Watch Shane explain why he made the “It Could Happen to You” video to the WFAA news team.

]]> http://recoveringfundamentalists.com/shane-bitney-crone-on-wfaa-news.html/feed 0 http://recoveringfundamentalists.com/equal-love-equal-rights.html http://recoveringfundamentalists.com/equal-love-equal-rights.html#comments Tue, 08 May 2012 18:36:02 +0000 Rob Steiner http://recoveringfundamentalists.com/?p=5583

When I first moved to California from Ohio 6 years ago, I had never known a gay couple. Tom and Shane were the first. They were two of the most genuine, honest, hard working and generally likable people I had ever met, too. Their love for each other was crystal clear. After 2 minutes of knowing them, I no longer saw a gay couple; all I could see was a young couple in love.

LGBT rights was a big reason why I began to question my faith. Tom and Shane were the first to remove the boundaries placed on my understanding of love by my fundamentalist upbringing. I owe them both a sincere debt of gratitude.

Last year Shane lost Tom in a accident. Tom’s mother, Martha Bridegroom, came to California from Knox, Indiana to retrieve Tom’s body. While Shane was at home resting, she left with Tom for Indiana without allowing Shane to say goodbye. Tom’s father, Norman Bridegroom, then threatened violence against Shane if he were to attend the funeral Indiana. Shane was shut out.

I don’t need to go on a rant about the damage caused by Martha and Norman Bridegroom’s bigotry and intolerance. Shane expresses more than I ever could with his tears in his “It Could Happen To You” video.

Watch Shane on WFAA news »

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Except for one thing: it didn’t happen. The photograph is real, but it has nothing to do with religious violence in Nigeria. What you see in the picture is the result of a terrible explosion that happened when a fuel tanker ran off the road, overturned, and ignited near the village of Sange. Sange, for those of you keeping track at home, is in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, thousands of miles away from Nigeria. Tensions are indeed very high right now between Christians and Muslims in Nigeria, and violence does break out. Like many other countries (including the United States), Nigeria has radical, dangerous groups that twist religious beliefs into excuses for terrible acts. But not even Boko Haram—the Nigerian equivalent of Al-Qaeda—has ever taken to burning Christians alive. The simplest of Google searches easily disproves the “truth” of this story. Yet even as I write this, Facebook posts, email forwards, “Action Alerts,”, Sunday sermons, and other forms of propoganda continue to paint a picture of bloodthirsty Nigerian Muslims setting fire to Christian martyrs. Such outrage raises already-dangerous levels of inter-religious distrust, distrust leads to tension, and tension leads to (more) violence.

I can hear the gasps of (feigned) shock now: “What?! Something I saw on the internet wasn’t true?!?!? Someone get me my smelling salts!” But this fake story is symptomatic of a larger problem that I’ve seen gaining strength lately. Something about the current mindset of many Christians in this country is causing them to throw fact-checking and logical thought entirely out the window. Apparently, the source of a story is more important to these people than the facts of a story—if it comes from Fox News or a conservative leader, it’s unassailably true, no matter how nonsensical or physically impossible. Once one of these “true stories” takes root, nothing from the outside world seems to affect it. For instance, a Christian friend of mine who I otherwise love and respect told me that he “knew” that President Obama is a secret Muslim because he has gold curtains in the White House.

Is this where we’ve fallen to? So many things are wrong with that one sentence—the President has been pretty public about his Christian faith, why would it be terrible if he were Muslim, and what do gold curtains have to do with anything anyway—that it was impossible to even respond. On top of that, a quick fact check told me that gold curtains aren’t even new to the White House. The particular Drapes of Muslim Doom that my friend was talking about were installed by Laura Bush (who is many things, but definitely not a Muslim woman). And check out this photograph of Ronald Reagan, Patron Saint of Conservative Christianity. The curtains may be tacky, but they’re a typical part of White House décor, not a secretly coded shout-out to the worldwide Islamic Brotherhood.

Stories like these make me worry that too many Christians are living in a world of superstition and fear that they mistake for shared reality. I’m sure whole books of folklore could be written about bizarre Obama “facts” believed by somewhere between 15 and 25 percent of the population. In speaking with family and friends, I’ve heard the following

Tales of Our President:

• He’s never seen wearing an American flag pin. (Actual true fact: after failing to wear one at an event during the 2008 campaign, Obama is almost never without a flag on his lapel in public. I’ll do my own speculating and maybe start a rumor that he’s had an American flag tattooed on his chest so that any swimming or vacation photos will also show how much he loves the USA.)
• He doesn’t know (or doesn’t recite, or can’t recite) the Pledge of Allegiance. (Actual true fact: video evidence from the Senate floor shows Obama reciting the Pledge with everyone else. He doesn’t seem to have any problems remembering the words.)
• He arranged to have his mother murdered so that she would never reveal his status as a foreign (Kenyan? Indonesian?) national. (Actual true fact: the “Obama wasn’t born in the US” myth has a million iterations, all of them laughably false. And Stanley Ann Dunham died in 1995 of ovarian cancer.)

