{"id":1373,"date":"2015-04-02T15:04:09","date_gmt":"2015-04-02T19:04:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/66.147.242.160\/~stumbli4\/?p=1373"},"modified":"2015-04-02T15:04:09","modified_gmt":"2015-04-02T19:04:09","slug":"pro-gay-slavery-it-will-stop-when-its-stopped","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stumblingblock.org\/?p=1373","title":{"rendered":"Pro-Gay Slavery: It Will Stop When It’s Stopped"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"To<\/a>

To be Christian is to hate, Yes?<\/p><\/div>\n

At The Stream, John Zmirak is coldly accurate<\/a>:<\/p>\n

If you have been following mass media over the past few days, you will have learned from an economist at the U.S. Department of Labor that defenders of religious freedom are \u201cNazis<\/a>.\u201d Take a moment to ponder that assertion. Roll it around in your head for a while. You\u2019ll be hearing a lot more fighting words as we enter the next phase of Christian life in America.<\/p>\n

Sample the hate that has been spewed at the state of Indiana in the past week, and faithful Christians in recent years, by gay activists and their allies. We are \u201cbigots,\u201d \u201cNeanderthals\u201d and \u201chaters,\u201d whose views must be ritually rejected by anyone hoping to keep a job<\/em> in today\u2019s America \u2014 even in a Catholic high school. Where will this end? Is there a logical stopping point for this aggression, where Christians are left in peace?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

If you are in China, it may seem to have no end.\u00a0 If you are in Russia, you know it ends when it’s stopped<\/a>.<\/p>\n

History teaches that mass vilification rarely stops short of spilling blood. The French Jacobins who spent the 1780s slandering the clergy in pornographic pamphlets went on in the 1790s to slaughter Christians by the hundreds of thousands<\/a>. The Turks paved the way<\/a> for killing a million Armenian Christians with a wave of propaganda. The Bolsheviks followed their \u201canti-God<\/a>\u201d crusade of the 1920s with starvation camps and firing squads. The Communist governments of Eastern Europe obeyed the same script, as scholar Anne Applebaum documents in her sobering study The Iron Curtain<\/a><\/em>. The Hutu government of Rwanda prepared for its assault on the once-powerful Tutsis by incessantly describing them as \u201ccockroaches<\/a>\u201d on radio broadcasts, which triggered a genocide.<\/p>\n

If the media, the law and our elite institutions succeed in lumping Christian sexual morals in with white racism<\/em>, how long will it be before believing Catholics, Protestants, Orthodox (and many religious minorities) find themselves labelled as members of \u201cextremist sects,\u201d no more to be trusted with the care of their own children than the Branch Davidians<\/a> were?<\/p>\n

Does that sound crazy to you? Then ask yourself why the German government, and the European Court of Human Rights, felt justified in seizing a Christian home-schooled student<\/a>\u00a0\u2014 with the apparent approval <\/a>of the Obama administration. Think about the moral views you teach your own kids. Would your local education bureaucrats approve?<\/p>\n

Perhaps Chicago\u2019s cardinal, Francis George, wasn\u2019t guilty of hyperbole when he said<\/a>, \u201cI expect to die in bed, my successor will die in prison and his successor will die a martyr in the public square.\u201d<\/p>\n

Joining him would\u00a0be many Christians who affirm the Gospel in its integrity \u2014 instead of the neutered version that\u2019s now sweeping the denominations to swell the ranks of the persecutors. See the Episcopalians and Presbyterians who are now blessing same-sex marriages; see \u201cCatholic\u201d universities <\/a>such as Marquette<\/a>, which fired a professor for defending the Catholic Catechism on this subject, and bishops such as Paul Bootkowski of Metuchen, N.J., who backed up a Catholic school that suspended a Catholic teacher<\/a> for her Facebook comments critical of gay activism. With shepherds like these, who really needs wolves?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Zmirak says we should not be surprised at the hate and contempt gay militants have for Christians.\u00a0 The question is, “What should we do?”<\/p>\n

If Indiana caves and guts its religious freedom law\u00a0\u2014 as Gov. Mike Pence has already promised\u00a0<\/a>\u2014 it will prove an equal triumph for those who are so enraged at Christian teaching that they are willing to persecute Christians<\/em>.<\/p>\n

If these zealots succeed, they will tear up the civil peace in this country, forcing millions of Americans to choose between church and state. If laws or government policies beggar Christian businesses, close Christian colleges and schools and force faithful Christians into third-class citizenship \u2014 making us virtual dhimmis<\/em>, like the Christian Copts in Egypt \u2014 what should we do? What should be our response now that we know what they want to do, and are overplaying their hand, but before they complete their coup d\u2019etat?<\/p>\n

We need to ask ourselves some brutal questions: How should the faithful\u00a0in\u00a0the\u00a0U.S. military respond? What about those in the state and\u00a0local police? City, state and federal employees? What about religious\u00a0shareholders in corporations led by anti-Christians, such as Apple<\/a>?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

He closes with the hopeful thought that the situation isn’t new or unusual for the Church, and it has been overcome before.<\/p>\n

We should not let\u00a0the possibility or even the likelihood of \u201cfailure\u201d make us timid. Witness is utterly different from propaganda, more fragile but far\u00a0more enduring.<\/p>\n

For centuries, the early Christians endured far worse than we might face, dying in the Colosseum to the taunts of jeering crowds \u2014 whose grandchildren would flee the moral chaos of collapsing Rome and flock to the underground churches. All the persecution that a government like China can deal its native Christians has not stopped the church from exploding there, and striking fear at the highest levels of a totalitarian government. The battered church in Poland led the movement that brought down the Iron Curtain, through sober, persistent resistance.<\/p>\n

Perhaps the future\u00a0we face is the one that Cardinal George envisioned. Speaking of a future\u00a0bishop who would someday die a martyr, George predicted, \u201cHis successor will pick up the shards of a ruined society and slowly help rebuild civilization, as the church has done so often in human history.\u201d If we stand for eternity, then history is on our side.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

At The Stream, John Zmirak is coldly accurate: If you have been following mass media over the past few days, you will have learned from an economist at the U.S. Department of Labor that defenders of religious freedom are \u201cNazis.\u201d Take a moment to ponder that assertion. Roll it around in your head for a …<\/span> Read More →<\/span><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1373","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stumblingblock.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1373","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stumblingblock.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stumblingblock.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stumblingblock.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stumblingblock.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1373"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/stumblingblock.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1373\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1379,"href":"https:\/\/stumblingblock.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1373\/revisions\/1379"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stumblingblock.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1373"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stumblingblock.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1373"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stumblingblock.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1373"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}