1980 prediction: "Christian Fascists" - persecution of gays and lesbians

[chat_noir]

Soldiers of Christ II

I can’t help but recall the words of my ethics professor at Harvard Divinity School, Dr. James Luther Adams, who told us that when we were his age, and he was then close to eighty, we would all be fighting the “Christian fascists.”

He gave us that warning twenty-five years ago, when Pat Robertson and other prominent evangelists began speaking of a new political religion that would direct its efforts at taking control of all major American institutions, including mainstream denominations and the government, so as to transform the United States into a global Christian empire. At the time, it was hard to take such fantastic rhetoric seriously. But fascism, Adams warned, would not return wearing swastikas and brown shirts. Its ideological inheritors would cloak themselves in the language of the Bible; they would come carrying crosses and chanting the Pledge of Allegiance.

Adams had watched American intellectuals and industrialists flirt with fascism in the 1930s. Mussolini’s “Corporatism,” which created an unchecked industrial and business aristocracy, had appealed to many at the time as an effective counterweight to the New Deal. In 1934, Fortune magazine lavished praise on the Italian dictator for his defanging of labor unions and his empowerment of industrialists at the expense of workers. Then as now, Adams said, too many liberals failed to understand the power and allure of evil, and when the radical Christians came, these people would undoubtedly play by the old, polite rules of democracy long after those in power had begun to dismantle the democratic state. Adams had watched German academics fall silent or conform. He knew how desperately people want to believe the comfortable lies told by totalitarian movements, how easily those lies lull moderates into passivity.

Adams told us to watch closely the Christian right’s persecution of homosexuals and lesbians. Hitler, he reminded us, promised to restore moral values not long after he took power in 1933, then imposed a ban on all homosexual and lesbian organizations and publications. Then came raids on the places where homosexuals gathered, culminating on May 6, 1933, with the ransacking of the Institute for Sexual Science in Berlin. Twelve thousand volumes from the institute’s library were tossed into a public bonfire. Homosexuals and lesbians, Adams said, would be the first “deviants” singled out by the Christian right. We would be the next.

http://www.harpers.org/FeelingTheHate.html

[PurpleChez]

1. A chilling bit of clairvoyance.

If there had been more people, like your professor, who could see what was coming, I wonder if we could have stopped it.

[enough]

2. Direct link

to the article by Chris Hedges quoted in the OP.

http://www.harpers.org/FeelingTheHate.html

[Ian David]

3. See also: Holy War (By the Southern Poverty Law Center)

See also:

Holy War
The religious crusade against gays has been building for 30 years. Now the movement is reaching truly biblical proportions
By Bob Moser
http://www.splcenter.org/intel/intelreport/article.jsp?aid=522

[populistdriven]

4. so who is second?

1. When George W. Bush was first elected, Pat Robertson resigned as head of the Christian Coalition, a sign to many that Bush was the first in an expected line of regents that will herald the coming of the Messiah.

[triakis36]

5. You're right. We can't become complacent about protecting our rights.

It's easy to think these things only happened in the past, as if somehow we are better now and won't slip back into that kind of barbaric political atmosphere. But that's the same thing people back then thought. Your professor is right, there were educated people, intellectuals who should have known better. These people have read the history books, seen what had happened before, and as it is happening right before their eyes can't or won't do anything about it.

Hitler and the holocaust is an easy example of what horrors can be committed by a totalitarian state. But fast forward just a few years and Americans horrified by the same atrocities builds similar internment camps to imprison thousands of innocent Japanese. Take that same thought and apply it to the present and we have Guantanamo Bay.

Take it a little further, and fundamentalists could strip away the rights to every homosexual, black, brown, liberal person in the country. Toss everyone into a barren desert state, lock it up, and call it a reservation. Already we have some countries, like the one in Africa, criminalizing homosexuality and even criminalizing opposition. We can't have that happen in our country. We can't stop fighting for our rights. Coretta Scott King might have died of old age, but Martin Luther King, Jr. was murdered. We can't forget that. We can't let fascist fundamentalists take control, or history will repeat itself.

[Brian_Expat]

6. Sadly. . .

. . . the Democrats are marching us along as well.

If they can "win" by letting the GOPers send us to the ovens, they'll let it happen and later express "regret."

[mitchtv]

7. not ovens but rather Faith based prisons

ala FLA. KBR is setting them up now. The desert will kill many "naturally." Winters in ID and UT will accomplish the same. The mormons will convert us posthumously.