During the July 12 meeting of the U.S. Senate, Rajan Zed, a director of interfaith relations, read a Hindu prayer. It was the first time in the Senate's history that a Hindu prayer was recited.
During this prayer, three Christians (Ante Pavkovic, Kathy Pavkovic, and Kristen Sugar) screamed and shouted over him in turn, denouncing his "false gods" and howling about Biblical Commandments. The three were promptly removed from the building and arrested for unlawful disruption of congress.
There are maniacs in any country; just last week I was in New York City, and came across a middle-aged woman on Park Avenue yelling at the top of her lungs about how Jason Giambi was a (*expletive*expletive*.) She didn't offer any evidence to support her position, and in humid 95 degree weather I didn't feel like engaging in a conversation with her anyway.
But the Pavkovic family isn't simply a group of loons; they speak for a very real, very un-American, very ignorant, and very dangerous group of loons under the banner of fundamentalist Christianity. The conservative American Family Association is chief among them; a radical group opposed to the United States in every conceivable fashion. It was them who sent out scores of protest emails and letters to senators to rally against the then-upcoming Hindu prayer.
Janet Folger of Faith2Action ministry has praised these three religious fascists. They are "heroes and history will show them as such," she proclaimed.
"If you look and see what God's position is on idolatry, he's not fond of it, to put it lightly," she proclaims. "And what we've got to do is side with where God is on this -- and he is not for praying to millions of false gods on the floor of the United States Senate."
Chiming in with Folger is the ranting of Rev. Flip Benham, director of Operation Save America/Operation Rescue: "Not one Senator had the backbone to stand as our Founding Fathers stood. They stood on the Gospel of Jesus Christ!"
It would seem that Flip and Folger need a history lesson. You see, the Founding Fathers didn't stand on the Gospel of Jesus Christ, the Hindu Bhagavadgita, or the Rain Chant of Tlaloc the Aztec thunder god. They stood on the Constitution. Flip and Folger and the fundamentalists should try reading it.
Benham goes on to drop this gem: "When you stand up and are arrested, and the Hindu is allowed to go free, this country has gone upside-down."
In actual fact it is Flip who is upside-down, and this position makes it tough to read the Constitution, though it is very easy to offer the world his flatulence.
What Folger and Flip and the rest of the fundamentalist fascist crowd are incapable of understanding is just how wrong they really are about the United States. The following facts are submitted for memorization:
The United States is founded on the Constitution, which in its own words is "the supreme law of the land." There is no reference to the Bible, to Jesus, to Christ, or to God, or even to a generic Creator. It is a secular document.
The first part of the First Amendment states "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof." In other words, there is no state-endorsed religion in America, and people are free to worship whatever gods they want to.
In Article VI, the Constitution states: "no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States."
These quotes are taken from the very founding fibers of the United States. They are not up for debate. They are inarguable - though many an evangelist has never taken the time to read them. Instead, fundamentalists will snag quotes about God and religion from colonial diaries or letters - which would be fine, if this country was founded on diaries or letters. It isn't. The only thing that matters is the Constitution. If our founders wanted this to be a Christian country, or a Hindu country, they would have stated it so - and referenced the appropriate holy book.
(It is difficult to find the time to read the country's founding document when you're constantly thumbing through Genesis. I have a modest proposal, that every hotel room in America contain the Constitution; that schools require it be memorized; and that instead of reading a prayer, the Senate should open with readings from the Constitution...since neither Yahweh, Jehovah, or Vishnu has anything to do with the United States government.)
There are many who feel that having prayer at the Senate is a violation of the church-state separation anyway, but if you stand by prayer in the Senate then, respecting the establishment clause, you must admit that there is no establishment of religion in U.S. government and therefore the prayers of any faith can be read.
Again, this reveals Folger's, Flip's, and the rest of the Christian Taliban's mindset: They screech about religious freedom until the time comes to grant a competing religion the same rights. Then they go to pieces, become disruptive, threatening, and even violent. The point has been made before how similar the extremists of religion are to each other. It's a point that can't be made often enough.
If you support religious freedom, and admit that this nation is a secular one, then you must grant the same freedoms to other religions. Therefore, the Senate should next open with a Wiccan prayer, a chant to Zeus, an ode from the Upanashads, a passage from the Popul Vu, a selection from the Enuma Elish, a page from the Tao Te Ching, a paragraph from the Quran, and so on.
