I haven't been here in years, but the discussion of Mr. White's book has caught my attention, because I have read this book, under the original title "Religion gone bad," though, but the message is still the same. Just to be clear, Mr. White was not directly comparing well-known leaders of the Christian Right of the USA with Hitler and the Nazis, and he even stated so, but what he did, is that he pointed out what he saw as a similarity between the Eternal Jew (thanks to the link, btw) and similar anti-Jewish propaganda of that time with what these fundamentalists have been writing about homosexuality. He also offered a speculation, about whether the American gay community is planned on enduring the same fate that happened with European Jews.
As a reader of his book, I am also having a speculation after reading it. First off, I can only wonder where did Mel White get the idea that the leaders of Religious Right want to replace the Constitution with the Bible? As far as I remember, the late Jerry Falwell has said 30 years ago that conservative evangelical Christians should implement their belief into our lawmaking. This is their right, the same one given to all citizens, regardless of their religious beliefs, or beliefs in no god. Everybody has a right to participate in political process, and whoever gets the most popular vote would win. This is what our Constution allows us to do, so conservative evangelical Christians are not any different than people of other faiths, atheists, pro-choicers, gays, strarghts, etc. Mel White is also incorrect about saying that our Constitution guarantees secularism, aka separation of state and church, meaning that people are forbidden to put their diverse religious beliefs in shaping public policies. Quite the opposite is true, and it's been like that for 236 years. Thus, his argument about conservative Christians wanting to replace the Constitution with the Bible does not logically make sense.
My speculation is that Mel White and Soulforce would dream about having a society where our religious freedom is being seriously altered, where conservative evangelicals cannot proselytize in public, because their preaching offend gays, people of other faiths, women, and so forth. In other words, based on the way the book is written, Soulforce would maybe like to have a society with "hate speech" laws (kinda like Canada and Western Europe) specifically targeting conservative evangelical Christians.
I think that after this book got published, Soulforce started losing its popularity, which explains why today, there's hardly any postings, here. These days, many people, young and old, tend to follow other gay Christian leaders such as John Corvino, Justin Lee, and Ralph Blair. These individuals and others are focused on building bridges between people with different beliefs, by trying to figure out how to live peacefully with each other, despite having strong disagreements on the proper sexual relationshps and the definition of marriage, instead of assuming the worst possible things about each other.
|