According to the good book, God hates the gays…

and the divorcees, and adulterers, and drunkards and a whole lot of others whose behavior often resembles, well, me (maybe you too?).

Funny thing is, Jesus never said a word about or against gays.

Yea there were a few passages inserted long after Jesus shed his mortal coil…

but Jesus himself…mute, mum, not a word.

He did have a thing or two to say about divorcees, however (ouch!).

It seems that gays are finally getting some well-deserved political respect.

And that scares the living shit out of bible-thumpers.

So much so that there’s currently a rallying cry for the adoption of so-called religious freedom laws that would allow businesses to refuse to do business with gays under the guise of protecting sincerely-held religious beliefs.

I vaguely remember, because I was very young at the time, the segregated south.

Years before blacks had also achieved some measure of political respect, via being recognized as actual human beings…

as opposed to just chattel.

A whole lot of good Christian folk were a bit upset about that. They were able to coax state legislatures to pass what became known as Jim Crow laws. Laws that allowed discrimination on the basis of, you guessed it, sincerely-held and arguably “religious” beliefs…chiefly the belief that whites were a superior race and that blacks should be kept separate and apart from it.

So, my question is this. If we’re going to use the bible as our guide to enactment of laws, why stop with the gays?

Let’s start stoning those nasty adulterers and divorcees (I’ll just remain in Costa Rica until further notice in that case).

And of course, then we can do much more than just discriminate against gays, we can do as the Ugandans do…get rid of them for good!

I read somewhere that the draconian law recently passed in Uganda (a country where the President actually said on the news that gays were “disgusting”) was also scriptural-ly motivated.

Or, we can look to another source for law. The one that begins with that well-known phrase of…

All men [and women] are created equal.

Shouldn’t that apply to gay ones and straight ones…even divorcees and adultering ones?

Jim Crow laws were rationalized along the lines of “protecting” black Americans by separating them from whites.

Really?

And in Arizona, a state where Christian owned businesses can already freely discriminate against gays (since sexual-orientation is not on the no-discrimination laundry list), the reason for the law is protecting religious belief?

What’s this really about?

Sounds to me like it’s a lot less about religious freedom and a lot more about religiously inspired hatred.

Seems that we’ve been there before…didn’t we learn anything?

image credit: The Searcher via Compfight cc