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Patch marketed to bikers and veterans.
It is therefore not an exaggeration to say that if the city of New York were replaced by a ball of fire, some significant percentage of the American population would see a silver lining in the subsequent mushroom cloud, as it would suggest to them that the best thing that is ever going to happen was about to happen: the return of Christ. It should be blindingly obvious that beliefs of this sort will do little to help us create a durable future for ourselves- socially, economically, environmentally, or geopolitically.
-Sam Harris
Since the assassination of physician, George Tiller, by Scott Roeder, a religious terrorist who differs from the 9/11 hijackers only by an accident of birth, segments of the media have pointed to PR statements plausibly denying him and his actions by various groups who seek to control women's bodies, as evidence that they were not complicit in Roeder's actions.
Neoconservative James Kirchick writes in an article entitled, The Religious Right Didn't Kill George Tiller, for Rupert Murdoch's Wall Street Journal:
Even Operation Rescue, the extreme antiabortion group that organized a six-week blockade of Tiller's office in 1991, issued a statement condemning the murder. "We denounce vigilantism and the cowardly act that took place this morning," Troy Newman, the organization's president, said.
Could these denunciations have a more practical basis, such as fear of asset forfeiture and/or jail time like the recent case against the Holy Land Foundation "under the "material support" provision of the Anti-terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, which provides that money in the hands of a terrorist organization, even if for charitable purposes, supports the organization's terrorist objectives" ? The protected status of Christianity in the US should not result in any more preferential treatment, and the assets of these groups should be seized. Environmental and animal rights groups are labeled as 'terrorists' for far less than what these kinds of militant theocrats advocate.
If the laws of the US were applied equally, these right-wing Christian groups would be subject the same kinds of investigations and legal action that their Islamic counterparts were, especially given Roeder's apparent ties to Operation Rescue and it's senior policy adviser, Cheryl Sullenger, (twitter feed) whose phone number was found on Roeder's dashboard at the time of his arrest.
The future of this kind of faith-based terrorism is made even more frightening by the emergence of Christian extremist elements that have found a home among US military officers and even at the Pentagon. Aside from reinforcing the Crusader mentality and image in the parts of the world currently under US military occupation for one reason or another, they are creating a hostile, even violent atmosphere for those in the military who do not share their views.
A excellent, recent article in Harper's Bazaar explores this phenomena in depth (it's long and scary, but worth reading) and interviews the Taliban-like commanders and their fellow officers-in-training who have been subjected to violence for refusing to convert to Christianity. An officer who graduated from the Air Force Academy started the Military Religious Freedom Foundation,in an attempt to restore some of the loss of separation of church and state in a military which is waging war against those who consider it to be another Western crusade. If you've seen Constantine's Sword, it's hard to forget Mikey Weinstein and the Inquisition that he and his family have endured for refusing to convert.
Central to Mikey’s worldview are two beatings he suffered as an eighteen-year-old doolie at the academy, retaliations for notifying his superiors about a series of anti-Semitic notes he’d received. Both beatings left him unconscious. Mikey put them behind him, graduating with honors; but his anger reignited in 2004, when his son Curtis, then a doolie himself, told Mikey he planned to beat the s*** out of the next cadet—or officer—who called him a “f***** Jew.” In 2005, when he created the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, he ornamented its board with a galaxy of retired generals, the stars on their shoulders meant to make clear that the foundation’s enemy is not the military. His enemy, he says, is “weaponized Christianity,” and his foundation is a weapon too: “We will lay down withering fire and open sucking chest wounds. This country is facing a pervasive and pernicious pattern and practice of unconstitutional rape of the religious rights of our armed forces members,” he says. He calls this “soul rape.”
It’s a strong term that at first sounds like typical over-the-top Mikey, but his struggle goes to the very heart of America’s First Amendment freedoms, dating back to the seventeenth century and Roger Williams, the founder of Rhode Island. Williams was a devout Christian, but based on his encounters with Native American leaders, whom he deemed honest men, and his dealings with the leaders of the Massachusetts colony, who sent him into exile, he concluded that outward religion—the piety of the Puritans—was no guarantee of inner virtue. What mattered most, he thought, was the ability to seek the good. So if the state restricted that search (through mandatory prayer, for instance, or discrimination against minority faiths), it violated the most basic freedom, that of individual conscience. Without the freedom to choose one’s own beliefs, Williams believed, no other freedom is really possible. Freedom of religion is thus bound to freedom from religion.
“In the military,” Mikey told me one night in Albuquerque, “many constitutional rights that we as civilians enjoy are severely abridged in order to serve a higher goal: provide good order and discipline in order to protect the whole panoply of constitutional rights for the rest of us.” One of those rights is free speech: a soldier in uniform can’t endorse a political candidate, advertise a product, or proselytize. That rule is for the good of the public—no one wants men with guns telling them whom to vote for—and for the military itself. An officer can tell a soldier what to do, but not what to believe; conscience is its own order.
This is even more terrifying when coupled with the violence advocated by abortion opponents. There are possibly thousands of Eric Rudolphs and Timothy McVeighs returning from Iraq and Afghanistan, with their urban combat experience, a mindset that they are carrying out the "Lord's work' through force of arms, and PTSD. Many of them will also take jobs in law enforcement and public safety, professions that exist outside of the law, where they will be free to impose their views on an unwitting civilian populace. The US military was a much more secular institution when Rudolph and McVeigh were there and a desperate military ignores the vast numbers of white supremacists who enlist for military training to use back in the US.
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