No Surprises with Hobby Lobby Family Agenda

What, you were expecting them to stop at Plan B?

I stumbled across a print version of Time magazine in a doctor's office earlier this week. Wow! Are those getting thin! Striplings, when I was your age, Time magazine arrived in the mailbox, chock-a-block with advertising of all sorts and running more than 100 pages. Now they have a website. On which I could not find a copy of the print article about the Green family, owners of Hobby Lobby.

The article is called "The Contraception Countdown." It appeared in the July 7-14 print issue.

In the absence of the link (sorry), let us here at "The Gods Are Bored" give you a rundown. Same thing, right? That's what blogs are for!

The article profiled the Green family, evangelical Christians. Here's a family portrait:

The Greens believe that America has lost its way and needs to return to good Christian values. Nobody would care much, except -- as you see from the portrait -- they're well-heeled and powerful. They have the clout to bring this country back to God as they see Him.

There's little argument that our nation has drifted from fundamental Christian principles that are clearly delineated in the Bible.

As the Greens see it, one way to rectify this falling-away from faith is to teach the Bible in public schools. Mind you, the course would be an elective, but they have sunk tons of money into developing a technologically advanced, kicky curriculum for their elective on the Bible as a historical and philosophical textbook. Needless to say, this has been a goal of many Christian Americans for a long time, and damn that pesky Constitution!

Since they more or less roll in ducats, the Green family has amassed a formidable collection of ancient Bibles, scrolls, and relics. Well, this is not the kind of stuff you heave into a temperature- and humidity-controlled vault, just for creaky old scholars to peruse. No! The Greens are funding a Bible Museum that will open in 2017 ... five blocks from the Capitol of the United States of America.

Come on, now. This whole "separation of church and state" thing is really bad. Historically, Christians have been shown to be open-minded and compassionate, modeling themselves after Jesus. Christians have a long and exalted track record of kindness to their own as well as to those of other religions.

This nation needs discipline, the kind that only Christianity can provide.

I'm sure the Green family would be waving their hands and shouting, "Oh, no no no no! This is not what we mean by bringing faith back into the classroom! This is not our vision of a unity of Church and State!"

*When you tell someone what they can and can't do with their own body, that's slavery.

*When you teach a religion in a public school, that's indoctrination.

*When the government favors one faith over others, that's discrimination.

*When a moral code from a religious text is applied piecemeal, rather than in its entirety, that's dishonesty.

Ooooops! I turned a perfectly lovely Time profile of a morally upright family into a screed. Shame on me! But you see, like the founders of this nation, I've read my history books. I know about the Crusades, about the persecution of Protestants during the Reformation, about slavery, about the Holocaust, about the creation of the Church of England, about popes who murdered entire families in vendettas. I know that our country is filled to the plimsol line with atheists, with Jews, with Pagans, with people who are just indifferent to religion, and with numerous Christian sects (large and small) who all have their own slightly different take on the faith. Putting Jesus into our government would only work if you could actually get Him, the actual Jesus, to run the government. And then ... oh golly! Within a heartbeat we'd lose our military industrial complex and find ourselves facing the death penalty for divorce.

I'll bet you're wondering what that new Bible museum in Washington, DC is going to look like. Here's an artist's rendering:

Theocracy is a marvelous thing. Ask any Pharaoh.