Light Your Faith

There's a lot of weird religious stuff in my Twitter feed tonight.  I swear they're just doing it to drive me crazy.  I have no idea what "incendiary apologetics" is supposed to mean.

Then there was this one.  Elizabeth Breunig, along with Daniel Larison, is one of the less tiresome Christians on Twitter.  (The historian Kevin M. Kruse, alas, is becoming a bit more tiresome as time passes, but I'll go into that some other time; tomorrow is another day.)

I sympathize with her on the hatemail thing; that shouldn't be happening to her.  But hate is just Christian love.  And why isn't she anti-Catholic?  If the rapists "hate the faith," why did the faith protect them for so long?

By contrast, the SF writer Cory Doctorow (who isn't a Christian as far as I know), posted some good news.  I knew that the Satanic Temple has been doing good work against religious fascism in America, which Doctorow sums up in that thread.  I've noticed before the 1984 Equal Access Act, which was intended to give Christian groups access to spaces in public schools, ended up as a lever to force schools to allow Gay-Straight Alliances to form and meet in the schools.  I'd hoped that the Religious Freedom Restoration Act would boomerang in the same way, and the Satanic Temple has found a way:

"A Satanic Abortion," Doctorow explains, "is a religious ritual that is totally indistinguishable from a normal, medical abortion, except that the participant says a few self-affirming words about her bodily autonomy.  Oh, also: the ritual absolutely forbids, as a bedrock matter of religous conviction, any waiting periods, the withholding of medically necessary advice, mandatory counseling, required readings, and unnecessary sonograms. Also forbidden: mandatory fetal heartbeat listening sessions and compulsory fetal burials. If you want an abortion and the doctor tries this bullshit, hand them one of these exemption letters explaining how the law doesn't apply thanks to the RFRA."

As a result, Doctorow says, "Now, the religious right could fight this. But if they win...they overturn the RFRA, and Hobby Lobby has to provide its employees with contraception and all the other theocratic exemptions go poof, too."  I don't know if it would work out so neatly, but it should.  This is what happens when instead of resorting to the preferred liberal tactic of throwing tantrums about the wickedness of the religious Right, you turn their methods against them.