Christians Are in the Crosshairs

By Dr. Kevin Barrett

When I was born in 1959, all 50 American states considered sodomy a criminal offense, as it had been since colonial times. Most of the blue states repealed those laws in the 1970s. But it wasn’t until the 2003 Supreme Court decision Lawrence v. Texas that southern states, along with Idaho, Utah, Kansas, Oklahoma, Missouri, and Michigan, were forced to decriminalize an act that has, throughout the history of Western civilization, been considered both a sin and a punishable offense.

Today, it could be argued, we still have sodomy laws. But today’s sodomy laws are pro-sodomy, not anti-sodomy. Admittedly, the government hasn’t made sodomy mandatory—at least not yet. But it has, in various ways, forced Americans to take pro-sodomy positions as opposed to anti-sodomy ones.

The homosexual community consists of people who proudly identify themselves with their penchant for sodomy. By prohibiting speech that takes a negative attitude toward this identification and practice, the government is essentially mandating that all Americans take a pro-sodomy stance. Dissenters are punished by deprivation of livelihood.

One of the best-known examples is baker Jack Phillips of Masterpiece Cake Shop, who was legally obliged by the state of Colorado to express pro-sodomy sentiments by baking a wedding cake for a sodomite couple. In 2018 the Supreme Court ruled that such laws violated his First Amendment rights to free expression and freedom of religion. But recently he found himself back in court defending himself against being forced to bake cakes celebrating “gender transitions.” On Jan. 26, the Colorado Court of Appeals ruled against him. Phillips plans to appeal the decision.

Another American whose livelihood is threatened by pro-sodomy laws is Georgia police officer Jacob Kersey. On Jan. 2, Kersey posted on his personal Facebook page: “God designed marriage. Marriage refers to Christ and the church. That’s why there is no such thing as homosexual marriage.” The Port Wentworth Police Department ordered him to remove the post, suspended him for a week, then told him he could not return to his job if he continued to post anti-sodomy views. To his credit, Officer Kersey refused to back down, and is now out of a job.

Jack Phillips and Jacob Kersey are Christians. Sodomy is a very grave sin according to virtually all traditional interpretations of Christianity. Philips, Kersey, and tens of millions of other Christian Americans, along with millions of followers of other religions, find themselves in the bizarre position of being required by law to embrace, whether explicitly or tacitly, ideas and attitudes that are anathema to their faith and the faith of their fathers going back thousands of years.

Do laws punishing the free expression of traditional religious views constitute anti-Christian discrimination? It would appear so. And is there a larger problem of anti-Christian discrimination and prejudice? Mounting evidence answers in the affirmative. Studies have found that socially conservative academicians face career discrimination, as do Christian medical students. And a study of Ivy League admissions records has shown that non-Jewish whites, meaning those from Christian backgrounds, are massively discriminated against in admissions decisions, while Jewish whites are lavished with equally massive favoritism.

How can a nation that is 63% Christian discriminate against its own majority? Why did that majority allow a rabidly anti-Christian elite to seize power in leading financial, academic, media, and political institutions?

America’s descent into anti-religious fanaticism parallels Russia’s trajectory after the 1917 Bolshevik revolution. Like today’s “woke” ideology, Communist ideology took an extremely hostile position toward traditional religion. The USSR, like today’s U.S.A. (U.S.S.A.?), made a point of not allowing religious people an equal opportunity to express their views. In the Soviet Union, Christians and Muslims were not allowed access to printing presses. Likewise, in today’s America, they are not allowed to post their thoughts on social media, under pain of losing access to gainful employment.

For a moving account of the repression of Christianity under the Communists and the rebirth of religion in post-Soviet Russia, I highly recommend the book Everyday Saints by Archimandrite Tikhon, a spiritual advisor to Russian President Vladimir Putin. Reading it made me wonder whether American religious groups and individuals may one day have to “go underground” like the Russian Orthodox Church did between 1917 and 1990.

The majority of Russians support new laws, passed by the Russian parliament and signed into law by President Putin, that outlaw homosexual propaganda in general, and grooming of children in particular. Meanwhile Ukraine, taken over by a U.S.-NATO coup in 2014, is dominated by a group of depraved anti-Christian oligarchs—the same tribe that for centuries made Odessa the world capital of sex slavery and other categories of vice.

Is Russia’s war on the “woke” West and its Ukrainian puppets really a war for the survival of Christian civilization?

Kevin Barrett, Ph.D., is an Arabist-Islamologist scholar and one of America’s best-known critics of the War on Terror. From 1991 through 2006, Dr. Barrett taught at colleges and universities in San Francisco, Paris, and Wisconsin. In 2006, however, he was attacked by Republican state legislators who called for him to be fired from his job at the University of Wisconsin-Madison due to his political opinions.