While you’re at it, America, take down these flags too.

So the little state I live in, North Carolina, has declared how little it is.  Our legislature passed a law (over a surprising veto by our Republican governor) that lets magistrates and registers of deeds choose whether to marry all couples or no couples — officially, for the sake of not offending any delicate bible-based sensibilities, but more for the sake of keeping fear alive and whom they fear in their proper place.

This means that some couples may have to travel elsewhere to get a marriage license, just as mixed-race couples once had to do, and as many women who elect to have an abortion are now forced to do.  “It is a very real scenario,” Drew Reisinger, our county’s register of deeds, told the Associated Press.  “In a rural county that has only two or three employees, it will be problematic.”

Reisinger surveyed other North Carolina registers of deeds, the supposed beneficiaries of the law, and reported that 51 respondents opposed this measure with only three in favor.   While a handful of magistrates chose to resign rather than issue same-sex marriage licenses, getting this law passed was hardly a grass-roots effort by devout county workers.  It was instead another case of conservative Christian groups leveraging money and power.  Three of these groups were Concerned Women for America (CWA), North Carolina Values Coalition (NCVC), and Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF).

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According to its website (a link I care not to post), CWA “believes the Bible to be the verbally inspired, inerrant Word of God and the final authority on faith and practice.”  Tamara Scott is the director of CWA of Iowa and, not coincidentally, a national committeewoman for the Republican National Committee.  She was named one of the “Nation’s Top Ten King Makers” by Religious News Service.  In the April 29 episode of her radio show Truth for Our Time — I listened to it so that you don’t have to — Scott voiced her stance on same-sex marriage in the first thirty seconds of the show: “The Supreme Authority has already defined [marriage].  The Supreme Court doesn’t get that chance.”  It sounded to me like Scott might prefer us to be governed by “a body of moral and religious law derived from religious prophecy, as opposed to human legislation” which is the Wikipedia definition for sharia law.

Later in the show, Scott invited some of her “friends from North Carolina” to discuss its so-called religious freedom law.  Her guests were attorney and lobbyist Tami Fitzgerald of NCVC and attorney Austin Nimocks of the Washington, D.C. office of Arizona-based ADF.  Nimocks, a Texas born-and-bred Baptist, is not a member of the bar in North Carolina and does not live in North Carolina but qualifies as one of Scott’s North Carolina “friends.”

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Fitzgerald of NCVC wasted no time playing the Christian victimhood card, popular with those on the right who would equate genocide by radical Islamists in Africa and Asia with constitutionally-based religious indifference in America.  “I believe [religious freedom] is why the Pilgrims came to Plymouth Rock, yet all of a sudden this is such a controversial issue,” Fitzgerald whined.  Yes, all of a sudden, people of the same sex who love each other want to marry (that probably included some at Plymouth Rock) like every other couple has always been able to do.  “There’s no constitutional right to have a certain magistrate marry you,” Fitzgerald said, lecturing those she would consign to the sidelines of marriage.  “But there is a constitutional right to exercise your religious belief.”  So take heart, gay lovers:  no license today but feel free to pray.

I learned about the separation between church and state sometime in the eighth grade.  Maybe Tami Fitzgerald missed school that day.  “We know that when God’s word says homosexuality is an abomination, that means it’s not the greatest and highest good of our brothers and sisters — so we’re seeking their best interest,” trumpets Fitzgerald, selflessly.  With those words, she steps into the same pile of shit — social engineering — that she and her fellow fundamentalists decry when liberals do it and just as loudly when they don’t.

Ms. Fitzgerald, I can only hope that the keepers of our Constitution, partisan as they are, will correct your interpretation of what it means to be free in America.  Because I too would like to be free … of such condescension and bigotry.

