Author Topic: Center For American Progress Panel: End 'Christian Privilege' In Name of Religious Freedom  (Read 777 times)

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Offline Rapunzel

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http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2013/12/13/Center-For-American-Progress-Panel-End-Christian-Privilege-In-Name-of-Religious-Freedom

Center For American Progress Panel: End 'Christian Privilege' In Name of Religious Freedom

by Dr. Susan Berry 13 Dec 2013, 10:56 AM PDT

A panel discussion sponsored by John Podesta’s Center for American Progress (CAP) on Thursday came to the conclusion that Christian conservatives use religion as a justification for their discriminatory behavior. Americans, they argue, will never enjoy full religious freedom until Christians’ claims for religious liberty are defeated.

According to Joel Gehrke at the Washington Examiner, the Rev. Dr. C. Welton Gaddy, president of the George Soros-funded Interfaith Alliance, said, “People [are] using the term ‘liberty’ when they really mean ‘my liberty, your slavery.’’

Gaddy argued that the left’s view of religious liberty comes from an originalist reading of the Constitution that was universally understood in the early days of the nation. He said that, unfortunately, the American people have become “confused” and misled about the issue of religious liberty by the United States Catholic bishops.

"You have the Catholic bishops advocating for 'religious freedom,' which doesn't look anything like what religious freedom is in the Constitution," Gaddy said. "Unless we do those kind of dramatic actions [such as the ACLU suing the USCCB] in order to get us back to what the foundation of religious freedom has been all the time, it's going to get worse and worse, with people using the term 'liberty' when they really mean 'my liberty, your slavery.'"

"See, I grew up in a part of the country where we really believed in religious liberty but we really enforced bondage on everyone else, and it was because we were Christians and we had the Bible," Gaddy said.

Similarly, ACLU senior counsel Eunice Rho continued the narrative that religious beliefs work to justify discriminatory behavior. Rho denounced attempts to pass a Religious Freedom Restoration Act in various states.

“These are very dangerous because they can allow religion to be used to harm others,” Rho said.

Gaddy likened Christian florists who refuse to provide services to gay weddings due to religious beliefs to employers who would post “whites only” signs in their storefronts.

“I don’t think we don’t want to go down that road again,” Gaddy said, and later agreed with another panel participant who said that liberals “need to start educating, and calling out, Christians for trying to exercise ‘Christian privilege.’”

Gaddy’s views are in sharp contrast to the Coalition of African-American Pastors (CAAP) who condemn gay rights activists’ use of the black civil rights movement to prop up gay weddings.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GacRPKtQ7eA

The Rev. William Owens, president of CAAP, organized students during the civil rights movement and marched with Martin Luther King.

As Breitbart News reported in August, Owens said the black community “knows that our civil rights were won through a strong faith in God, and most still believe that the truths of our faith say that marriage should be between a man and a woman.”

Regarding President Obama’s statement that his view of same-sex “marriage” “evolved” to allow him to support it, Owens told Breitbart News, “Obama is the most powerful man in the country, and he sent a signal that same-sex marriage is okay. Well, we don’t think it’s right, and that day was the day the dynamics changed.”

In the CAP panel discussion, however, Sally Steenland, director of the Faith and Progressive Policy Initiative at the Soros-funded CAP, said, “It sets up a false equation of ‘my religious liberty versus same-sex marriage, reproductive rights’ – as if those two are inherently opposed and you’ve got to choose one versus the other. And we, as we’ll talk about later in the panel, know that’s not the case.”

As Gehrke observes, however, that claim is at odds with the position of gay activist Chai Feldblum, whom President Obama appointed to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

Perhaps acknowledging the inherent weakness in the argument for sexual liberty, Feldblum said in 2006, “There can be a conflict between religious liberty and sexual liberty, but in almost all cases the sexual liberty should win because that’s the only way that the dignity of gay people can be affirmed in any realistic manner.”

Gehrke notes, however, that the CAP panelists “never explained why Feldblum was wrong or articulated a judicable principle that reconciled the apparent tension between the sexual liberty of gay couples wanting to marry and the religious liberty of Christian-conservative business owners who don't want to service their weddings.”

Using what Gehrke describes as “clichéd comparisons” between Christians who oppose gay marriage and people who oppose interracial marriage, the panelists continued their discussion.

“We don’t tolerate that type of behavior,” Human Rights Campaign’s Sarah Wurbelow said. “Serving a client through a contract is not the same thing as putting your imprimatur on it, saying, ‘I agree with this particular marriage.’”

Similarly, NARAL deputy policy council Lissy Moskowitz expressed concern about the Hobby Lobby lawsuit pending before the Supreme Court, in which the Christian business owners claim that being forced to pay for employees’ contraception violates their religious beliefs.

“That’s the concern, that if the court rules in favor of Hobby Lobby, the concern is that, well, in this context, it's birth control, but what's not to stop another boss from saying, 'Well, I don't want to cover vaccines, mental health, blood transfusions' — I mean, the list goes on and on, and it's really worrisome," Moskowitz said.

 
« Last Edit: December 13, 2013, 11:18:52 pm by Rapunzel »
�The time is now near at hand which must probably determine, whether Americans are to be, Freemen, or Slaves.� G Washington July 2, 1776

Offline Rapunzel

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and Podesta is moving into the White House!!!!!!!!
�The time is now near at hand which must probably determine, whether Americans are to be, Freemen, or Slaves.� G Washington July 2, 1776

Offline flowers

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Online andy58-in-nh

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Quote
Gaddy likened Christian florists who refuse to provide services to gay weddings due to religious beliefs to employers who would post “whites only” signs in their storefronts.