But fundamentalists don't want this. Instead they seek the transformation of America into Iran. They have openly stated their thirst for total dominion, that laws should be based on the Bible. which is the most grotesque document of "morality" ever championed in western history. The Biblical god says we must kill people who refuse to listen to priests (Deuteronomy), kill fortune-tellers and homosexuals (Leviticus) kill adulturers (Leviticus) wipe out an entire city if a single person in it worships a "false god" (Deuteronomy), kill people who work on the Sabbath (Exodus), kill your family and friends if their religious views differ from your own (Deuteronomy) and so the list goes, in a long crimson stretch of pure intolerance and murder including death for blasphemers and women who aren't virgins on their wedding nights.
Folger doesn't say any of this; she selectively refers to the Biblical God's tantrum-throwing jealousy over divine competition, while carefully avoiding the rest of the Bible's "pro-murder" endorsements.
The same goes with the Creationism versus Evolution debates, which prompted the Christian Taliban to send death-threats to the University of Colorado earlier this summer. Police Commander Brad Wiesley said e-mails claiming to be from a religious group made repeated reference to killing people who back evolutionary theory.
Very Christian. The threatening email accuses people who support evolutionary theory of "being the source of every imaginable evil in our society." An interesting perspective, but I think those words are better reserved for people who support a literal interpretation and obedience to the "pro-murder" words of the Old Testament.
The Christian Taliban harps about how Creationism gives students more choice in academia, but then they balk when other "choices" are necessarily brought up regarding the origin of our species: the Nordic tale of how all of humanity sprouted from the maggots of a frost giant, the Chinese egg of chaos out of which the Earth hatched, the Greek "five races of man" fable describing how various ages of humanity were carved by the gods from gold, silver, bronze, and iron (of which we belong to this latter category,) the Tibetan tale of the mangases, and so on and on.
The United States is not a Christian nation; it is a secular nation which respects religious freedom.
Fascist Folger claims, "Idolatry is the reason why it made the First Commandment." No reference to the First Amendment. which actually matters to America.
And then there are Folger's groupies who have posted online regarding this incident. From just a few minutes on onenewsnow.com - but there are plenty of others if you take the time to see how much ignorance exists in this country:
"May God have mercy as this country as it turns away and ignores the God and His Principles that this country was built on. Stop worrying about offending this one or that one and worry about offending God! In the end His offense is the one that matters!" (This ignorant woman should read the Constitution, instead of parroting her fundamentalist newsletters.)
Another writes of this incident: "It is not 'rude' [to interrupt the Hindu] when you interrupt sinful practices...it is just and right. Stop thinking 'politically correct' and start thinking 'Christ correct'. (Of course! Just like it is not murder to kill pagans and witches. Good fundamentalists should never suffer either to live!)
Yet another ill-educated fanatic pens: "This is a Christian country. Let only Christians pray." (And throw the rest in prison, deport them, or burn them at the stake, presumably.)
But my favorite comment was from this fellow: "It is a serious affront, not only to God and to Christians, to have a Hindu offer up prayers in the U. S. Senate, it is a "slap in the face" to all our brave men and women serving to defend our Nation's freedom!" (So blind he can't see the irony of his own words, not even if they were etched on his eyelids. In one breath he spits the word "freedom" and then denigrates it!)
I have a suggestion for Folger and her followers. Go off and found a new nation truly based on Biblical principles. Be bold enough and proud enough to plainly state the following:
I renounce the secular Constitution of the United States, and propose the formation of a nation based on the Bible alone. Non-Christians need not apply (and if you do, we have a Biblical obligation to kill you.) We like what Pat Robertson, in running for president in 1988, said: he'd only allow Christians and Jews into government. We know this violates Article VI of the Constitution, but we despise the Constitution anyway.
Folger's nation might even consider basing itself somewhere in the Middle East, to help bring on the mythical Apocalypse like the Christians United for Israel want to do. Shed blood to bring back the Lord. Add more bile to a history of intolerance. and fight your wars with your equally rabid Muslim neighbors. The rest of the world will stand back and watch you go at it, gladiator style, until only one remains. And the winner gets the same reward bestowed upon the variola virus.
There's a challenge I've posed to Muslim clerics, and that is for them to publicly decry terrorism and radical Islam.
I now pose the same challenge to Christian leaders: Stand up and denounce these fascists, or be labeled with them. There's a very real culture war on, and it's time for you to join us in a 21st century of rationality.
Denounce these people, distance yourself from them as you would from any dangerous virus, and show the world you truly do understand what America stands for.
Folger may maintain that history will remember these people as heroes, but the truth is that the only thing history will remember of them, herself, and her rabid groupies as uneducated enemies of America.
by Brian Trent [click here for more articles], who is a professional essayist, screenwriter, and novelist; he is the author of "Remembering Hypatia" and the just-released "Never Grow Old: the Novel of Gilgamesh." Brian is a contributor to the Populist Party, the American Chronicle and The Humanist Magazine.
