Reprinted from LA Progressive
The phone call came in at about 9:30 AM MST on Monday, November 16, 2020, on our home landline.
"We're Coming For You in a White GMC Truck to Blow You and Your Wife's Heads Off With a 12 Gauge Shotgun”
The Voice was male, unaccented, earnest, eager, and almost gleeful.
The Voice repeated the sentence over and over again during the 37-second duration of the call.
We get a lot of this.
Why?
Let me see if I can try to explain.
I am not a Christian but I call many Christians my dearest of brothers and sisters.
I was born and raised Jewish.
Although I’m not very religious, I am proud of my religious faith’s ethnicity, cultural heritage, and contributions to the human condition.
Nevertheless, what I do professionally for work, brings me in extensive contact with many Christians.
I am a lawyer and civil rights activist.
I lead an organization, the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF), which has helped well over 71,000 U.S. military members and veterans fight against the ravages of religious discrimination for 15 years now.
The clearly distinct villains in about 99% of these cases of abject bullying, prejudice, and bigotry are military superiors who use their professed version of their Christian faith to profoundly hammer their otherwise helpless military subordinates into submission so as to force them to accept their armed forces bosses' fundamentalist Christian faith.
Amazingly, about 95% of the abused clients we help at MRFF are Christians THEMSELVES!
They are being targeted by their military superiors for simply not being “Christian enough.”
Here at MRFF, we have over 500 paid and volunteer staff, of whom roughly 80-plus % are also practicing Christians.
As a result of MRFF’s successful interventions to preserve the Constitutionally-mandated separation of Church and State in the United States military, we have made many powerful enemies among some large fundamentalist Christian parachurch organizations, right-wing national news outlets, and the many individuals who support them both.
We have received a steady daily diet of only the most perverse threats and warnings of imminent violence and death, as well as grotesque, intensely ad hominem condemnations, for many years.
These often surprisingly specific threats are aimed directly at myself, my family, and the MRFF staff.
My wife has written two books about it all. (Read them with caution!)
This abuse is immeasurably repugnant, ugly and – above all else – constant.
Consequently, we are forced to invest nontrivially in substantial security measures to protect ourselves, our MRFF staff, and our MRFF mission.
We work extremely closely with law enforcement and our own MRFF security team.
Why am I writing about all of this?
It is not to “complain” but rather to meaningfully comment.
If vigorously supporting our United States military members’ basic Constitutional rights to be free from the constancy of Christian proselytizing by their superiors generates the never-ending torrent of hateful threats directed at me, my own family, and the MRFF family of staff and supporters…well, what does that genuinely say about us ALL as fellow American citizens?
Today, we live in a desperately divided America savagely polarized into two distinct camps and, if you’re reading this, you already know where you pitch your own tent.
With the advent of the new Administration coming shortly to power in Washington, there is a glimmer of a chance that our Divided States of America can possibly heal in UNITY once again.
We, as a country, must rapidly find the treasured mechanisms to reach out to our neighbors in purposeful fellowship, understanding, and love.
We must come together as a whole American people; we must do so NOW.
We must recognize and celebrate that which we share and not fatally obsess over that which separates us.
The responsibility to reasonably and rationally reconcile in friendship falls upon each of us.
Failure to come together will justly reap The Abyss.