“The Obama administration and its militant cronies want to tell Christians whom to hire, how to run their business and how to think,” Todd Starnes declared in a recent column. “And now the president has decreed that any religious group that holds viewpoints divergent from the LGBT agenda is not worthy of federal tax dollars.”
He concluded, “The Obama administration seems hell-bent on forcing Christians to assimilate to the militant LGBT agenda. Resistance is futile.”
That agenda, of course, is simply about achieving equal civil rights. To refer to it as militant is the most blatant fear-mongering; we’re talking about GLAAD, not Al Qaeda. But to Starnes and his ilk, the prospect of equal rights for LGBT people represents a direct threat to their fundamentalist ideology.
Cue the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB). In an email blast sent to supporters the day the order was signed, Archbishop William E. Lori and Bishop Richard J. Malone wrote, “In the name of forbidding discrimination, this order implements discrimination. With the stroke of a pen, it lends the economic power of the federal government to a deeply flawed understanding of human sexuality, to which faithful Catholics and many other people of faith will not assent.”
That’s some incredible logic.
Let’s be clear: faith-based organizations can still discriminate against LGBT employees. They’re entitled to express their conviction that sexual minorities are “deeply flawed.” They’re simply not legally entitled to public funds if that’s the direction they choose to take. It is not the responsibility of the federal government to help these groups advance their specific interpretation of a religious tradition.
Fringe Furor: Extremists Denounce Executive Order Banning Anti-Gay Discrimination | Americans United
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