This article on HuffPo describes the very public musings of some evangelical leaders about the greater meaning of Rev. Louie Giglio's removal from the list of performers at Barack Obama's second innaugural. Rev. Giglio was scheduled to deliver a blessing, and that schedule was changed after homophobic and condemnatory quotations from the bible were found in a sermon he taught in 1996. The leaders in question have been concern-trolling about whether this means that we as a people are intolerant of those with deeply held religious convictions, and that they are unwelcome to share those convictions with the rest of us at a secular and political event.
Leaving aside the whole issue of whether it's appropriate to have blessings offered by anyone at a secular celebration such as the innauguration of a president, it's specatularly rich that those whining about intolerance of their beliefs have
been shoving the intolerance in their beliefs down everyone's throat for
the last thirty years or so. For those "wondering" if that bigotry is
still "welcome in the public square", no, it's not, and good riddance.
It's a cute rhetorical trick to bemoan disapproval of intolerance as
intolerant, but it's transparently nonsense, and it has finally begun to
stop working. As others have said, believe whatever bronze-age gibberish
you like, but don't expect the rest of us to take those beliefs as
sacrosanct or worthy of special consideration just because somebody
thousands of years ago wrote them in your magic book. Your bigotry is
exactly as "welcome in the public square" as the idea that the earth is
flat and has dragons around the edge of it.
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