher and clergyman who wrote under the pseudonym Ariel, insisted in 1867 that the tempter in the garden was a black man whose interaction with Eve was the first cause of the Fall. Writing at the height of Radical Reconstruction, Ariel concluded his argument by reminding his readers that "a man can not commit so great an offense against his race, against his country, against his God, in any other way, as to give his daughter in marriage to a Negro or to take one of their females for his wife."

The liquidation of six million Jews and other “enemies of the state” was caused, D. B. Red explained in his pamphlet Race Mixing a Religious Fraud (c. 1959), by the sexual "mingling" of the Jews, who suffered what Red represents as God's final solution to the miscegenation problem: "Totally destroy the people involved." Here, surely, was proof that segregation was "divine law, enacted for the defense of society and civilization.”

Franks statements reflects these sentiments. “The provisions of ENDA would subtly erode the ability of states to protect the most fundamental building block of Western Civilization, the institution of marriage and family. It would serve as a building block for judges to argue that the government has no rational basis to continue discriminating in the area of marriage.” Gee, if ending legal discrimination of any class of citizens is such a threat, he should have trotted out his old picture of a fetus to scare people.

Franks summation of his position is, “Religious liberty is the cornerstone of human freedom, and the legislation put forth today would inevitably undermine that right;” which makes perfect sense as long as humans are defined as ‘straight, white heterosexual people’. If you are not part of that group, do not walk into Franks’ church; you are not human and have no rights as a citizen of the United States.