Christian Stonings?

In my last post, I reported on the impending stoning of people for sexual offenses in Iran.

So would Christian theocracy be any more civilized? Surely not. The Hebrew Bible harshly condemns supposedly deviant sexual behavior as abominable to God. For example:

If a man commits adultery with the wife of his neighbour, both the adulterer and the adulteress shall be put to death.

The man who lies with his father's wife has uncovered his father's nakedness; both of them shall be put to death; their blood is upon them.

If a man lies with his daughter-in-law, both of them shall be put to death; they have committed perversion; their blood is upon them.

If a man lies with a male as with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination; they shall be put to death; their blood is upon them.

If a man takes a wife and her mother also, it is depravity; they shall be burned to death, both he and they, that there may be no depravity among you.

If a man has sexual relations with an animal, he shall be put to death; and you shall kill the animal.

If a woman approaches any animal and has sexual relations with it, you shall kill the woman and the animal; they shall be put to death, their blood is upon them. (Leviticus 20:10-16)

The evangelical Christians seeking to transform the United States into a Christian nation have not renounced those passages. (How could they, if the Bible is the unerring word of God?) Instead, they frantically oppose any and all attempts to portray and treat homosexuals as normal people. For example, see this response to a Heinz ad featuring a gay couple. Any recognition of the fact that gays can and do form loving families is horrifying to them; it must be squelched -- now.

The Christian theocrats are not concerned to uphold and protect individual rights. They care only for God's will. As Colorado's Amendment 48 shows, they seek to impose God's law on everyone by force, including dissenters and disbelievers. That, combined with their obsessive dehumanization of gays, leads me to believe that Christian theocracy would be no more tolerant of homosexuals than the Islamic theocracy of Iran.

It's a frightful prospect.