NY Times Mispainting

Normally, I don't trouble myself to reply to anti-religious screeds but I think what makes Harold Meyerson's Op-Ed for the New York Times worthy of my attention is that his paints history with such a sloppy and careless brush. Considering the educational background that I would expect from someone writing for the New York Times I have to suspect that at least some of his writing is self deceived if not meant to purposely deceive. More troubling is that Meyersons op-ed is not really about homosexuality it is about how wrong he feels Christianity particularly Evangelical Christianity is.

He says....

Mohler's {An evangelical Meyerson is arguing against} deity, in short, is the God of Double Standards: a God who enforces the norms and fears of a world before science, a God profoundly ignorant of or resistant to the arc of American history, which is the struggle to expand the scope of the word "men" in our founding declaration that "all men are created equal." This is a God who in earlier times was invoked to defend segregation and, before that, slavery.

However, ignorant Meyerson may imagine the God of being of the arch of human history can Meyerson be so ignorant as to really believe that Christianity was the primary defending force for slavery and segregation? After all, abolition was pushed largely by religious individuals, William Wilborforce comes immediately to mind but the movement was dominated by religious groups, the Church of England, the Quakers and Meyerson's most hated Evangelicals were all major players in Abolition. And has Meyerson forgotten that science was also in earlier times invoked to defend slavery and segregation. Africans were drawn up as the missing link between men and apes, skulls were filled with marbles to show that the brain capacity of Caucasians was larger than that of 'inferior races'. Segregation was opposed also largely by churches, ever heard of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.?

Even our founding declaration which Meyerson quotes drips with the same religious mindset he carelessly dismisses as oppressive. "... that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights,..." I don't believe the government of this country was set up to be religious in anyway but how ironic that Meyerson would accuse the Christian God of not understanding our laws at the very point in which He is evoked.

What Meyerson seems unable to understand is that religion is not a prejudice or an opinion but the most central point of the lives of millions of people, it has been the inspiration of vast good works and essential energy of most moral causes over the years. It is in the end the fundamental right of the Evangelicals to withhold approval from the behavior of certain groups regardless of how unfair Meyerson may feel it is for God to allow people to be born with the inclination toward sin.