April 10, 2016 5:51 AM

It's easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a hypocrite to...oh, never mind....

A new message on a giant electronic billboard went online…in Jackson, Mississippi, and it’s taking aim at religious bigotry with a tongue-in-cheek response to the state’s new horrific anti-queer legislation…. Mississippi Governor Phil Bryant signed a bill into law that may be the most intense anti-queer legislation to pass in America to date. According to Reuters, “the far-reaching law allows people with religious objections to deny wedding services to same-sex couples. It also clears the way for employers to cite religion in determining workplace policies on dress code, grooming and bathroom and locker access.”…. In response, the non-profit organization Planting Peace purchased space on a giant electronic billboard in the Southern state to remind so-called Christians about the “golden rule” in a hilarious way.

It should hardly come as a surprise that the culture warriors who comprise the American Taliban are a particularly joyless and humorless lot who see their “duty” to force their narrow religious/theological/moral agenda on all of us as VERY serious business. Evidently, enforcing discrimination and oppression in Jesus’ name is a solemn undertaking and not one to be conducted with an air of levity and lightheartedness.

Especially if you lack any semblance of a capacity for levity and enjoyment of life….

This is why the billboard rented by Planting Peace was the perfect rejoinder to the monstrous anti-LGBT bill Gov. Phil Bryant (R-15th cent.) signed into law. They may claim to revere and worship a Savior who preached love, tolerance, acceptance, and inclusion, but their epic, undeniable hypocrisy puts the lie to that assertion. Mississippi’s Conservative culture warriors couldn’t lead a Christ-like life if their Lord and Savior his own self showed up with a flash, a 5-lb. bag of Peanut M&Ms, and an instructional manual (you might know it as “the Bible). There’s nothing even remotely redolent of Christianity in their actions or beliefs…unless you want to count their hyper-religious self-righteousness and conviction that their God is The One, True, and ONLY God ©. All others are false idols and worthy only of destruction.

Right; these folks are Christians in the same way I’m the Queen of Denmark.

“The intent of this billboard is to bring awareness to how the anti-LGBT movement continues to try to move us backwards in the fight for equal rights,” Aaron Jackson, president of Planting Peace, told The Huffington Post in an email.

“Like many other anti-LGBT groups, Governor Bryant and Mississippi legislators are citing ‘religious objections’ as a validation for discrimination and being extremely selective in their definition of ‘traditional’ institutions or values. It’s important to bring awareness to this fact, because these actions have never been simply about a political or religious debate.”

Jackson added, “There are LGBT youth across the world who are taking their lives at an alarming rate because of these messages that make them feel broken or less than. We have to meet intolerance with compassion. Our message to our LGBT youth: You are loved, valued, supported, and beautiful. There is nothing wrong with you, and we will stand by you. You are not alone. We will keep sharing this message as long as we need to to counter hateful actions designed to infringe on people’s basic human rights and dignity.”

I don’t believe in God, Jesus Christ, or Christianity, but I do remember enough of the Gospel from my childhood Sunday School days to be able to speak to this topic with some reasonable degree of authority. At no time did Jesus Christ ever preach or even intimate that discrimination and oppression directed at others in His name is even a remotely Christian thing to do. The Savior Mississippi’s culture warriors claim to worship didn’t teach that those who think, believe, live, and/or love differently were apostates deserving of being treated as “less than.” In fact, Christ commanded his followers to love those who may choose a different path. If Mississippi’s devotees of the American Taliban could be bothered to dust the cobwebs off their Bibles, they might be surprised to find that the Jesus Christ they claim to revere taught exactly the opposite of the hatred, exclusion, homophobia, and bigotry they’re modeling. Then again, their “worship” is merely camouflage intended to provide a patina of piety and religious cover for the hatefulness and self-righteousness. Their hatefulness and active discrimination are more reminiscent of Pharisees than devotees of the Prince of Peace.

This isn’t Planting Peace’s first foray into pushing back against those who fancy themselves to be Christians but couldn’t lead a Christ-like life if someone held a gun to their head. The group is famous for the Equality House, a (very successful) effort to expose and shame the purveyors of abject bigotry and very unChristian hatred at Topeka’s Westboro Baptist Church.

Over the past three years, Planting Peace has engaged in a number of protests at the Equality House, most aimed at Westboro, including a child’s lemonade stand for peace, a gay wedding, a drag show and a fictional wedding between Dumbledore and Gandalf.

The organization also frequently spearheads other large-scale activism efforts, like traveling to Antartica to declare it “the world’s first LGBT-friendly continent” and creating a giant billboard in county clerk Kim Davis’ Kentucky hometown that called out the clerk’s bigoted stance on same-sex marriage.

I may not be a Christian nor believe in modern Christianity, but I do know that being a Christian and living a Christ-like life isn’t terribly difficult. In fact, modeling love, tolerance, acceptance, and inclusion is significantly easier than dragging an anchor made of hatred, intolerance, rejection, and exclusion through life.

Would that the good, God-fearing, Bible-believing, homo-hating, flag-waving Conservative Christian Patriots in Mississippi’s state government could see their way clear to modeling even just a few moments of behavior that might betray them to be actual, loving, Christian human beings.

Like that’s ever going to happen.

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This page contains a single entry by Jack Cluth published on April 10, 2016 5:51 AM.

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