Christian Right activist Bryan Fischer doesn’t read so good. So when it comes to the First Amendment, he somehow thinks freedom of religion only applies to which denomination of Christianity you’d like to be.

By extension, he claims non-Christians don’t have any First Amendment rights. That’s the point he made on his radio show yesterday when discussing a case involving a Wiccan prisoner in North Carolina demanding the same religious rights as other inmates.

Fischer said there was no need for the accommodation.

“The blunt, simple, direct, straightforward answer is that Wiccans do not have First Amendment rights,” he said, “nor do Muslims, nor do Jews, nor do Native Americans, nor do Rastafarians, nor do any practitioners of any other religion other than Christianity.” “Whatever the First Amendment is about, whatever protections it extends in the federal Constitution, those were just for Christianity,” Fischer insisted. “Christianity has First Amendment rights under the federal Constitution, no other religion does.”

If an atheist said the same thing about Christians, Fischer would call it persecution. But I guess he’s allowed to throw non-Christians under the bus.

To be sure, there’s no credible interpretation of the First Amendment that lines up with his theory. Hell, even the Founders weren’t all Christian. Some were atheists and Deists. So why would they carve out special rights just for Christians?

(And if Fischer is right, then we ought to at least be able to use that argument when it comes to the Second Amendment, since there’s no way the Founders were thinking about semi-automatic high-capacity weapons. Does that mean we can ban them?)

As judges have long said, the First Amendment applies to people of all faiths and no faith. It’s not a special rule that only applies to Jesus lovers at the expense of everybody else.

But Fischer’s never been the sort of person who cares about facts, so expect him to keep making this fallacious argument. Christians like him have no problem with lying in the name of Jesus.

(via Right Wing Watch. Portions of this article were posted earlier)

