I got a link to a movie trailer The Givers from a bunch of Republican luminaries. I watched the trailer until one of the baddies said:
“When people have the freedom to choose they choose wrong.”
Of course inner hilarity ensued as I immediately thought of Republican support for the War On Drugs.
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3 responses to “The Takers”
I had the same thought after reading some gushing comments about the movie from a couple of conservatives.
For most Republicans and Christians in general, liberty means you must choose (snicker) to live your life within the bounds of Christian social norms or face the consequences for not doing so. They’ve seen to it that there are laws in place to punish you if and when you do something outside the boundaries they’ve set based upon their religious beliefs. You don’t have to be a Christian to live here, you just have to live like one and they are happy with that.
Christians have been persecuting sinners for centuries in that way. You get a lot of religious compliance when the cost of non-compliance is so high.
But now that religious liberty has lowered the cost of religious non-compliance, the social and political power of the church and religion has dramatically waned in modern times in the West. And this is what rankles so many conservative Christians in this day and age, they can’t spank those who defy religious dictates like they could in the not-too-distant past. They are like Cartman “You must respect my authoritah!” from South Park in that it frustrates them to no end that they don’t get the respect nor have the power they think are owed to them.
And related to this topic, I get a chuckle when Christians speak out against Sharia Law coming to the USA. They act as if Christianity and the USA has never had anything like Sharia Law on the books. But the fact is we do have laws that mirror those in Sharia Law, we just refer to them as “vice laws”. Vice laws basically serve the same purpose as Sharia laws and are therefore pretty much the same thing. Of course, when Christians do it under the guise of vice laws, it’s “the right thing to do”™, unlike Sharia law.
You might try pointing conservatives toward this article.
Joseph Hertzlinger,
I have. It makes no difference.