On Sunday, in a gruesome tragedy, 24-year-old Matthew Murray killed two people at a Christian missionary center in Arvada, Colo., and then killed two others a Colorado Springs megachurch later that day. Murray apparently intended to kill others before a church security guard shot and killed him Sunday afternoon.
Tony Perkins, head of the far-right Family Research Council, decided yesterday to use the shootings to bash (and blame) the “secular media.” (thanks to reader D.N. for the tip)
Under a headline that read, “An Assault on Faith,” Perkins told supporters in a weekly email newsletter:
“It is hard not to draw a line between the hostility that is being fomented in our culture from some in the secular media toward Christians and evangelicals in particular and the acts of violence that took place in Colorado yesterday.”
I’m not sure what’s more twisted — Perkins seeking to exploit a tragedy to advance his religio-political agenda, or his bizarre belief that the “secular media” is responsible for fomenting hostility towards evangelicals.
In both instances, Perkins, a prominent religious right leader, has the story backwards. Murray, who was obviously suffering from severe mental illnesses, wasn’t immersed in the “secular media,” he was home-schooled in “a deeply religious Christian household.”
Also, it’s frustrating to see how predictable far-right activists have become. It seems whenever there’s a tragedy involving a young person with a gun, right-wing voices step up to blame the American culture.
For example, in 1999, as the nation was still coming to grips with the tragedy at Columbine High School, then-House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Texas) took to the floor to identify what he saw as the real culprit: science classes.
“Our school systems teach the children that they are nothing but glorified apes who are evolutionized [sic] out of some primordial soup,” DeLay said. Young people learn modern biology, DeLay said, which in turn makes them feel insignificant, which in turn leads to violence.
Earlier this year, after the shootings at Virginia Tech, Ken Ham, a leading creationist activist, offered a similar tirade less than 24 hours after the slayings.
“We live in an era when public high schools and colleges have all but banned God from science classes. In these classrooms, students are taught that the whole universe, including plants and animals — and humans — arose by natural processes. Naturalism (in essence, atheism) has become the religion of the day and has become the foundation of the education system (and Western culture as a whole). The more such a philosophy permeates the culture, the more we would expect to see a sense of purposelessness and hopelessness that pervades people’s thinking. In fact, the more a culture allows the killing of the unborn, the more we will see people treating life in general as ‘cheap.'”
And now, within 24 hours of the shootings in Colorado, there’s Tony Perkins blaming “the secular media” for the tragedy.
Can’t these clowns have the decency to wait more than a day before trying to exploit murders for political gain? Please?