“The Passion of the Frist” – Who’s the persecuted?

Sixty years ago this month the advance of Allied troops into Germany stopped the guards at the Buchenwald concentration camp from turning Jews, queers, and political dissidents into lampshades and soap long enough to pack as many of us into railcars as they could and send us deeper into the countryside to Dachau.
…
Three weeks after the 40-odd railcars left Buchenwald, the American forces that liberated Dachau discovered them sitting on the tracks outside the camp and opened them, finding all 2,000-3,000 prisoners in an advanced stage of decomposition.

It is the sight of what is now known as the “Dachau death train” that is said to have caused the Americans, who had just accepted the surrender of the Waffen-SS soldiers stationed in the garrison next to Dachau, to break all conventions of civilized warfare by lining their POWs up against a wall and shooting them.

Yes, 60 years after the Holocaust, archconservatives that have always accused people of color, LGBT people, and women of playing the victim, and who now use bullying and coercion in their attempts to bypass the Constitution and level the wall between church and state, are trying to claim the moral high ground of persecution.

It would be more convincing if their self-perceived situation as victims had any basis in reality…

…The Justice Sunday folks and a couple of other current major newsmakers aren’t just wrong about what constitutes persecution status. They’re wrong about what constitutes true moral evil in the world.

The archconservative Christian group Focus on the Family (FOF)…has no apparent interest in focusing on the issues most families in the US grapple with: the rising cost of health care, the scarcity of living-wage jobs, a deteriorating public education system, and the ballooning federal deficit. Instead Dr. James Dodson, FOF’s founder, kept it real during his time at the mike by accusing justices of “a campaign to limit religious liberty.”

But this week, he was silent on the liberation of Dachau 60 years ago – even though Dachau is a part of his past.
…
So what new humanitarian ground has the new pope marked out for himself instead? Did he speak out against government-sponsored genocide in Darfur and Chechnya? Did he plead for religious tolerance and co-existence? Remind the world of its obligation to care for the weakest among us?

Um, no.

Benedict XVI, who passively watched “Jews being herded to death camps,” and later went on to ignore the suffering of thousands of children at the hands of pedophile priests in his capacity as head of the Vatican office to safeguard the morals of the church, has chosen as his first big issue – wait for it – the decision of the democratically elected Spanish government to allow same-sex marriage. Furthermore, he has ordered the people of Spain to rise up in resistance against this atrocity, demanding, “Every profession linked with implementing homosexual marriages should oppose it, even if it meant losing their jobs.”  In a moment of unsurpassed irony, B16’s cardinal, speaking 60 years too late and in the wrong country, “insisted that just because something was made law did not make it right.”

Holy Wars are terrific fundraisers, and great for group morale – so long as you’re not their object. But those of us who have been on the wrong end of a Crusade know that these choreographed spectacles aren’t cheap, and that they run on orders from the top. We will hold President Bush, and House and Senate majority leaders DeLay and Frist, responsible for encouraging this dangerous nonsense whereby powerful majorities pose as the victims of religious persecution in a ploy to extend Republican political dominance.

And we will never forget.