By DOUG PITMAN

Response to Frank Miele’s column (“This Easter it’s time to stand up for Christ”) in the Daily Inter Lake on April 5.

To compare the religious dilemma facing Christians in the United States regarding their “powerless” fate being “forced” into providing flowers, baking a cake, or photographing an LGBT wedding to the plight of the Jews during the reign of the Third Reich speaks to the editor’s apparent moral stupidity and/or profound confusion. 

Mr. Miele’s comparison defies rational thought. At best it is insulting and insensitive. At worst it is the kind of pre-meditated, destructive rhetoric that intentionally provokes irrational religious and political conflict to sell papers or put a small person into the middle of his own fabricated “big” issue to appear as a true champion of the oppressed Christian right. Mr. Miele exacerbates his hubris by invoking the “lessons” of Gandhi, Martin Luther King, and Jesus to pander his manipulative and destructive argument.  

Mr. Miele has intentionally flipped the issue upside down as it is the gay community that has suffered discrimination and persecution at the hands of intolerant God-fearing, Jesus-loving “Christians.” To quote Ian Millhiser (senior fellow at the Center for American Progress Action Fund): 

“While LGBT Americans are the current target of this effort to repackage religious prejudice as ‘religious liberty’ they are hardly the first. To the contrary, as Wake Forest law Professor Michael Kent Curtis explained in a 2012 law review article, many segregationists justified racial bigotry on the very same grounds that religious conservatives now hope to justify anti-gay animus. In the words of one professor at a prominent Mississippi Baptist institution, “our Southern segregation way is the Christian way...  [God] was the original segregationist.” 

The Ku Klux Klan fervently defended their cross burnings and lynchings with old testament scripture as do the current crop of “Christian” homophobic bigots who are determined to deny LGBT Americans the right of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. 

Regarding Old Testament scripture, let me refer Mr. Miele and his “Christian” readers to those biblical scholars who make their life’s work the interpretation of the Old Testament and Jewish law in terms of living in the real world. The Central Conference of American Rabbis, the professional association of Reform rabbis, passed a resolution in 1996 opposing “governmental efforts to ban gay and lesbian marriage.” The Union of American Hebrew Congregations, the congregational arm of the Reform movement, followed suit in 1997, resolving to “support secular efforts to promote legislation which would provide civil marriage equal opportunity for gay men and lesbians.”  Mr. Miele and the “Christians” he portends to represent need to get the memo that the laws of Moses have been re-interpreted by the present sons of Moses to grant LBGT Americans equality and freedom from bigotry and persecution. 

Mr. Miele’s concludes that “what we have here is a war on religion and especially Christianity” and that “I have the same choice as the Jews in Germany, exile or prison.” Mr. Miele, your attempt to stand the true issue on its head brings those of us who can see through your stupidity (?), confusion (?), or intentional inflammatory rhetoric (?) to the point of revulsion.  

And by the way you do have one more choice beyond exile or prison. You can step outside your self-righteous, self-important delusional persona into the sunlight, breath some cool Montana fresh air in the home of the free and the land of the brave, and try to get a fix on the true moral compass of our country. But before heading out make sure you put on your shirt that reads “Stand Up for Christ” on the front and “No Cake for You!” on the back. 

Pitman is a resident of Whitefish.