... as opposed to radical Islamists who behead homosexuals and enslave entire populations, about whom CAP and its radical leftist adherents have no qualm, so long as they seek, mutually, the ruination of America, a profound hatred of which they share?

Racism is virtually non-existent among Christians. It is non-existent because they are Christians. Christians are also largely content to leave gay people alone to live their own lives. Gays are accepted as human beings, while their behavior is disapproved of, as is the right - not the "privilege" - of every living human being, regardless of one's faith. The Left's false accusations of racism/sexism/homophobia/bigotry are by now so reflexive and predictable that they ought to provoke not anger, but laughter. But they are serious, nonetheless.

Demanding the approval of others for objectively abnormal human behavior under penalty of law is tyrannical, and make no mistake about it: state tyranny is what the Left now demands. And in order to obtain it, they first need to deny the source of our rights, which is not the State, but God.
"The most terrifying force of death, comes from the hands of Men who wanted to be left Alone. They try, so very hard, to mind their own business and provide for themselves and those they love. They resist every impulse to fight back, knowing the forced and permanent change of life that will come from it. They know, that the moment they fight back, their lives as they have lived them, are over. -Alexander Solzhenitsyn

Offline Rapunzel

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good post, Andy.
�The time is now near at hand which must probably determine, whether Americans are to be, Freemen, or Slaves.� G Washington July 2, 1776

Offline Atomic Cow

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This will end in bloodshed.  The left cannot achieve total victory unless they exterminate all opposition.
"...And these atomic bombs which science burst upon the world that night were strange, even to the men who used them."  H. G. Wells, The World Set Free, 1914

"The one pervading evil of democracy is the tyranny of the majority, or rather of that party, not always the majority, that succeeds, by force or fraud, in carrying elections." -Lord Acton

Online kevindavis007

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I wish these numbskulls will go after Islam, but they are cowards.
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Online andy58-in-nh

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This will end in bloodshed.  The left cannot achieve total victory unless they exterminate all opposition.

I pray you are wrong.

That said, I believe America faces two fundamentally incompatible visions of the proper role of government in society. One such vision relies upon the philosophical base flowing in time from Aristotle, to Edmund Burke and John Locke, to Alexander Hamilton and James Madison, to Michael Oakeshott to Russell Kirk and William Buckley and Ronald Reagan. This is the basis of modern conservatism, which recognizes universally inalienable human liberty as a precondition to ordered society.

The other flows in time from Plato to Jean-Jacques Rousseau to John Stuart Mill to Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels to John Dewey and Woodrow Wilson, to Eugene Debs and Herbert Marcuse, to Tom Hayden and Bill Ayers.  Theirs is the philosophy of collectivism, of the primacy of the state and the sublimation of human freedom and property to the satisfaction of need and want. 

I have left out many contributors on both sides in order to provide a rough timeline of the development of both competing visions. The competition is, at long last coming to a head in our own country. One side will win; both cannot. Conservatives find themselves at a disadvantage, both culturally and politically, owing to the Progressive project's 100-year effort to dominate America's social and government institutions, which they now do. But they are hardly powerless, except for the failure to effectively control at least one of America's two major political parties. Absent that development, and given the triumph of the Leftist vision everywhere else on the globe, it is hard to see how they might triumph in the near term.
"The most terrifying force of death, comes from the hands of Men who wanted to be left Alone. They try, so very hard, to mind their own business and provide for themselves and those they love. They resist every impulse to fight back, knowing the forced and permanent change of life that will come from it. They know, that the moment they fight back, their lives as they have lived them, are over. -Alexander Solzhenitsyn

Online Fishrrman

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Atomic Cow wrote:
[[ This will end in bloodshed.  The left cannot achieve total victory unless they exterminate all opposition. ]]

and Andy58 replied:
[[ The competition is, at long last coming to a head in our own country. One side will win; both cannot. ]]

The left may win by way of creeping progressivism -- infiltration into the culture, the schools, the government (a close examination of employees of the federal government will show that an ever-larger share is composed of folks of non-Euro heritage). And they actively will use without qualms the raw physical power of government, both of the uniformed military and the ever-larger-growing segment of "civilian agency" paramilitary police to subjugate ordinary Americans. Ultimately -- be it by circumstantial development or by intentional design -- the socialist/police state will grow. As it's growing right now.

Against this, there's only one way for "the folks" of the red states to win. I doubt it can be peaceful, because the left will never accede to The Right in peaceful good-faith agreement. They are treacherous and deceitful to the end.

Remember what Thomas Jefferson said about "the tree", Andy -- it's as true today as back then. Perhaps more true today, than ever before.

We're approaching a time similar to where we were back around 1856.
The South -- whether or not you ascribe to their cause and reasons -- knew what they had to do. Of course, they weren't successful in their efforts -- but at least, they tried.

What the "conservative side" of America faces today is a choice no different.
With consequences, no different.

Conservative, traditional (and Euro) Americans must decide to either:
1. Submit, or
2. Resist, by force of arms if need be.

I don't see any other possible way out of this.
I could be wrong.
« Last Edit: December 14, 2013, 08:57:17 pm by Fishrrman »

Offline mountaineer

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I wish these numbskulls will go after Islam, but they are cowards.
Yes, they are. Cowards and hypocrites.
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