Doesn’t this look just like the sort of thing the Ku Klux Klan would fly?
The recently recognized Traditional Values Club has won the right to hang its organization’s flag in the stairwell of Howell High School next to the Diversity’s Club’s rainbow-colored flag, which some say represents gay pride.
The Traditional Values Club flag is red, white and blue, symbolizing patriotism, and it features a red “t,” which stands for traditional values. The lowercase “t” also resembles a cross, representative of the Christian faith.
Last year, the district was embroiled in controversy after the diversity flag was raised. Students painted the rock in front of the school with anti-gay slurs. In response, other students supporting the Diversity Club then painted the word "Love" over the hate messages as well as spraying the word “Love” more than 25 times on sidewalks and around the school flag pole.
Four students were found responsible caught for painting the “Love” messages and suspended, which prompted ignited hundreds of students to hold a sit-down demonstration in protest.
The Traditional Values flag has yet to be raised in the school, according to Assistant Principal Michael Mulligan, who referred all questions to Principal Marge Hamill. Hamill did not return phone calls from The Detroit News.
The Traditional Values club’s chairman, Andrew Cureton, senior class vice president and National Merit Scholarship finalist, applauded the school administration for its their decision to hang the flag.
“We asked to hang this flag to promote equality and acceptance of conservatives within our school,” he stated in a release.
The article goes on to cite one Vicki Fyke, organizer of a group calling itself Livingston Organization for Values in Education (LOVE), as saying of the flag: “It’s a Christian flag obviously and I’m thrilled the club decided on having a Christian emblem to represent them…I don’t think there’ll be any more controversy with this flag than the other one. Maybe, it will take away what was dividing (the students). It might be calming thing.”
Uh, yeah. And then again, it might not. Especially when you consider that, according to the wingnuts of the Religious Reich, there’s a war on:
A summit of evangelical Christians and conservative Catholic and Jewish activists yesterday produced a “Values Voters’ Contract with Congress,” an outline of what the religiously minded expect their elected representatives to bring about in the near future.
Modeled after the Republican Party’s 1994 “Contract with America,” the “Values Voters’ Contract” stipulated 10 aims, ranging from legislation to keep the words “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance to laws guaranteeing greater religious freedoms in the workplace, prohibiting human cloning and embryo research, and guaranteeing a “right to life” to all children before birth.
“It’s time for the values voters to tell the government what we expect of them,” said the Rev. Rick Scarborough, founder of the Lufkin, Texas-based Vision America, which organized the summit. “This contract tells Congress they can count on our vote if these things become front-burner issues.”
It also addresses President Bush, Mr. Scarborough added.
“With all this discussion of marriage before the election,” he said, “we just heard a State of the Union message where there was no mention of a marriage amendment.”
The “contract” was released at a “War on Christians and the Values Voters in 2006” conference at the Omni Shoreham Hotel, where speakers painted a gloomy picture of a war by “neo-pagans” against “values voters” for about 300 listeners.
“Let’s not say, ‘Oh, it’s not that bad,’ ” said the Rev. Tristan Emmanuel, director of the Equipping Christians for the Public Square Centre in Jordan Station, Ontario. Secularists, he added, practice “Christophobia,” which he deemed “an irrational fear of anything Christ-based.”
“When you listen to their rejection of our participation in the public square, it’s visceral,” he said.
Ron Luce, president of Teen Mania Ministries of Garden Valley, Texas, told the audience that only 4 percent of today’s “millennial” generation of teenagers are evangelical Christians able to transform the culture.
“If we only have 4 percent, we all lose,” he said. “We look at ‘In God We Trust’ on our money and think [losing] it will never happen.”
Five Jewish speakers on one of the afternoon panels seemed unconcerned by other speakers’ rhetoric about “losing Christian dominance of America” by noting that their safety depends on the existence of evangelicals.
Jokingly referring to the quintet as “Jewish co-conspirators on the religious right,” Jeff Ballabon of the New York-based Center for Jewish Values said today’s culture wars “aren’t just a war on Christians.”
“This is a war on America, a war on God and a war on all believers,” he said.
“Our battle,” said Rabbi Aryeh Spero, president of Caucus for America, “is the battle of the ages, and that’s of great import. We are aligned with Elijah, with Jesus and with Moses.”
Values voters are believers aligned against pagans, he said, adding, “Elijah went up against the pagans of his day. We should be happy this day we can fight the battle of God.”
This pagan says: Just try it, you bastards. You do anything of the jihadist sort, and you’ll get hexed straight into the next fucking millennium. You wanna feel what it’s like to take a karmic drop-kick straight into the mouth of Nemesis, you go right ahead and make that war…if you dare.
Now go fuck yourselves. And keep your rosaries off my ovaries, y’hear?
Like Bill Maher said, nothing says we are oppressed like holding a conference at the opulent Omni Shoreham Hotel. This isn’t about a war on Christians. This is the Christians feigning the victim when they can’t push their narrow views on everybody. It’s like having a spoiled brat crying when he couldn’t get all the kids in the neighborhood to joins his club where he got to set all the rules. They scream religious oppression whenever someone disagrees with them. Nobody is saying they can’t live by their beliefs. They just can’t go around like some dictator telling everyone else how to live. If they want to see real religious oppression, they should try to move to Saudi Arabia.