Wednesday, January 05, 2005
Fighting the Right
Dr. Bruce Prescott, a leader in the fight against the fundamentalist takeover of the Southern Baptist Convention:
We need to dispel the myth that Christians are being persecuted in our public schools. Most of the instances I hear about Christians being persecuted are really examples about Christians no longer being permitted to dominate the stage and school or takeover the public square.
Fred Clarkson:
Christian Nationalism is an ideology that ought to be easy to demolish, from a powerful factual and moral high ground. Christian Nationalism presumes second-class citizenship at best for the religiously incorrect. The nostalgia for more theocratic times by the likes of Rev. D. James Kennedy and David Barton is offensive. The early colonies were hotbeds of legalized religious bigotry and persecution. That's one of the reasons why the churches were disestablished. We don't want to go back to that era. Teasing effective "messages" out of the facts and the history is not that hard, but our knowledge and our arguments are sorely in need of being updated.
We have allowed the Christian Right to own the phrase "religious freedom." Its time to take it back. On the matter of religious equality and religious freedom, we are the political descendants of James Madison, Thomas Jefferson and the Framers of the Constitution. Let's act like it....