From the article:



The anti-abortion activist father of a pair wanna-be reality TV stars disrupted the services of a Unitarian church Sunday while the congregation was honoring a member who had died. Members of Flip Benham’s Operation Save America group delivered an impromptu sermon while the congregation at First Unitarian Universalist Church of New Orleans was observing a moment of silence. “Into that sacred silence, a voice began to speak, and it began to speak about ‘abominations,’” said Rev. Deanna Vandiver, adding that the protesters shouted that their church was not a true faith. “Literally in our most tender and vulnerable space, religious terrorism began.” Operation Save America, which grew out of the Operation Rescue movement tied to the assassination of Dr. George Tiller , described the church as a “synagogue of Satan” for its longstanding support of reproductive rights. “During an open ‘meditation’ time, Deanna (Waller) shared the Word of the Lord,” the anti-abortion group said on its website. “When the female ‘pastor’ took issue, Deanna reminded her that, ‘It would be better for him if a millstone were hung around his neck, and he were thrown into the sea, than that he should offend one of these little ones’ (Luke 17:2).”

My thoughts on this are that I disagree with one of the opinions that floats around atheist circles, and that is the idea that Islam is somehow worse than Christianity in terms of violence and ugly behavior. Now granted, there's a lot of ugly behavior in the Middle East coming from thugs that practice Islam. The latest example is ISIS members stoning a woman to death in Iraq for "adultery", aka shagging the wrong guy. There's also Boko Haram in Nigeria, and the Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan kidnapping, and shooting little girls in the face, respectively, for the crime of going to school and learning to read.

But at the same time, one of my friends is a feminist Muslim. She believes very fervently in women's rights, but she also practices Islam, eats halal food, refrains from drinking, and prays five times a day. I suspect that the Taliban or Boko Haram would respond to her in the same ugly way that Operation Save America did to the Unitarian-Universalist Church, differing only in degree. At least Bentham's goons didn't shoot any Unitarians in the face... today...

But Operation Save America is a group that's descended from Randall Terry's group Operation Rescue, which bred fun characters like Scott Roeder, who did walk into a church and shoot a man, Dr. George Tiller, in the face.

When you really look at it, Christianity and Islam aren't all that different. It's social norms, fragile social norms, that keep religious extremism from running rampant and turning into mass violence.

Those social norms failed in many areas in the Middle East, leaving religious extremist groups like ISIS and the Taliban to run rampant. They've also failed in Vladimir Putin's Russia, where the LGBT community is persecuted at the behest of the Russian Orthodox Church. It's also failed in Christian-dominated Uganda, thanks to American preachers like Scott Lively, and now they've got mobs demanding the deaths of LGBT people, and literally hunting for witches. Witches. Didn't we get over witch hysteria back in the 17th century in North America?

So here's my question. How well are our social norms holding up? Operation Save America and other extreme Christian groups prove that if they thought they could act without restraint, they'd turn America into something out of The Handmaid's Tale, where women have to cover up like Muslim women in burqas, people are executed for homosexuality or adultery, and religious nonsense holds entire populations at gunpoint.

I don't think those social norms are invincible. In fact, it would take just a few minor mutations in Christian religious memes for American fundamentalist Christianity to become as bad as the Taliban. Just a little nudge, and we can revert to barbarism. We've already dipped our toes in the water, and the theocrats want us to dive right in.

We must fight groups like Operation Save America, the Westboro Baptist Church, and other, more mainstream extremist Christian groups that want to inflict their nonsense on our nation using the coercive power of the state, or at least the coercive power of brainwashed thugs with weapons. The Founding Fathers created the wall of separation between church and state for a reason, and if we don't remember that, we could easily lose our religious liberties and the rest of our freedom.

Groups like Operation Save America cannot be condemned strongly enough.

Easily Weaponized Superstitious Hokum. I couldn't agree more.