I guess it had to happen eventually, Right wing ‘christian’ extremists blame the Hurricane on New Orleans’ party people – apparently New Orleans is the worst place in the world right now for sin, as they allow Gay Pride parades and Mardi Gras celebrations. As a result, according to the dickheads at ‘repent america’, God has punished them with the Hurricane.
Interesting that there’s no mention of global warming in their report, nor have they chastised God for punishing the poor and ignoring the manifold sins of the rich and powerful. No, because as we all know, on the Sin-hit-parade, being Gay is far worse than robbing the poor to fund your classic car collection. So long as it’s ‘legal’, it’s fine for the wealthy to keep twisting international trade laws to destroy the lives of the poor. All the world’s problems can be blamed on gay people. Thanks for making it so simple.
This reminds me of a very wise quote from a friend of mine about George Bush – ‘the problem with Bush isn’t that he’s a conservative evangelical Christian, it’s that he isn’t conservative evangelical enough’ – the culture of conservative evangelicalism in the US have utterly dispensed with their supposed respect for The Bible as the authority in deciding what’s right and wrong. The entire Biblical narrative follows the story of God holding leaders to account for their mistreatment of the poor. All the way through, ‘disobedience’ is as much about justice, about failing the poor and the marginalised as it is about personal piety.
And what about Grace? At what point will these so-called christians get down of their soap-box and acknowledge that the Christian story is one of God’s grace towards the entire created order. We fail, we get it wrong, and we look to God and she says ‘don’t do it again’.
I have two conflicting responses that immediately spring to mind – the first is to disown myself from anything labeled as ‘christian’, in the hope that I’m never going to be tagged as anything to do with these psycotic fuckwits pretending to speak on behalf of God. The other is to put more energy into reclaiming the concept of ‘christianity’ from the madmen… I guess this post falls into the latter category, but tomorrow I’ll be back to calling myself a messianic taoist and disowning the fascists… :o)
Soundtrack – The Rough Guide To Franco (After playing with Duncan and Rise at Greenbelt, I’m going to be hitting the African CDs pretty hard, trying to get myself comfortable with all these marvellous rhythms!)