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Austin Nimocks makes his living opposing same-sex marriage for ADF.  And like any good lawyer, he knows how to spin things.  So this is right up his alley, this upside-down version of reality that he offered up on Scott’s radio show:

If you want to understand RFRA [Religious Freedom Restoration Act] in one word, it’s tolerance.  RFRA is about tolerance and this is not a controversial law,  I think your listeners need to understand that.  It was passed by a nearly unanimous Congress, signed into law by President Clinton in 1993.  It was supported by groups on the left and the right including the ACLU.  Everybody came together, all walks of life and corners of society for this law, because it promoted tolerance.  So why now are people opposing it?  The reason that people are opposing it is because they are intolerant of people with religious beliefs.

At this point, Fitzgerald could not help herself and chimed in, “That is exactly right.”

What Nimocks failed to tell Scott’s listeners was that RFRA (the 1993 Federal law, not the North Carolina proposal) was passed to prevent state interference with the use of peyote in Native American worship settings.  It was not meant to give the self-righteous legal cover for acts of discrimination against others.  Nimocks knows that.

Nimocks also forgot to mention that RFRA (the Federal law) was found unconstitutional in 1997 because Congress had, in effect, taken it upon itself to interpret the provisions of the 14th Amendment as it saw fit.  Nimocks knows that too.

The 14th Amendment was adopted in 1868.  Its original purpose was to guarantee due process and equal protection under the law for all Americans — not just white Americans.   So it is ironic that lawyers like Nimocks now use the 14th Amendment as a weapon to fight the imagined victimization of the Christian majority by those in need of some equal protection themselves.

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For much of my adulthood, I operated under a false assumption.  I thought that once the inherent rights of Americans of different stripes were formally recognized, a kind of progressive ratchet-mechanism would lock in those gains as others were pursued.  But I was wrong.  Opponents — and by opponents I mean those of privilege who do not want privileges extended to others —  are not content to accept legal realities.  They instead work to erode and erase what others have gained.

In my lifetime, this retrograde force came to the fore after the 1973 Roe vs Wade decision, morphed into the so-called Moral Majority of the late 1970s, rebranded itself under the “family values” banner in the 1980s, became the dittohead hate-fans of Rush Limbaugh in the 1990s, and finally in the 2000s have gathered together to worship in the church of their choice, the conservative propaganda arm that is Fox News.

I think the very raison d’être of Fox News is to stoke fear and resentment of others in the minds of its viewers.  It goes to great lengths to advance the religious (and by religious, they always mean Christian) victim narrative, from Bill O’Reilly’s tired “War on Christmas” rants to the more recent effort on Fox and Friends to cast the Emanuel AME Church massacre as an attack on faith rather than the racial hate-crime that it was.

Fox News plays to its hard-right audience, for whom entitlement and victimization are two sides of the same coin.  Tamara Scott of CWA captures the essence of it:

We never thought this would happen in America.  We’ve so enjoyed such liberty and such freedom for so long, that now generations have taken it for granted.  And we watched it be chipped away and peeled away without our response.  Now, it’s not just that we are having to stand strong, but we’re having to retake the mountain, we’re having to retake what was ours.

Few say so, but what we seem to have is a modern-day Confederacy, waging the Cold War equivalent of the Civil War.  It is found in the flag flying above the South Carolina capitol building and in the diatribes of Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh.  It is found in the countless Take Back America speeches by the likes of Rick Santorum, Rand Paul and others on the fringe.  This un-civil war is not about territory, it is not about slavery and it is not really about freedom.  It is about preserving the entitlements of those who feel most entitled to them.  And once again, the little state I live in is one of the battlegrounds.

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Every war needs a battle song, so I wrote one for Conservatives to sing.  It only has one verse, but that’s all right — they sing the same verse over and over all the time.  I have to confess, I wasn’t feeling very creative, so I lifted a lot of the words and music from fellow traveler Woody Guthrie.  You can click here and then sing along:

This land is my land,
This land is my land.
Screw California
and the New York island.
From the red-state florists
To the coal-ash waters,
This land was made for folks like me.

Soon, we will see whether the Supreme Court agrees.  Not that Tamara Scott cares.