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Op-Ed

Real News

January 29, 2021

Eighty years and millions of pages of historical research have determined that the Nazi Party was a right-wing Christian political movement. Shocking news, I am sure you will agree.

Robert Kahn

By Robert Kahn

Deputy editor emeritus, Courthouse News

Eighty years and millions of pages of historical research have determined that the Nazi Party was a right-wing Christian political movement. Shocking news, I am sure you will agree.

As at any responsible news site, here at (transmission garbled), our bedrock commitment is to facts. That’s why I’d like to address you today from my heart, as a black woman and a Republican.

I urge all of you, voters and nonvoters alike — preferably nonvoters — to do some Research into the Party to Which You Belong. In fact, it wouldn’t hurt anyone to look into your religion: Catholics and Jews, Protestants, Muslims, Hindus and everyone else.

Looking down through the centuries from the awful abyss of 2021, we see that the only religions that have not inflicted mass murder upon suffering humans are the Zoroastrians and Bahá’ís — but that’s probably because they never got the chance.

My parents raised me to believe there are three things you should never mention in polite conversation: sex, money and religion. That was in the 1950s.

Well, without sex and money, what would we have to talk about today, besides politics, sports and the weather?

But religion is supposed to be still so sacrosanct that it’s off-limits in polite company.

Horsefeathers.

The religious right has been ramming their cramped and annoying version of god down our throats for 40 years. Right-wing evangelicals in recent days have called for the murder of people who disagree with them — i.e., Democrats — after years of funneling money through a nontaxable religious fire hose to neofascist Republicans.

Right-wing evangelicals have disrupted dozens of funerals of military veterans who died in combat, claiming it was their god’s judgment for serving in an Army that allows homosexuals to defend the United States.

Right-wing evangelicals for years have waved their bloodstained flag to rail against normal human relations, in defense of the sexual predators who lead their movement. But now at last Jerry Falwell Jr., numerous Catholic bishops and the Southern Baptists are facing long-running sexual abuse scandals, with, at last count, more than 700 victims among the Southern Baptists alone, according to the Houston Chronicle.

It’s no surprise, then, that the latest Pew Research Center survey found that the largest growth rate among U.S. citizens is people who describe themselves as atheists, agnostics, or “nothing in particular.”

The hypocrisy on virtually all levels of modern Christian, Jewish, Hindu and Muslim leaders — so long suppressed by timid reporting — has left young people adrift. “They’re not going to join a religion that’s not making a difference, or, worse yet, is full of hypocrisy,” the Rev. Jim Wallis, founder of the Christian social justice movement Sojourners told PBS News Hour.

Is there a link, direct or indirect, to institutionalized sexual abuse in religions, and their support of right-wing politics? I believe there is.

All are top-down organizations that tend to regard the slightest questioning of their essentially totalitarian systems as apostasy, punishable by … well, punishable.

I’m singling out right-wing evangelical Christians because they play such a large part in the venomous politics that dominate U.S. society today. But Falwell and his ilk are no better, nor worse, than the Hindu fascist Narendra Modi in India; the Muslim fascist Ali Khameini and his toadies in Iran; the Catholic fascists Andrzej Duda in Poland, Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil and Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines; and the Jewish fascist Bibi Netanyahu.

I don’t blame young Americans for walking away from churches whose twisted, venomous politics seem to be based upon Jesus as a gun-totin’ assassin. As I recall, Jesus threw the money changers out of the temple: he didn’t shoot them, or ask them for political donations.

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