Police arrested a 58-year-old Boise, Idaho, woman Wednesday night on a warrant for two felony counts of malicious harassment, after she reportedly attacked a Jewish acquaintance, stomping on the woman’s neck in a bizarre bid to convert her to Christianity. Margurite Dawn Haragan has been charged with two counts of malicious harassment in an attack police have labeled a hate crime, according to KTVB…. “The defendant was banging on the front window yelling at her that she better believe in Jesus and she was not going to leave until she did believe in Jesus,” Ada County Prosecutor Dave Rothcheck said. He said the victim, identified in court only as “A.G.,” opened her door to tell Haragan to leave and to write down her license plate number…. Prosecutors say Haragan stepped onto A.G.’s neck as she lay on the ground, pressing down with her foot and pulling up on the woman’s head and hair. Eventually, the woman said she would become a Christian in an attempt to placate her attacker, Roscheck said, and Haragan let her go. But according to court documents, she returned to the victim’s home two days later, carving “death bin bond” into her mailbox and cutting up her mail.
At first, I had a good laugh at the sheer unmedicated lunacy that led Ms. Haragan to witness for Jesus Christ in most violent of manners. Then it dawned on me that this episode of self-righteous violence was exactly the mindset that led the Crusaders to kill millions in the name of their Lord and Savior. Yes, the Crusades were conducted on a far larger scale, but the arrogant, self-righteous sense of superiority that led to justify forcibly converting (or murdering) non-believers is almost exactly the same.
Clearly, Ms. Hargan has some serious, intractable delusions of adequacy, and I recognize that her behavior is at the very least cruel and unusual. That said, if one looks around at what’s happening in the world today, it’s easy to see that religion is one of the leading causes of premature death. The threat of terrorism- Muslim AND Christian- and the rise of ISIS/ISIL demonstrates if nothing else that the desire and willingness to kill in the name of religion is alive and well. Christians are loathe to acknowledge the brutality of and justification for the Crusades, but millions were killed in the name of their religion, and the tradition of committing murder in the name of one’s flavor of God lives on.
Ms. Haragan’s attack illustrates with disturbing clarity the problem with religion, today and throughout history. There have always been those willing to exterminate other human beings for the high crime and misdemeanor of believing in a different flavor of Imaginary Friend. It’s as barbaric as it is inhuman, and it’s as true today as it was during the Crusades- religion provides psycopaths, killers, and other unbalanced sorts license to loose their demons upon others guilty only of believing differently.
God may be love, but when you consider the large number of Conservatives who got their panties in a wad when President Obama pointed out the murderous historical reality of the Crusades, that message has yet to penetrate the hatred that grips so many Christians. Yes, radical Islam is a threat…but the far greater threat to the Homeland is domestic, homegrown Christian terrorists. The longer Americans choose to ignore that undeniable fact, the greater the risk to our collective security.
Margurite Dawn Haragan is merely the latest illustration of what can happen when psycopaths latch onto religion. So much for peace, love, and understanding, eh?
