Presidential candidate and paid paranoid Marco Rubio has joined the irrational chorus of Christian Conservative presidential contenders now peeing their pants in fear at the thought that the Supreme Court may legalize, a.k.a. legitimize, marriage equality in the United States.
In a recent interview with CBN, Rubio echoed Mike Huckabee when he told David Brody that marriage equality represented a threat to the survival of Christianity.
First of all I would say to him the very same thing I said to the Huckster. Christianity is under no threat whatsoever. According to the Association of Religion Data Archives (ARDA) 26,344,933 make up the membership of mainline churches; even more, 39,930,869 make up the membership of evangelical Protestant churches. That’s mainstream Christian. PewResearch also estimates 51 percent of the LGBT community also make up part of this religious population. That means if every atheist/liberal/gay person in the country teamed up against the Christians, we’d still be so outnumbered we’d have our asses kicked in only a matter of days.
So contrary to Rubio’s “belief,” Christianity is under absolutely not threat: at least not from us. The threat is in their heads.
The reality is, Christians in the ilk of Rubio LOVE persecution. They thrive on it. They live to play the martyr. Their entire ideology—not to mention their fund-raising—is built around it. Which, ironically, means that they then create it.
It’s no secret that Christians weren’t well liked in Rome, but a large majority of that had nothing to do with their “god.” Romans were rather accepting of other gods. It was a “better safe than sorry” proposition. You just didn’t want to piss a god off no matter who’s it was. Now it’s true that they weren’t fond of Jesus, but let’s face it, he was murdered by the Romans for sedition, subversion, and claiming to be a messiah (which in those days was tantamount to treason).
Since I’m making an “outrageous” claim and I don’t have the space here to explain, I’ll source myself: In her book, The Myth of Persecution: How Early Christians Invented a Story of Martyrdom, Candida Moss goes into great depth as to how Christians positioned themselves against Rome in an attempt to “invite” persecution.
The real problem is that Christians like Rubio and Huckabee don’t play well with others. It’s THEIR (version of) God that’s correct, and they don’t compromise. If you disagree with them, YOU’RE wrong, and therefore you’re against their god. You then become a threat to them and their way of life.
Following the death of Jesus, Christian persecution did grow—but not from the Romans: instead from other Christians. As the debate heated up over who Jesus was, they started to persecute and kill each other. Leaders of one philosophy would be dragged through the streets of Alexandria, and then set on fire. Others would be assassinated. Still others stoned in a good ol’ biblical fashion.
These battles would lead to what we now call the Nicene Council, one of the many councils that would be called by Roman leaders (particularly Constantine), to try to resolve this issue, and prevent civil war.
Let’s not forget, either, that there are nineteen countries around the world that have adopted marriage equality, including: Belgium, Canada, Sweden and the United Kingdom (and now add Ireland). If you look up any of these countries online, say, Wikipedia, you don’t see anything about persecution. The Christians there seem to be living fairly common lives, free to worship as they please, fitting into society just fine.
Now that his paranoia has been put to rest, let’s look at what else Rubio said about his “beliefs.”
“If you think about it, we are at the water’s edge of the argument that mainstream Christian teaching is hate speech. Because today we’ve reached the point in our society where if you do not support same-sex marriage you are labeled a homophobe and a hater.”
First of all, his comment is stupid. I’m sorry, ‘bereft of logic, and therefore inane, silly, ridiculous, absurd, irrational…’
that’s right, I have a thesaurus, and I’m not afraid to use it. We’ve reached a point in our history as a species where we understand biology (that’s science for Marco Rubio), and, unlike Rubio, we aren’t spending our lives trying to deny or run away from this science. To disagree with someone for being gay is akin to disagreeing with someone because they’re Asian, or Spanish, or Mexican… oh wait… they do. And we call it what it is: xenophobia. You’re not being “labeled” a hater, you just “are” a hater. If you have a problem with someone because of a “belief” that YOU hold sacred, well, that’s just plain intellectual laziness on your part.
But wait… he said more.
“So what’s the next step after that? After they are done going after individuals, the next step is to argue that the teachings of mainstream Christianity, the catechism of the Catholic Church is hate speech.”
There’s no argument: it IS hate speech. They hate Muslims, they hate “the gays,” they hate women who consider themselves equal with men, they hate atheists, they hate liberals, they hate the poor, and right now, they’re hating on Pope Frank because he’s started to sound too much like Jesus. And if Jesus were alive today, they’d hate him too.
And they “hate” with the blessing of their Bible.
Even Jesus got a little xenophobic at one point. In Matthew 15, Jesus had a visit from a Canaanite woman:
A Canaanite woman from that vicinity came to him, crying out, “Lord, Son of David, have mercy on me! My daughter is demon-possessed and suffering terribly.” Jesus did not answer a word. So his disciples came to him and urged him, “Send her away, for she keeps crying out after us.” He answered, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of Israel.” The woman came and knelt before him. “Lord, help me!” she said. He replied, “It is not right to take the children’s bread and toss it to the dogs.” “Yes it is, Lord,” she said. “Even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their master’s table.” Then Jesus said to her, “Woman, you have great faith! Your request is granted.” And her daughter was healed at that moment.
Let’s be clear, what Jesus said to this woman was awful. It was profoundly xenophobic and even somewhat vicious. Jesus never sounded more Conservative in the entire bible than he did right here. But the difference between Rubio—Huckabee, and Jesus was how they handled rebuke. When the women very wisely pointed out that even dogs get scraps, Jesus was willing to look at his xenophobia and correct it. He didn’t call her a “hater” because she challenged his bigotry, he took her rebuke to heart and fixed it.
Were Jesus to be having this same debate today, it’s a safe assumption that before he “got on his cross” as Rubio has done, he would check himself… ask himself if there was any merit to what his critics had to say, and probably reset his "moral" GPS.
If I may quote the great Bertrand Russell:
“I would never die for my beliefs because I might be wrong.”