The Australian Christian Lobby's Lyle Shelton has posted on the ACL's blog a piece called "Why Dietrich Bonhoeffer still inspires me".
After writing about what Bonhoeffer did, he then includes this beautiful segway from Nazism to marriage equality (emphasis added):
So why this history lesson? My kids roll their eyes whenever I talk about Bonhoeffer. So do some ACL staff.
Isn’t it dangerous to draw comparisons with the Nazis? It is often said that whoever invokes Hitler first in an argument loses.
That may be so but as I read Bonhoeffer, I can’t help but be struck by the similarities between then and now.
I’m not suggesting we are about to be overrun by men in jackboots marching the innocent off to death camps. (Although, our society’s acceptance of abortion surely must cause us to ask some very hard questions about our attitude towards human rights.)
But I am concerned about some of today’s cultural and political trends and the silence from us as Christians that accompanies them.
Quite frankly I’ve been shocked at having to have conversations that I would not have dreamed would need to have been had five years ago about standing up for the right of children to wherever possible have a mum and a dad.
In some sections of society, leaders are looking for a way out of the marriage debate.
So apparently, the possibility of Australia legalizing same-sex marriage is "one of the similarities between [Nazi Germany] and now."
In the same post, Shelton also wrote about the following issues:
- Abortion;
- Euthanasia;
- Public advertising of a sexual nature;
- The application of anti-discrimination laws to religious schools;
- Prayer and Bible study in schools;
- The Millennium Development goals;
- Immigration and refugees;
- The war in the Middle East.
He could have transitioned from Nazism to anyone of those issues. But instead, he chose marriage equality.
Previously, Shelton has used overtly violent rhetoric to describe marriage equality supporters. On November 27, he wrote that "[a]chieving a conscience vote of Liberal MPs has been a strategic objective of the same-sex marriage lobby because it then allows them to pick off MPs one-by-one in the relentless war of attrition they are waging in pursuit of redefining marriage.
And this is at least the fourth time that the Australian Christian Lobby has made this comparison.
On July 14, 2011, they endorsed former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd's sisters comments referring to a "global gay Gestapo".
The next day, they asked "how else [apart from 'global gay Gestapo']" do you describe marriage equality supporters?
On June 7, 2012, then-ACL Managing Director Jim Wallace stated on a televised marriage equality debate that "this whole campaign would do great credit to Joseph Goebbels." (1:33 in the video)
Finally, just so I don't get accused of hypocrisy by equality opponents, a note about my recent post calling Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback "Gov. Brownshirt". That's a joke, an insult, and a play on his name "Brownback". Unlike the ACL, it was not a substantive argument. I don't really think he's like the Nazis. The ACL, however, apparently really does think that about us, or they wouldn't have said that they think it four separate times now.