‘Help, help, I’m being repressed!’: How conservatives make a mockery of the oppression of religious

[hrmjustin]

Adam Lee

In much of the rest of the world, religious persecution involves forced conversion, mob attacks and genocide by violence or by neglect. In America, your employee might be able to use the health insurance for which you pay a part of the premium to get an IUD.

American conservatives who inveigh against the erosion of their religious liberties are crying that they’re the oppressed minority: not because they face forced conversion or death, but because they’re not getting their own way on same-sex marriage or the Obamacare contraception mandate (though the US supreme court’s conservative, male majority did side with them in the Hobby Lobby contraceptive access case).

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/aug/17/conservative-christian-oppression-religious-minorities

[Fortinbras Armstrong]

1. American Evangelical Christians regularly say

That (1) they represent a majority of Americans and (2) they are being relentlessly persecuted. First, the phrase "relentlessly persecuted majority" is an excellent example of an oxymoron. Second, they are "mildly uncomfortable," not persecuted. Sending Jews to Auschwitz is persecution; passing gay marriage laws is not. Basically, their claims of "persecution" amount to "They are being mean to us by not giving us our way" -- a cry one might expect from a four-year-old, not an adult.

[cbayer]

2. Well said. Their blinders and ideas of persecution only serve to further

marginalize them.

And that's a good thing. I think the pendulum will swing back.

[rug]

3. "Their blinders and ideas of persecution only serve to further marginalize them."

That has a broad application.

[cbayer]

4. Yes it does. Sometimes you can just let people tie their own nooses.

Right?

[rug]

5. Yup.