The Religious Right in Three Fights

By Rabbi David Eidensohn

The Religious Right just had three fights. One, with the Supreme Court when it revoked sodomy laws, two, when a Federal Judge ordered the removal of the Ten Commandments from Judge Moore’s courthouse, and three, when a major distributor of movies refused to distribute Mel Gibson’s movie. In each of these battles, the religious right made a great protest, but failed.

This is part of the general trend in the battle between family people and the Gay Lobby. Why is it that tens of millions of Americans cannot stop the destruction of its traditional values? If we do not answer this question, family and religious values are doomed.

The Battle of Gettysburg found General Robert E. Lee in bitter disputation with his senior Lieutenant, General Longstreet. General Longstreet wanted the Confederate Army to go around the Union army and camp between the Federal camp and Washington, D.C. This would force the Feds to charge defended Confederate positions. Lee wanted his troops to charge straight into the waiting Federal artillery. Longstreet could not convince Lee. The heavily fortified North enfiladed and destroyed the southern soldiers attacking in brave but hopeless charges.

Whose army was better? The issue was never decided. All that was decided was the basic premise that an army behind artillery and barricades can defeat a horde of people crossing open fields.

The three battles of: sodomy laws, the Ten Commandments, and Gibson’s movie all follow the pattern of the North defeating the South. The Religious Right defended an indefensible position and lost. This has nothing to do with the power of the Religious Right. It only means that when the Religious Right charges across an open field into waiting cannon, do not expect victory. Let us explain.

First, sodomy laws. Let us imagine a thousand people gather to protest the Supreme Court ruling. We ask, “Whoever wants the police to arrest someone for doing that with his wife, raise your hand.” How many hands would go up? Conservatives despise police power over the family in any form other than criminal abuse. Promoting government regulation of what consenting married people do is charging artillery with a rifle and will not carry the day. What the conservatives want is for a law to be on the books but not enforced. Such a position is untenable. Do we make laws not to enforce them?

The religious right claims that if this law is not on the books, eventually people will commit polygamy, bestiality, and sado-masochism. This is true, but do we make a law we do not want in practical terms because it protects other sins or crimes? Any law not designed for enforcement is a joke. The Religious Right charges a defended position. Does this mean the Religious Right is wrong? Should it accept the Supreme Court’s ruling and not fight? Absolutely not. The damage is real. However, our point is only to realize what Lee did not. You must have a powerful position to win a battle. If we fight in bad terrain, we are looking for trouble.

Our position in the Ten Commandments case is much stronger. Gibbons says that a civilization is its religion. Our religion is the Sinaitic values of the Torah given to Israel at Sinai, especially the Ten Commandments. The Ten Commandments are the font of morality for the modern world. Therefore, the Ten Commandments belong in a courtroom. Why is this a poor position?

Nobody mentioned this, but in fact, the Religious Right has a problem with the Ten Commandments. The Religious Right does not believe in the Ten Commandments. Does the Religious Right believe in the first commandment, “I am the L-d your G-d who brought you forth from the land of Egypt from the house of bondage”? Just what American Protestants can say this? The Catholics, as I understand, realized this and simply erased the first command! They then had only nine commands, so they configured a tenth command. Is this a strong position? Shall society rest upon a foundation that is already hacked to pieces by the people who present it?

Does the Religious Right believe in the command to honor the seventh day as the Sabbath? They do not. They replaced Saturday with Sunday. Therefore, obviously, the Ten Commandments is not the American religion. Rather it is a specifically Jewish document only awkwardly accepted by Christians. For a Christian to fight for the Ten Commandments is therefore a dubious stand.

We now come to Mel Gibson’s movie. I never saw it, but I read about it on World Net Daily, in an article by Elizabeth Farah. She says that there is a long scene of Jews in a fury tearing away at a body hanging nailed to a cross. Mel Gibson wants us to believe that millions of devout Christians will watch Jews torturing and mutilating their deity and walk out of the theater just as cool as cucumbers. They will smile pleasantly to the next Jew they meet. Obviously, Christians have a lot of cool.

Does Mel Gibson have a lot of cool? A New York Times reporter wrote that Mel’s father said such and such about the Holocaust. Mel said, regarding the reporter, “I want to kill that man. I want to hang his intestines on a stick in my backyard. I want to kill his dog.” Mel lost his cool because somebody insulted his father. What happens when you insult somebody’s deity? What do people feel like when somebody savages their deity? How “cool” are they going to be? As cool as Mel? Therefore, the position of the Religious Right, that Mel’s movie will not produce hate for Jews, is ludicrous.

Why did the Communists, Nazis, and Gay Lobby succeed? First of all, they decided exactly what they wanted to do, in detail. Secondly, they focused on their manifesto and worked steadily until they implemented it. Thirdly, they proceeded with logic and rationality, like computers, going from A to B to C. Even when they failed, they regrouped and carried on, further and further. Ultimately, they achieved a critical mass and took control. This is exactly what the Gay Lobby is doing.

