Kindness of Reverend Meg

 

Kindness of Reverend Meg

Woke up this morning thinking about this ridiculous canard of “religious liberty”…if the extremists get their way…there are folks with sincere beliefs that their faith rejects women in ministry. I have dealt with it, and many of my women colleagues have experienced it…so, I guess we can expect to not be served in restaurants? Not be able to book an appointment for a haircut, not be treated at an urgent care or emergency room, if the people providing those services in their businesses object to ordained women in ministry…and what about just how women style their hair, or their clothing? There are people whose sincerely-held beliefs dictate that women wearing pants are violating God’s law.

To an astounding number of religious bigots, I am an abomination. So is my Jewish husband. So is my gay child. We can all expect to be turned away from businesses and events, and will live in a minefield of rejection that will be everywhere and every day. And chances are, YOU violate someone’s sincerely-held religious belief. Divorced? Living in sin? Married to someone outside your race/faith/nationality? Have a tattoo? Don’t belong to the “right” church? Or *any* church? There are 649 “laws” in the Hebrew Scriptures that could be used by literalists to justify their discrimination against whoever they decide they don’t like, and call it “religious liberty”.

This is more crazy than the extremism we have railed against since the late 1970s and the religious extremist “revolution” in Iran. If the extremists here get their way, every religious bigot will be their own “supreme ruler” in order to punish those they despise under the noble-sounding guise of “religious liberty”.

Real people will be harmed in real ways…not in the imagined ways religious bigots claim *they* are being harmed by the *sin* they allege they are being forced to condone. But I suspect that’s the goal. To dehumanize, to push to the margins, to eliminate everyone they just don’t like. Call people “sinners” and “abominations”, and get the powers of the empire to sanction your hatred and imperil those you loathe.

When my family and I face the discrimination and overt state-sanctioned punishment that will come—and it WILL come—when the extreme court allows it, I wonder how many of you will stand up for us. I suspect as many who stood up for their targeted neighbors in 1930s Germany and Poland and Hungary and Austria…

You think it’s only about “the gays” or “the trans”…it’s not. It’s about all of us. You think it’s about protecting ”the faithful”...it’s not. It’s about the power to inflict harm upon minorities and even non-minorities whom the religious bigots hate. That’s the real abomination. It’s seeking the legal power to participate in the sin of doing harm to your neighbor.