I understand where so many believers, so many Christians have been in the past seven years, we now are experiencing something I never thought I would experience in my life, I never experienced it growing up and it’s what Jesus promised us would happen, and that is, ‘You will be persecuted for my sake.’ I never got persecuted growing up in Texas and I bet you didn’t in Louisiana, but we’re being persecuted now, Christians are being persecuted here for our religious beliefs and I think people are so sick of the nation being fundamentally transformed away from being a Christian nation.
With the departure of Michelle Bachmann, a convincing case could be made for Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX) being the Dumbest Biped on Capitol Hill ©. Read some of his quotes, or, even worse, listen to Gohmert for any length of time and you can almost feel your brain cells dying one by one. Gohmert is so lacking in intellectual capacity and agility that it can be painful to listen to his fevered ramblings. Which doesn’t say much for his constituents in east Texas, does it?
There’s your common, garden-variety, ill-informed and/or willfully ignorant brand of stupid…and then there’s Louie Gohmert Stupid, which combines a pronounced absence of native intelligence with an outsize arrogance, an epic lack of self-awareness, and the lack of anything resembling a filter. It’s what John Cleese famously referred when he spoke of people being too stupid to recognize that they’re in fact numb from the neck up.
The idea that Christians are a persecuted (70+%) majority in America is prima facie absurd. Combine that with the supposition that Christians support a particular candidate because of said alleged persecution, and what you have is some industrial grade stupid, a vast, endless pool of ignorance and self-delusion so deep that hip waders should be mandatory equipment.
When more than 70% of Americans self-identify as Christian, there’s simply no credible way to argue that Christians are persecuted for their beliefs- unless the definition of “persecution” is “not being able to do what you want when you want and to whom you want.” Being told “NO!” isn’t persecution, it’s part of being an adult- accepting and recognizing that you don’t always get what you want…because the world doesn’t revolve around you and your narrow, inflexible, self-interested beliefs.
Rep. Louie Gohmert, R-Texas, spoke with Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council about Donald Trump’s appeal to evangelical voters.
While both Gohmert and Perkins have endorsed Ted Cruz and were campaigning for the Texas senator in Iowa before the “Washington Watch” interview, the two said that Trump is winning over some conservative evangelicals because they are fed up with anti-Christian “persecution” and “sick of the nation being fundamentally transformed away from being a Christian nation.”
How a sitting member of Congress can possibly believe that he is facing persecution for being a member of the country’s largest religious group shows just how absurd Religious Right’s persecution narrative has become. And, ironically enough, these conservative leaders are now worrying that their manufactured paranoia of religious persecution may end up sinking their preferred candidate and help Trump.
The problem is that the denizens of the Rabid Religious Right have become captive to their narrative of made-up-on-the-fly false equivalence. They’ve lost track of the lies, the disinformation, the fear-mongering, and the persecution fantasies…which now seem to be coming back to bite them.
When you have Radical Right-wing Christians (or, as some refer to them, the American Taliban) who espouse all manner of self-interested, delusional fantasies that have as much to do with the teachings of Jesus Christ as Michael Savage is about reasoned, rational discourse, there’s no room for truth…except that which is manufactured on the fly by demagogues to suit the dominant narrative of the moment.
The thing I’ve spent years trying to wrap my head around is how and why voters in Gohmert’s east Texas district continue to send him back to Congress. If Gohmert is Dumbest Biped on Capitol Hill ©, what does that say about those who continue to vote for him?
On second thought, I’d really rather not know the answer to that question.
