Although I want to take Dave Mustaine of Megadeth to task for being an uninformed moron who is spreading hate and mocking him for being kicked out of Metalica, I don't think I will. However, because I'm insane, I'm doing not 1, not 2, but 3 , count them 3 BachmannLands on Sunday. On the part where I blather on half cocked about something...
Pat Robertson is someone I am going to make an excuse for. Yes, he is uninformed, but that is only part of it. Christain fundamentalists, like Mr. Robertson only understand things as either their view of Christanity or it's not Christianity. So when Mr. Robertson saw the shooting at the Sikh temple, he. like all Christians, saw the shooting as a non-Christian thing. In his world view, the lack of guidance from Jesus means one of two things, he is a devil worshipper or an Aheist. He wasn't brown enough to be the third possiblity, a Muslim.
Don't believe me, here is what he said:
Now, if you watched the whole thing, they hit a few points I already made, both in the comic and in these comments.
So, Mr. Robertson, here is what you are missing:
"Bringing a Message of Hope and Deliverance to White Christian America!"
That is the first words on the Klan's website. Wikipedia says "The burning of the cross was also used by the second Klan as a symbol of Christian fellowship, and its lighting during meetings was steeped in Christian prayer, the singing of hymns, and other overtly religious symbolism."
As for Hitler's Germany, Hitler wrote in Mein Komf, "I believe that I am acting in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator: by defending myself against the Jew, I am fighting for the work of the Lord." Again there is a group of people using fear and violence to oppress a group of people claiming they are Christians. In fact he extolls Christian values in his hate:
"My feelings as a Christian points me to my Lord and Savior as a fighter. It points me to the man who once in loneliness, surrounded by a few followers, recognized these Jews for what they were and summoned men to fight against them and who, God's truth! was greatest not as a sufferer but as a fighter. In boundless love as a Christian and as a man I read through the passage which tells us how the Lord at last rose in His might and seized the scourge to drive out of the Temple the brood of vipers and adders. How terrific was His fight for the world against the Jewish poison. To-day, after two thousand years, with deepest emotion I recognize more profoundly than ever before the fact that it was for this that He had to shed His blood upon the Cross. As a Christian I have no duty to allow myself to be cheated, but I have the duty to be a fighter for truth and justice... And if there is anything which could demonstrate that we are acting rightly it is the distress that daily grows. For as a Christian I have also a duty to my own people.
-Adolf Hitler, in a speech on 12 April 1922 (Norman H. Baynes, ed. The Speeches of Adolf Hitler, April 1922-August 1939, Vol. 1 of 2, pp. 19-20, Oxford University Press, 1942)
If you want further evidence, there is a wonderful website about this where I got my quotes from.
Finally there is the interracial dating ban at Bob Jones University until the year 2000. That is right, 35 years after the all other kinds of segragtion was eliminated, they made sure that, as Bob Jones the 3rd said in 1981, "There’s no discrimination here. Why at Bob Jones University, whites can date whites, blacks can date blacks, brown can date browns, yellows can date yellows.” This case went to the Supreme Court. They defended banning interracial dating because "It was in the Bible" as late as 1998. If you are reading this comic, you were alive when Bob Jones University was, in a sense, segregated. I was born 12 years after the Civil Rights Act was passed. I like to think that in the 1980's we were a country ready to move past the hate. And yet, this kind of backwards thinking existed.
The worse part is that this kind of thinking was being taught to our community leaders. Let's face it, whether you go to church or not, a pastor is a community leader. Putting this brand of ignorance into a community leader can cause some poeple to end up in a shooting spree because they were taught that because you are a different skin color, you are to be feared. That leads to someone, who claims to be a Christian, picking up a legally purchased gun, a person who was a known racist and capiable of commiting such an act. And yet we sold him a gun.
I do think, as John McCain so eloquently put it, that Pat Robertson is an "agent of intolerance." However, I also believe that Pat Robertson also got a few things right about this shooting and with a little bit of a history lesson, he can turn, at least in part, from his intolerent ways.
I would love to see him march in a gay pride parade as an advocate of gay rights. But that will never happen.
I'm not say that Nazis and the Klan are representative of the Christian faith, but what I am saying is that it's a part of their history and Pat Robertson, when propogating his intolerance, is not leading his flock away from this path of hatred, violence and destruction.
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