Rhetoric Race and Religion
Thirty-five years ago, having lost the moral battle for segregation, a small group of evangelicals met to rethink their attitude toward politics. Unlike Catholics and mainline Protestants, evangelicals had tended to stay out of secular politics, believing it to be irredeemable. But with the IRS’s decision to withdraw tax-exempt status from the evangelical Bob Jones University, which discriminated against African-Americans, the Christian right was born. Their mission, they said, was to defend “religious liberty.”
Today is a different age—but the players, and the rhetoric, are the same. Today a far-right coalition of conservative Catholics and evangelicals perceive that they have lost the moral battle against LGBT equality, particularly same-sex marriage. And so, as described in a lengthy report released Monday by the think tank Political Research Associates and chiefly authored by this writer, they are waging a multi-pronged battle against LGBT rights, not on substantive moral grounds but on the premise that equality for gays restricts the religious liberty of Christians to discriminate against them.
Of course, this is rhetoric, not reality. Forty years ago, the newly minted Christian right “played the victim” by claiming that a racist school, rather than the students being discriminated against, was the true victim. And today religious-liberty activists claim that bullies are the real victims because they cannot “express their views about homosexuality.” They claim that businesses who say “No Gays Allowed” are being oppressed because they are forced to “facilitate” gay marriages. And they claim that the real targets of discrimination are not gay people, who in 24 states can be fired from their jobs simply for being gay, but employers who can’t fire them.
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