Religious tolerance for me but not for thee.

Support for religion only exists for fundamentalist Conservative Christian believers, it seems.

Last month, Operation Save America  terrorists activists surrounded and invaded a Unitarian Universalist Church in Louisiana. They screamed at the congregants that they were hell-bound baby killers. It’s okay, they believe, because the UUs allowed the groundbreaking for a new abortion clinic to take place within their facilities. So these people decided to crash their worship services, to scream hatred towards people who have different ideas about when life begins.

At the time the terrorists activists showed up, the congregation was having a moment of silence for the members who had died in the past few weeks. The Operation Rescue people desecrated this time of prayer with no hesitation. The congregants responded by singing hymns. After they were shown the door, the protestors stood outside the nursery to scream at the children within.

George Tiller, the abortion doctor who was shot a few years back, was killed at the church where he was an usher. In church. Where is the respect for the sanctity of houses of worship?

What do you think any of those Operation Rescue people would do if an Evangelical Protestant church was surrounded by a Islamist congregation screaming that the people inside were infidels who needed to convert or possibly die?  Such a scenario is unthinkable, not the least because conservative factions are already willing to believe that even the most moderate Muslims are ready to engage in violence at the drop of a hat.

Across the nation, there have been a whole host of regulations and court decisions, ranging from “conscience provisions” for pharmacists to Hobby Lobby, that warp the First Amendment to privilege conservative Christian religious doctrine over any other.  (Hobby Lobby also allows religions to define their own scientific reality, but that’s another post.) Who cares if an employee belongs to a religion that accepts contraception as morally acceptable (or no religion at all)*? Or if a young woman who seeks emergency contraception or *gasp!* an abortion is following her own conscience?

Southern Baptists believe (or at least used to) in the “priesthood of the believer.” This concept meant that there was no intermediary between the human soul and God. It seems that that only applies if you hold the same very narrow views as they do.  People who believe otherwise are set up for damnation.

Last week, police surrounded St. Mark’s church near Ferguson, Missouri, on several nights.  The church and its school building were being used as a “safe space “by the community in the midst of the ongoing chaos. The police were apparently upset that people were leaving the church wearing gas masks, among other things.

So maybe we should make that privilege narrow to white conservative Christian religion.

That “War on Christianity”  that people on Fox News rant about is even more obscenely ridiculous than it ever was.  If fundamentalist Christianity in America is at war, it is an offensive war of its own choosing with the goal of squelching any other belief.

We will never have Sharia law in America; but I am afraid that unless we are careful at some point we may have theocracy nonetheless.

*Do NOT get me started on the “paying for it” issue.  Employees pay for their own insurance, either directly or through their labor. Hobby Lobby and other corporations of their ilk should have no say in the personal medical decisions of their employees, given how much money they make off them.