Moments of Permanence - A couple of things, neither of them good.

From: elspethdixon Date: June 1st, 2009 02:58 pm (UTC) (Link)

It's not irony. Not even close. It's a hate crime, an act of terrorism against Christians who do not adhere to extremist insanity.

This.

Honestly, one of the things this drives home to me (yet again) is that people who do these kinds of things are motivated predominantly by hate, and that whatever principles they claim to be espousing are more excuses than motivations. People who are truly pro-life/anti-abortion because they have a deep respect for human life and consider unborn fetuses to be the same in that regard as already-born people* do not murder people. People who are truly motivated by their Christian faith do not murder people in church (I'd say "at all," but I think the entire history of Western civilization contradicts me there).

Extremist far-right Christians of the sort who participate in these kinds of atrocities (and also often in a hell of a lot of racist creepiness on top of their sexism, witness the towering WTF of the "Obama is the antichrist" meme) don't really acknowledge non-fundamentalist Christians as Christians, though. Only their kind of Christianity is 'real' Christianity -- the rest of us are just as hell-bound as all those godless atheists and people who practice any religion that's not Christianity.

Even other Christians who *agree* with them, sometimes. Official Catholic doctrine is uncompromisingly anti-abortion, but some of the more rabid fundamentalist Christians out there think that the Pope is the anti-christ and the Catholic Church worships the Whore of Babylon rather than the Virgin Mary.

*not my opinion, but I can respect people who hold it if they really do want to protect unborn children rather than just punish women for having sex -- my test for that is whether they also want to help said children and their mothers once they're born, which many conservatives don't seem to. Spend money on women and childrens' health care? Why would we want to do that?

Edited 2009-06-01 02:58 pm (UTC)

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