You should never under-estimate the religious right. I recently wondered out loud: "How long before religious right leaders urge a ban on gay marriage because it is inflaming Islamist terrorism?" I was a couple years too late. Chuck Colson wrote the following in October 2004:
"One vital goal of the war in Iraq, and the war against terrorism, is to bring democracy to the heart of the Islamic world. Our hope is to make freedom so attractive that other Muslim countries will follow suit. But when radical Islamists see American women abusing Muslim men, as they did in the Abu Ghraib prison, and when they see news coverage of same-sex couples being "married" in U.S. towns, we make our kind of freedom abhorrent ‚Äî the kind they see as a blot on Allah’s creation.
Preserving traditional marriage in order to protect children is a crucially important goal by itself. But it’s also about protecting the United States from those who would use our depravity to destroy us. We must not give up simply because the Senate voted down the FMA. It took William Wilberforce and his allies 20 years to shut down Britain’s slave trade; it will take years to win the battle for traditional marriage."
The equation of my commitment to my fiance with that of the torture in Abu Ghraib is unsurprising coming from a Christianist, but it is morally abhorrent nonetheless. I’m sure that Mr Colson has done great work with prisoners. But the notion that a commitment to another human being for life is "depravity" is itself depraved. (Hat tip: PFAW.)
The Dish 