What terrible repressions, you may ask, comprise this “persecution”? Let’s find out…
Oh, puh-leeze. :rolleyes: :rolleyes: :rolleyes:
Even if this incident is one about which this guy has a legitimate gripe (rather than, as I strongly suspect, a case where he got deservedly slapped down for misusing his position to impose his sectarian preferences upon sailors of other faiths), that comparison is a nauseating display of drama-queenery.
If you’ll excuse the expression: Preach it, Rev. Franklin!
Not just non-Christians but Christians in general are soon going to get very tired of what the OP has rightly termed this kind of drama-queenery among a small subset of self-important evangelicals and fundamentalists. Remember everybody sneering at the “culture of victimhood” of some minorities and women who complained about really trivial and petty instances of what they called “oppression”? The “culture of victimhood” Christians are setting themselves up for a similar smackdown.
Oh yeah, Christians are persecuted in the US :rolleyes: :rolleyes: :rolleyes: :rolleyes: :rolleyes:
It’s unbelievable that a Jewish speaker would support this- equating a Christian chaplain being somehow punished for a sectarian prayer with the Holocaust. Speaking of self-hating Jews…
Oh, and was it the “Christian decency of this country” that made the US (among other countries) severely limit the number of Jewish immigrants they would accept during the Holocaust?
I think Abdur Rahman should come in and tell them what real persecution is like. Or any random Holocaust survivor. If I were Abdur Rahman, a Holocaust survivor, or anyone who has undergone real religious persecution, I’d be horribly offended by these whiners. So they can’t say whatever they want, whenever they want, wherever they want as long as they justify it by saying “it’s Christianity”. Boo fuckin’ hoo.
Just what do they want? They pretty much control the White House, the Senate, the House, and they are digging their claws into the states now (all the anti abortion and anticontraceptive and antieverything). Persecuted minority my ass.
I disagree. My family members are mainstream Catholics and they talk about how they’re being attacked and persecuted. My brother, for example, spent about an hour telling my (atheist) niece about how her values were going to be under attack at NYU and that they probably didn’t have Easter break because it wasn’t okay to be Christian. She nodded at him and said, “I’ll be sure to keep that in mind!”
Or maybe it was the Christian decency that kept the US from bombing the rail lines leading to the camps, because some people might think the war involved protecting Jews?
Something is fishy about this chaplain’s complaint. I was not aware that chaplains were not allowed to be sectarian - unless he did something like offering Christian prayers at the funeral of a Moslem.
Having been to a fundie wedding where the father of the bride saw fit to tell the Jewish relatives of the groom that we should convert before it’s too late, I’d put nothing past them.
Not only is he a whiner, he’s a liar. There has never been a single bar of soap from the Nazi era that has tested positive for human fat and there is no credible evidence that the Nazis ever made soap from humans.
I love the Spoiled brat comment. What really galls me about this group is that they invite a lying dishonest scumbag like Tom Delay to tell them how persecuted they are. I felt the same about Christians being so excited about “born again” GWB being president. It seems like they don’t give a rats ass about what kind of person they are or if they have any integrity. Just talk the talk and say what we want to hear. It’s disgusting.
Not to single out your brother, jsgoddess, but people who say that Christianity or Catholicism is under attack now in the US are ignorant.
So your niece might not have gotten Easter break at NYU. She might have gotten a break in the springtime that coincided with Easter but wasn’t called Easter break- oh yeah, that’s persecution :rolleyes: . Or she might not have gotten a week-long break that included Easter. Jews don’t get an extended break including High Holidays or Passover, either. Hindus, Buddhists, Muslims, and others don’t get a day off school or work for everybody for their holidays, either. That doesn’t mean that members of all those religions are persecuted.
There is real religious persecution, of Christians and others, in the world today. Equating anything you’re likely to see in the US with that trivializes the evil that is religious persecution terribly.
I wonder how your brother would react if he was told that not even Catholic colleges and universities time their spring breaks to be around Easter. Universities, be they public or private, have to operate according to a set annual schedule and the date of Easter moves around the calendar too much for it to be incorporated into the spring break every year.
Also, if your brother starts whining about how Catholics are being persecuted in the U.S., ask him if, because of his faith, he’s been declined employment, refused service at a business, discriminated against while trying to buy or rent a home, or ordered to sit at the back of the bus. If any of those things have recently happened, then his complaint might have merit.
I’m afraid I have to straddle the fence on this a bit.
On the one side: there is no excuse for the comparisons being made in the OP’s linked story. As everyone else in this thread has pointed out there’s a world of difference between being told to shut up at a sailor’s funeral, and facing the death penalty for telling your friends and family you’ve converted. Knowing what I do about the chaplain corps* I’m convinced the OP called it right: This guy probably wanted to use the service to speak about his own sect, not the deceased.
On the other side, there are a lot of small things that chafe, at times. I’ve been to college twice, and both times the resdence staff seemed rather oddly sensitized about religious displays. At Cornell residents were told they couldn’t put up Christmas decorations on their dorm windows. I think that was going too far. There was a similar flap at UMass, but I can’t recall the regulation. I stopped reading the dorm handbook after the first egregious piece of idiocy in it. I’ve been told by people that I shouldn’t be allowed to vote, because my religious beliefs will affect how I vote, and that’s a violation of the separation of church and state.
None of this is, in any way, shape or form, an organized WAR on anyone. But a few of these incidents can chafe, as I said, and leave someone who doesn’t know what real persecution is feeling ill done by. Add in a propaganda mill to the idea, and it will take off. Suddenly it’s not just society trying to steer through a minefield as more religions become a part of mainstream culture, it’s a War - so it’s okay to get upset about it.
I just want to emphasize it’s not being made up out of nothing. It’s a very manipulative attempt to transform simple frictions into a political movement. Which makes the War on Christianity types even more scummy in my mind.
*I’ve met chaplains who were as committed to ecumenical service as anyone could ask for. I’ve met others who had all the sensitivity of a lead brick. Alas the good ones were outnumbered, in my experience, by the bad by about 3 to one.
This is really simple. For most of the country’s history, Christians had a hegemony over any religion in the public sphere. And by “public sphere” I mean government controlled institutions-- legislatures, courts, public shools and libraries, townhalls, and post offices. That hegemony is under attack, and many Christians seem to take that as an attack against their religion. It’s not. Yes, it’s a relinqueshing of that historical hegemony, but them’s the breaks. Times change, and the last 50 years have been largely about breaking down those old strangleholds and making a more inclusive society. It’s a small price to pay, if it can even be considered a price at all.
I wonder why you say that universities have to operate according to a set annual schedule. It wasn’t an issue for twelve years of public education in grade, middle, and highschool. We always had “Spring Break” beginning on Good Friday and lasting through Easter week. If it matters, this was in the Chicago area in the 70’s and 80’s. Why would Universities have to follow a set schedule?
Cornell University isn’t only a private college. It has seven schools, IIRC, and of that three of them are part of the SUNY system. So, it’s got a bit of the worst of both worlds. One can never be sure just what laws it can and cannot evade.
Doesn’t change that I, and many others, thought that particular rule ridiculous.
They don’t, but if a university operates on a January to May spring semester and Easter week falls in April (as it does this year), it makes no sense to have a 7- to 10-day break and come back for three weeks of actual class time before finals.
Also, Easter is variable and it’s hard to get any kind of real consistency in the schedule.
