The following item showed up in my e-mail a week ago and, like Stop the Mormons, I thought it was curious but not worth an immediate response:
But then Stop The Mormons noticed that the article disappeared from Focus on the Family’s website:
Stop The Mormons details the flamewar that erupted among Christian blogs and media services on Dec. 19, when conservative Christians realized that Focus on the Family was — like some religious-rightist allies — promoting Mormons!
The collaboration of socially conservative evangelicals, Mormons and Catholics on anti-marriage constitutional amendments demonstrated in 2008 that all three religious blocs were willing to sacrifice some core religious beliefs in order to work with — and receive sizable donations from — rival factions that were considered to be hellbound heretics, but who shared a zealous and overriding commitment to deny freedom and family well-being to gay Americans.
The reaction of antigay evangelicals to Focus on the Family’s public expression of respect for one religious minority’s family values suggests, furthermore, that these evangelicals are “pro-family” only toward their own families.
In short, their spiritual loyalty is tied not to a Christian creed, but to an overriding antigay universalism. Their family values consist of envy and ill will toward families other than their own.
When Focus on the Family surrendered to the criticism of intolerant Christians by withdrawing the Glenn Beck book promotion without explanation, Christian writer John Schroeder of the evangelical Christian-Mormon blog Article VI responded:
… the Dobson organization has caved …
The absolute worst part is that in California we have just witnessed what is possible if Mormons and Evangelicals and Catholics unite politically – so how does the leading Evangelical public figure (although Dobson is rapidly being supplanted in that role by Pastor Warren) respond? By caving to the slighest pressure from a few grossly over-zealous types. Which does what? It weakens an already very weak and formative bridge between.
Shame on the Dobson organization.
Here we have a tacit admission, by a Christian-Mormon blog, that the religious right’s unethical anti-marriage campaign — which continues to attempt to forcibly divorce thousands of gay California couples — was viewed by some antigay Protestants, Catholics, and Mormons as an opportunity to unite their incompatible religious factions in a joint campaign to nullify the freedom and family well-being of yet another demographic that these religious factions hated more than each other.
Who, really, is being “over-zealous” — those who tolerate no positive message about anyone outside their own denomination, or the opportunists who seek to harness the combined envies and hatreds of disparate and incompatible religious minorities in a common cause against the freedom and well-being of other social minorities?