I’m sure I’ve missed a lot of these, but the ones I’ve listed here share some troubling features. They all portray the President as some sort of alien “Other” who does not share “our” values. They all state or imply that the President is constantly telegraphing his allegiance to shadowy groups through “hidden” signs. And, of course, they’re all easily disproved with photographic and historical evidence. In other words, they’re superstitions that articulate intense anxiety (about change, about the future) and vestigial racism as the definition of “American” expands to include people with non-Anglo names and non-Caucasian features.

Thanks to gullible Christian congregations and misinformation outlets like Fox News, though, these glaringly false tales get treated as if they were factual events rather than evidence of deep psychological and sociological conflict. And that makes a more divisive and dangerous world for all of us to live in. How are we supposed to have a real, respectful conversation with people who disagree with us if we have to spend the first several hours “debating” the presence or absence of an American flag pin on the duly-elected President of the United States? How are we supposed to be credible advocates for peace between all kinds of people if we can be duped into imagining that Nigerian Muslims were conducting systematic Christian-roastings? The country (and the world) needs more clear-eyed, rational understanding of the world around us, not inflammatory internet memes that get all of their credibility through repetition.

Please, people. Think before you click “Share.”

Here’s the original video:

Ace and Gary also illustrate a complete misunderstanding of atheism. An atheist is not afraid to believe that a god may exist, they simply have no reason to believe that one does. If a banana, or any other phallic fruit, for that matter, were to absolutely prove the existence of a deity, most atheist would be willing and eager to accept this new information.

I have to wonder: where is the concern for the children already born into this world and the adults those children eventually grow into? By making sure that people—particularly women, and particularly poor women—don’t have access to good sexual information or reproductive services, “pro-life” Christians are basically guaranteeing an overpopulated, dangerous society with too few resources to deal with too many social problems.

Planned Parenthood was founded in 1916 by Margaret Sanger, a woman who had watched her own mother die at the age of forty after 18 pregnancies and 11 children. Margaret Sanger became a nurse and worked with poor immigrant women in New York’s Lower East Side. She saw women’s lives cut short by the strain of too many pregnancies, and ignorance about birth control meant that many families had more children than they could provide for. Without the ability to control reproduction by either birth control or abortion, families were stuck in a cycle of poverty and misery when parents couldn’t possibly have enough time or money to make sure that every child was well cared for. Worse, many of those unwanted children grew up with few opportunities, resorting to crime or remaining chronically unemployed. Sanger realized that if every child were born to parents that were ready for him/her and had enough resources to feed, clothe, and educate the children they had, many societal problems would shrink dramatically. So Sanger formed an organization that would provide women and men with the information and services they needed to learn how to plan their families rather than get “surprised” by unsustainable pregnancies. Over the decades Planned Parenthood helped women take control of their lives by teaching them about how human reproduction worked, providing access to birth control, and, yes, making sure that a woman had access to safe and legal abortion services rather than risking their lives with unscrupulous “back alley” doctors or amateur methods.

It seems like simple common sense. Children whose parents are ready for parenthood and can financially support them are more likely to succeed in life and less likely to engage in antisocial behavior. Women’s lives are better when they understand how their bodies work and can make informed decisions about sex and contraception. In a world of limited resources, no one is helped by forcing a woman to go through with a pregnancy that she knows she’s unable to handle. Keeping sexual-health information and services away from people who need them won’t discourage anyone from having sex; it will just fill up our prisons faster and ensure that we as a society always have too many mouths to feed.

So why are the Christian fundamentalists who control the Republican Party so dead-set against Planned Parenthood? For one thing, they’re absolutely obsessed with a tiny sliver of Planned Parenthood’s services: abortion. To hear religious zealots tell it, you’d think that your local Planned Parenthood office is an abortion factory, enticing pregnant women off the street and murdering unborn babies for fun. In reality, abortions constitute less than 10 percent of what Planned Parenthood does (and no federal funds go toward abortion anyway). The rest of the time, they’re screening women for cervical cancer, giving pregnancy tests, helping pregnant women stay healthy, and taking care of new mothers and their babies. Many of Planned Parenthood’s clients are poor, with no other access to these services that clearly improve the lives of women AND children.

But it’s no fun for religious people to talk about improving women’s lives, and especially not women who may not be the absolute ideal of (white, wealthy) Christian femininity. Adult women might make choices that offend fundamentalist norms, and their already-born children need education and services that cost tax dollars. Instead, let’s idealize the fetus! In its first trimester, it’s a kidney-bean-sized pile of cells—there’s no way it will force us to think about difficult topics or make costly choices. Plus, they can smugly talk about knowing the exact moment when “life” begins. Too bad they don’t seem to be too invested in “life” over the long haul.

As much as the Religious Right wants to make the issue of Planned Parenthood’s funding into a debate about abortion, it’s much more far-reaching than that. Regardless of one’s opinions about abortion (I myself would like it if abortions weren’t performed after the first trimester), the continued survival of Planned Parenthood is vital for a safe and secure future in which every child is wanted and our population does not outstrip our resources. I want my daughter to grow up in a better world than this one. I want her to have the knowledge and the tools available to make responsible choices. I don’t want her to have to live in the society Margaret Sanger saw over ninety years ago: a dangerous, violent, and overpopulated place dominated by ignorance and desperation. But that’s exactly what we’ll have if we keep letting Puritanical religious freaks set our public health policy regarding sex education, contraception, and, yes, abortion.