I think Herb Titus is on to something.
Later in the interview, Titus warned that if conservative Christians give up on trying to shape government to biblical specifications, they will end up like the Amish, with special protections for their religion but “no influence in the greater society”
“God didn’t call us to just be in a closed-off, religious community, God called us to exercise dominion,” he said.
He repeated that public officials who disagree with marriage equality should defy the law and “make people remove us from office, if that’s what it’s going to take you, ‘you can remove me, but I’m not going to just ask you to give me a special privilege, or resign and will no longer function in a civil capacity.’ What that does, I think, is basically sounds the bugle of retreat.”
He can take his “dominion” and shove it. You don’t exercise dominion over anyone by being removed from office, whether you go voluntarily or not.
It’s time for conservatives to retreat from public life and lick their wounds, which is kind of the opposite of what Titus thinks he is saying. Really, though, there’s not much point in sticking around at this point. Unless he wants to bite us in the knees.
Wherefore come out from among them, and be ye separate, saith the Lord,
2 Corinthians 6:17
I think that the Dominionists going to use 2016, or more specifically, 2018 as their one last chance to ‘get’ the Democratic Party.
Johnathan Chait wrote that 2012 was going to be the GOP’s last chance to implement an unbowed conservative agenda and while I think he was right on the generalities, he failed to estimate how much the aftershocks of the 2007 financial crisis would give Republicans an ‘in’ via the 2014 Congressional elections.
Even if a Hillary Clinton or whatever administration flounders and 2020 becomes the chance for the GOP to capture all three levels of government, the Religious Right will have demographically outlived their usefulness by then. They, unlike the plutocrats, shouldn’t expect any more than crumbs.
“Torquemada – do not beg him for mercy. Torquemada – do not ask him for forgiveness. Let’s face it – you can’t Torquemada anything!”
In no study of the Bible have I ever heard that Christians are called to exercise dominion. In the world but not of the world.
False prophet pure and simple.
I nominate this charlatan and his tribe to be the first earthlings to colonize Mars and create their very own “dominion.” As the sane earthlings won’t miss them and quickly forget that they ever existed, will leave it to “their god” to provide for them in their new home.
Spaceship B? h/t Douglas Adams
Yeah, in Doug’s Epistle to the Telephone Sanitizers, or something like that.
Don’t forget that Adams acknowledged the futility of fighting the absurdity of the universe by noting at the end of the story that the parent civilization was ultimately wiped out by a virulent infection contracted from a dirty telephone.
The truth is that this is a loud small minority that has gotten funding to go on the airwaves and carry out their harebrained “ministry”. And that they are useful idiots for some of the powers that be in subverting American institutions, the one most in the crosshairs being the US military.
We saw this in the 1930s as well.
Neoliberalism and hard times seems to bring it to the fore and to notice. In part because it is a form of entrepreneurial “Christianity”. If you can’t find a job anywhere else, start a “ministry” and beg for donations.
Funding from whom?
It’s surprising how much money there is to be made from persuading a large number of people who individually have little to give you the little they have. That’s what rants like Titus’s are really about- keeping the sheep riled up so they keep forking over.
Well if Christianists don’t want to ignominiously sound the retreat, then why just stop at calling for Christianist officials to defy the gay marriage ruling? Doesn’t Jebus require them to defy the ban on prayer in schools?–and they run the school boards all over the South and West. Openly defy it, schedule prayer every single day in school. Clog the federal courts with case after case across a hundred districts.
And as for hating on the gays, why stop at defying the small potatoes of gay marriage, Mr Titus? What’s stopping Christianists in control of the New Confederacy from banning, say, adoption by gay couples? Certainly there are few to no laws protecting gay people across American Talibanistan. Sound the charge, Imam Titus!
And (phoney) Christianist worries about calling for a retreat surely don’t seem too applicable to abortion rights, which don’t exist any more across all of American Talibanistan, and likely will cease to exist in any meaningful way nationwide after next year’s abortion ruling by Roberts Repubs.
Christianists control large swathes of the country, Mr. Titus, they aren’t in retreat and aren’t about to retreat—the relatively small defeat on gay marriage notwithstanding. The question is why the Ayatollahs like Tituses don’t think bigger in their call to “defiance”.