Time to rise up and fight the tyranny of equal rights laws!
Oh, how we wish this were The Onion. Alas, noted crazy person Pat Buchanan is making the case for civil disobedience among the right-wing crowd to overturn the Supreme Court's marriage equality decision. And you won't believe some of the
examples he cited as justification for "rebellion":
New England abolitionists backed the anti-slavery fanatic John Brown, who conducted the raid on Harpers Ferry that got him hanged but helped to precipitate a Civil War. That war was fought over whether 11 Southern states had the same right to break free of Mr. Lincoln’s Union as the 13 colonies did to break free of George III’s England.
"Mr. Lincoln's Union." Okay. Get the impression he might've been writing this in his favorite pair of Confederate flag shorts? He is a member of the Sons of Confederate Veterans after all.
Rosa Parks is a heroine because she refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery bus, despite the laws segregating public transit that relegated blacks to the “back of the bus.”
In “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” Dr. King, defending civil disobedience, cited Augustine – “an unjust law is no law at all” – and Aquinas who defined an unjust law as “a human law that is not rooted in eternal law and natural law.”
Said King, “One has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws.”
Oh, Pat. Nevermind that all those named in your op-ed were people fighting to gain liberty and equal rights under the law. All those bakers and county clerks do have freedom. The freedom to find another job more suited to their religious beliefs. For instance, working for the Christian Broadcasting Network. Their rights aren't being denied. Their ability to discriminate based on their own personal religious beliefs are being stunted, as they should be, particularly when it comes to elected positions responsible for overseeing ALL the people.
In the end, we'll see if this civil disobedience appears or not. Emphasis on civil, something right-wing protests are not generally known for. Comments from other right-wing preachers aren't exactly encouraging:
Wiles claimed that the U.S. has reached the point where federal agents will soon move to arrest pastors and seize church buildings, sparking a violent confrontation: “You’re going to see gunfire.”
“I don’t doubt it,” Shines said. He added that while “we’ll continue to utilize as much as even though it is trampled on, and that is, working within the confines of the law, but if we are forced to deal with these issues, make no mistake about it, America was born out of this idea where pastors left their pulpits to fight back a tyranny from England. I don’t believe that we’re just a few hundred years away from it that we could not see, unfortunately, things like that again, but if it needs be, I think people that have strong religious convictions as I and others do, we will be more than up for that task.”