Conservative Pundit Pat Buchanan Compares Anti-Gay Bigotry To Civil Rights Movement
In an article that was published Thursday in conspiratorial dirt sheet WND, former Republican Presidential candidate and longtime culture war commander Pat Buchanan called for conservative Christian to take to civil disobedience to force the country to accept that the United States is a Christian nation. He commended Oklahoma Governor Mary Fallin for initially refusing to take down a statue of the Ten Commandments from the state capitol after a court ruling, and said that her actions are a “harbinger of what is to come in America,” which is right-winger pushing taking to the streets to defend their rights to force their religion on others and generally be bigots.
Buchanan, who has long been a voice for the Religious Right and is unapologetically a closed minded asshole, directly compared today’s anti-gay activists and defenders of “religious liberty” to the civil rights icons of the ’50s and ’60s and anti-abolitionists. In Buchanan’s opinion, since America has a tradition of defying Supreme Court decisions and tyranny, those who want to take away equal rights should push back against the government and make their voices heard. You know, just like those who actually HAD their rights trampled on.
From Buchanan’s column:
U.S. Supreme Court decisions have been defied and those who defied them lionized by modernity. Thomas Jefferson freed all imprisoned under the sedition act, including those convicted in court trials presided over by Supreme Court justices. Jefferson then declared the law dead.
Some Americans want to replace Andrew Jackson on the $20 bill with Harriet Tubman, who, defying the Dred Scott decision and fugitive slave acts, led slaves to freedom on the Underground Railroad.
New England abolitionists backed the anti-slavery fanatic John Brown, who conducted the raid on Harpers Ferry that got him hanged but helped to precipitate a Civil War. That war was fought over whether 11 Southern states had the same right to break free of Mr. Lincoln’s Union as the 13 colonies did to break free of George III’s England.
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In the civil rights era, defying laws mandating segregation and ignoring court orders banning demonstrations became badges of honor.
Rosa Parks is a heroine because she refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery bus, despite the laws segregating public transit that relegated blacks to the “back of the bus.”
In “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” Dr. King, defending civil disobedience, cited Augustine – “an unjust law is no law at all” – and Aquinas who defined an unjust law as “a human law that is not rooted in eternal law and natural law.”
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Rosa Parks is celebrated. But the pizza lady who said her Christian beliefs would not permit her to cater a same-sex wedding was declared a bigot. And the LGBT crowd, crowing over its Supreme Court triumph, is writing legislation to make it a violation of federal civil rights law for that lady to refuse to cater that wedding.
Later on in his article, Buchanan railed against Obamacare and its mandates for businesses to provide contraceptives in their insurance plans, pointing out that many have already refused to do so. He then decried the notion that tax exemptions for churches might be in the near future. He concluded his column by saying that America is on the edge of a secession due to the fundamental disagreement between good and evil.
If a family disagreed as broadly as we Americans do on issues so fundamental as right and wrong, good and evil, the family would fall apart, the couple would divorce, and the children would go their separate ways.
Something like that is happening in the country.
A secession of the heart has already taken place in America, and a secession, not of states, but of people from one another, caused by divisions on social, moral, cultural and political views and values, is taking place.
America is disuniting, Arthur Schlesinger Jr. wrote 25 years ago.
And for those who, when young, rejected the views, values and laws of Eisenhower’s America, what makes them think that dissenting Americans in this post-Christian and anti-Christian era will accept their laws, beliefs, values?
Why should they?
In other news, Buchanan is a crazy old coot who doesn’t even try to hide his prejudiced heart anymore. For fuck’s sake, he’s writing for WND! However, he is a man that has always been given a platform to spew his terrible views — currently he is a Fox News contributor (natch) — and tends to reach more people than your typical batshit insane preacher on AM radio. Therefore, while it is easy to dismiss his commentary as that of the whacked-out far-right, it isn’t as if it isn’t being taken seriously by a number of people.
