Bryan Fischer: People run for office to either slight or praise Jesus

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04/05/2011

by Jeremy Hooper

Bryan Fischer's sadly cynical, unsurprisingly reductive explanation of why people pursue elected office:

People pursue public office for one of two reasons, one contrary to the spirit of Christ, the other consistent with it. Some - perhaps most - pursue public office because they want to control other people. They see themselves as the smartest people in the room, the elite, people so smart that they believe they should make lifestyle choices for other people, for the benighted masses who are too stupid to make intelligent decisions for themselves. This, Jesus says, is how the “Gentiles” do it, but it is “not so with you.”

Others - sadly, the great minority - pursue public office because they want to liberate people rather than control them. They want people free to make choices that affect their own lives without the interference of the overreaching hand of government. They want to free their constituents to engage in the God-given right to the “pursuit of happiness” without bureaucrats defining happiness for them. This is public service in the spirit of Christ.
Bryan Fischer: Jesus groomed his apostles for political office [AFA]

What convenient classifications. Both Jesus-based, of course -- one against and one for. And naturally Bryan paints the "against Jesus" camp as overreaching and authoritarian, while presenting the "caucusing for Christ" camp as the liberation movement. Liberation, that in Bryan and like-minded allies eyes', seeks to liberate gay people from the burdens of their sexual orientations (or at the very least, the public acceptance thereof). Bryan forgot to mention that part.

In truth: There are countless different reasons for why people pursue public office, many of which are based in an understanding that personal faith, be it based in Jesus as a savior or not, is to be separated from shared civil policy. All people are guided by their own belief systems and life experiences, and are free to base their senses of right and wrong on any number of sources, but a responsible representative always operates with the knowledge, acceptance, and understanding of the cruciality that is church/state separation. It's a sense of responsibility wherein putting the constitution above personal interpretation of Leviticus is not merely a elective suggestion -- it is an elected duty.

But of course the Bryan Fischers of the world don't want you thinking this way. They have a "culture war" to foster, one in which teams and battles and "anti-Christian" motivations are crucial memes. Our equal protection be damned, just as long as the coffers stay filled with lucre and the nation stays divided with contrived red and blue mindsets.

Such a waste.

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*REMINDER: This is the same Bryan Fischer who's said "Homosexuals in the military gave us...six million dead Jews". The guy who's said "homosexuals should be disqualified from public office," has called on Christian conservatives to breed gays and progressives out of existence, has called gay sex a "form of domestic terrorism," who's said only gays were savage enough for Hitler, has compared gays to heroin abusers, has directly compared laws against gay soldiers to those that apply to bank robbers, who once invoked a Biblical story about stabbing "sexually immoral" people with spears, saying we need this kind of action in modern day, who has spoken out against gays serving as public school teachers, has questioned why Medals of Honor are given to people who save lives (rather than take lives), who says that open service will "assign the United States to the scrap heap of history," who recently commiserated with Bradlee 'Executing homosexuals is moral' Dean, and who has blamed gay activists for dead gay kids, saying that: "If we want to see fewer students commit suicide, we want fewer homosexual students". The guy who said the only acceptable "culture war" truce would have gays giving up their demand for equality. The guy who painted Native Americans as innately cursed because they "cling to the darkness of indigenous superstition". The guy who conservative Christian Warren Throckmorton aptly noted is "to the right of Jerry Falwell" on some LGBT issues. The guy whose words pretty much single-handedly landed the American Family Association on the Southern Poverty Law Center's hate groups list.