The Family Lobby has a few people who fight like that. I am one of them. Of course, I am one person, and the few activists on our website are also individuals. Some of them have struggled for years without funding. The gays have fortunes. The gays make dinners attended by presidents and global billionaires. Those who fight them either do so as part of a church organization mostly interested in the church, or pinch pennies to survive. This is no way to fight. It is very nice for people to pray that the wheels come off the wagon taking the Ten Commandments out of a courthouse. If they had funded anti-gay and radical groups properly, it would never have happened in the first place.

H. G. Wells once said that in a struggle between two camps, the victor is the one sure and vociferous in his position. The loser is the person willing to listen to two sides of the issue. He wrote then about the battle between science and religion. In those days, the clergy was focused while science claimed no clear vision of the truth. Today, things are reversed. Secular people are triumphant and fanatic, and religious people are melting; their theology twists in the wind. A recent World Net Daily column by its editor David Kupelian revealed that about ninety percent of Protestant clergy do not accept the church’s theology. How can such people fight for their beliefs? Of course, many do not.

The Gay Lobby is comprised of focused fanatics. The Religious Right has no clear theology, if it has one at all. It only knows that whoever disagrees with a particular idea has no portion in paradise. This includes all secular and most religious people in the world. Such ideas are exactly what the Gay Lobby wants. America will not tolerate mortals who rise up and claim that everyone who disagrees with them are to be destroyed.

We must disengage the battles for family and even respect for the bible from the church, its theologies, and squabbles. The church, since its earliest times, has featured ferocious theological battles that come and go, usually involving enormous bloodshed. A concentrated secularism cuts through these squabbles like a hot knife through butter. Every year we read that another religion has collapsed its fight against the gays. Of course. There is no steady theology, only a moving and misty dogma. It will not stop the Gay Lobby.

Not long ago I received an e-mail from a group of religious people who had enough. They determined that America is dying spiritually and the church as well. The solution? Violence. A few bombs here and there, they concluded, is the solution. Somehow, they reason, if people see that religious people are serious, everyone will simply prostrate themselves before the bombers and their dogma.

Guess again.

Frustration, if endured long enough, invariably brings violence. This is where religious Americans are now. Some on the fringes have already taken to bombing, such as Timothy McVeigh and the abortion-doctor killer. Some consider them heroes. These were not necessarily bad people, originally. They were perhaps good people, who have no plan, no program, to stop the incredible wave of secular fanatics. The constant pain of losing battle after battle snapped them. Trapped in failure, here and there we have actual violence or discussion of such. Nothing will so damage religious values as violence.

Everyone agrees we need values, morality, and even religion. Voltaire, the mighty enemy of the church, said, “If there was no G-d, we would have to invent Him.” To those who wanted the French Revolution to reject G-d, Rousseau thundered, “Atheism is the luxury of royalty.” On the other hand, the Thirty Years War and the Hundred Years War convinced the Christian world that religion must not play a major role in government. Religious people, not the atheists, created secularism. They needed it to protect religious people from murdering other religious people. For this reason, any government past the sixteenth century will think twice about ensconcing religion in its legal fabric. Nothing is so dear to the atheists and secular radicals than a bid by religious people for control of society. Now, they proclaim, you see that religion is dangerous. We must train people to hate religion just as we hate bondage, they trumpet.

If religious people want a country that respects, honors. and learns from religion, they must avoid frustration. They are not helpless. They are perhaps the strongest block in America. On the other hand, if they do not plan properly, if they do not have a realistic program, only frustration will reward their efforts.

Religion requires that the Gay Lobby and radicals be stopped. Only a secular program can do that. We cannot destroy the Nazis, Communists, and radical secularists by claiming that our theology detests them. They, too, have a theology. Their theology is organized, as evil as it is, and in the modern world, may give us a run for our money.

We cannot spend our lives and precious little time left for us in futile efforts, even if they make us feel good. They will win everything if we push religion on secular society. We can only protect our religious freedoms by launching a ferocious secular offensive against the gay lobby. This offensive must speak in secular terms. We must break the power of anyone who calls us names like “homophobe” or “hater.” We must repeal all Gay Rights Bills that criminalize teaching the bible and its anti-gay messages. We must make sure that the gays cannot sue us for discrimination in our religious settings. We must resist the ubiquitous terror of fanatics.

We must match them dollar for dollar. We must make war on the global billionaires who back the gay lobby and get a free ticket to invest in China and destroy American jobs. We have so much to do, and so little time to do it. When we do our job, we will not need sodomy laws, we will gain new respect for the Ten Commandments, and we will not have a hideous Hollywood to anger Mel Gibson and prompt him to make his movie. Whatever we do, we have to win. There is no other way. Religion cannot otherwise survive.