Legalized Hate

Something happened this past week which has NEVER happened in the history of the United States. . . .

We have codified religion as law.  Evangelical “Christian” Hate is now law of the land.  There is no more separation of church and state.  The Deists have won.

What am I rambling about?  On Thursday January 18, 2017, the government established a new “Conscience and Religious Freedom Division” in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Office for Civil Rights (OCR).

Conscience and Religious Freedom Division.  Does that sound Orwellian enough for you?

What’s the point of this?  Well, OCR Director Severino said, “No one should be forced to choose between helping sick people and living by one’s deepest moral or religious convictions…”

Let me de-alternative fact that phrase for you.  If you, as a health care provider, don’t want to treat someone (specifically LGBT, but really it could be anyone) because your “religion” is against it. Now, this is “Christian” specific.  I’m sure if a Muslim or a Jewish person tried it, they’d be arrested.  But that’s the thing — they WOULDN’T do that.

So, if a paramedic was to see a transgender person, or someone they suspect to be gay, they could withhold treatment and say doing treating that person is against their religion. They could forswear any oath they took, like say the Hippocratic Oath, and hide behind a book they never read. Because after all, if they had read their Bible, they’d know the story in Luke 10:25-37, which is the parable of the Good Samaritan. That story, related by the Christ, is about helping others DESPITE religious or moral convictions. The whole point is to love your neighbor, and help them.

However, that’s not how Republican Jesus works.  If you don’t like a person because YOU feel they are a sinner or unclean or whatever, you can let then die and rot.

Legally.

Never happen? Well does the name Tyra Hunter ring a bell? She was in a car accident in 1995 in Washington D.C. The EMTs refused to provide emergency care (in fact they insulted and slurred her) and the doctors at the emergency room did the same thing. She died of her injuries, despite, as shown at trial, having a 90% chance of surviving those injuries if given proper medical care. None of the EMTs involved were ever disciplined.

Back in the Civil rights era, many racist “Christians” hid behind their Bibles to justify racism. There are many instances of this. For example, Senator Bilbo of Mississippi wrote in the 1940s “[p]urity of race is a gift of God . . .  And God, in his infinite wisdom, has so ordained it that when man destroys his racial purity, it can never be redeemed.” Allowing “the blood of the races [to] mix,” according to Bilbo, was a direct attack on the “Divine plan of God.” There “is every reason to believe that miscegenation and amalgamation are sins of man in direct defiance to the will of God.”

So. This new department is Legalized Hate. You can do whatever you like to discriminate against whomever you like and claim that doing so was because of your deeply held religious belief. No proof needed.

There is a chance that the Supreme Court MAY strike this down . . . assuming Trump doesn’t get to appoint another far right evangelical to the court. Let’s say it DOES get struck down.  How long will that take? How many people will die?

Not enough, according to the GOP. Separation of Church and state is history. In its place is a new era of Hate. The New Inquisition is here, courtesy of the Republicans. We are the target.

So now, the battle is joined.

With whom will you stand to be counted?

History is watching.

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Tags: civil rights, featured, opinion, politics

Category: Transgender Opinion