Burning Down The Church, by Mike Gold – Brainiac On Banjo #393 | @MDWorld
April 6, 2015 Victor El-Khouri 3 Comments
It would be swell if I could like Mike Huckabee. The guy is just so damn affable. He’s funny, self-effacing, pleasant to watch on teevee, and for a politician he’s a decent rock musician. Even Jon Stewart likes him, and to his credit Huckabee has the guts to appear on Stewart’s show. But it is impossible for me to like such an intolerant dogmatist.
Just as many of his fellow Republicans were beginning to regret mindlessly backing the pro-discrimination bills in Indiana and Huck’s native Arkansas, Mike went on Tony Perkins’s radio program to say stuff that is so outrageous, so contemptible and so insane if he said all that in front of his draft board he would have been rejected.
Of course, I’m talking about the Tony Perkins who heads up the hate group called the Family Research Council, a name so preposterous George Orwell would think he missed a bet. Tony is just like Mike except he’s a lot less congenial, and he’s even more of a bigot. I mean that in the purest textbook definition of the term.
You may very well ask what Mike told Tony that spawned my reaction. Sit down.
Huckabee defended the so-called Religious Freedom laws – the ones written to deny non-believers the equal protection clauses in the Constitution. He said opposition to these laws are part of a liberal / homosexual / anti-Christ pogrom to exterminate right-wing heterosexual Christians. It is these people who are, according to Mike and Tony, the nation’s truly oppressed minority.
“It is … really a page out of 1984, when what things mean are the opposite of what they really are,” Huck told Tony. Yes, he actually said this in defense of the hateful “Religious Freedom” movement, which is exceptionally upfront in advocating a “right” to discriminate against those who do not share their own religious beliefs.
“It won’t stop until there are no more churches, until there are no more people who are spreading the Gospel,” Huckabee told the Tony Perkins who did not play Norman Bates. Yes, indeed: the homosexual community wants to terminate the Christian faiths because… because… well, he doesn’t really say. He implies the mere act of peaceful coexistence with homosexuals is anti-Christian and therefore is unacceptable.
Hmmm… That case he’s carrying may not contain a bass guitar.
It may contain rocks. Beware smiling politicians.
Mike Gold performs the weekly two-hour Weird Sounds Inside The Gold Mind ass-kicking rock, blues and blather radio show on The Point, www.getthepointradio.com and on iNetRadio, www.iNetRadio.com as part of “Hit Oldies” every Sunday at 7:00 PM Eastern, rebroadcast three times during the week – check www.getthepointradio.com above for times and on-demand streaming information. Gold also joins MDW’s Michael Davis and Martha Thomases as a weekly columnist at www.comicmix.com where he pontificates on matters of four-color.
Mindy Newell
April 6, 2015 - 3:29 pm
I’m just like you, Mike. Wishing I could like Mike Huckabee, but just can’t. Oh, and besides Jon Stewart, he also appears on Bill Maher’s show…in fact, he was just on, though not on the panel, just as the “special guest” that Bill talk with before the panel.
It’s interesting that he has the cojones to mention Orwell and 1984’s “New Speak.” The entire Christian Right speaks in “New Speak,” as do their Republican cronies. The “Freedom to Work” slogan, for instance, used to promote anti-union paranoia. That one ESPECIALLY drives me C-R-A-Z-Y.
And what gets me, is that the religion of $$$$ in this country shows their hypocrisy so overtly. Yeah, they’ll promote the “Freedom of Work” slogan, since they’re so scared of spending money on their employees…while at the same time the religion of $$$$ will ultimately defeat the “Religious Freedom” laws because it can curb their profits.
Of course there are REAL Christians in this country and around the world who do try to follow the precepts of Jesus Christ…especially his “Sermon on the Mount.”
The other ones are false prophets.
Rene
April 7, 2015 - 4:11 pm
The funny thing about Conservatives is that they seem to be stuck in the 1970s. To them, feminists are still unshaved, bra-burning man-haters to them, gays are still godless hedonists out to transform straight society.
Newsflash. This is 2015. What gays want now is to JOIN straight society. They’re fighting for traditional things, like marriage and children. (I realize that gays aren’t a monolith, just saying what are the main issues now). So there goes the “hedonist” accusation.
As for “godless”, I think gays are no less and no more religious than straights, on average. Many have turned from faith only because traditional churches turned their backs on them first. But give them a religion that accepts them, and lots of gay will embrace it. I even know gays that have founded their own Evangelical Churches, particularly popular with gays that come from a working class background.
Mike Gold
April 7, 2015 - 5:36 pm
Rene, to be fair — and we always endeavor to that standard — Conservatives have made great progress. They used to be stuck in the 1950s.
Although a lot of ’em are still pissed at how the American Commies took McCarthy down.
I’d have to say that from my experience, the gay men are more likely to be religious than the straight men and women. I haven’t noticed this one way or the other re: lesbians. I wonder if transgenders are more likely to convert…