Hobby Lobby and the Tinfoil Hat Brigade

Stand Firm by David Fischler 

 

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I doubt that this is news to anyone, but Frank Schaeffer, the late Francis Schaeffer’s wayward son, is now being fitted for a straight-jacket. He has officially joined the people who think the government is hiding aliens at Area 51, that the CIA developed AIDS to destroy black America, and that the CDC is even now planning the zombie apocalypse to relieve over-population. We’re talking serious mental illness possibilities, folks.
Schaeffer, long a scourge of religious conservatives, has loped into conspiracy theory territory over the Hobby Lobby decision. The title–“Hobby Lobby Verdict is a Victory For Ultra-Right Roman Catholic Co-Conspirators With Chuck Colson’s Ghost”–says it all. Apparently the late Chuck Colson and Princeton’s Robert George are responsible for Antonin Scalia’s installation of a cabal of right-wing evangelicals and medieval Romans Catholics in complete control over the bodies of every female in the United States:

Pope Francis must have vomited when he heard the Hobby Lobby news. Nothing could undo the good he has recently done the Church’s image more than yet another case of anti-woman lashing out by a cabal or far right Roman Catholic activists– this time in the Supreme Court.
Alarmed by the Supreme Court pandering to the extreme religious right in the Hobby Lobby case, the new pope might ask “Who is responsible for this?” The answer is: Many people. However two people are the real instigators: the late evangelical far right activist, Charles Colson, and Roman Catholic far right ideologue and anti-gay activist, Princeton Professor Robert George. Their tool has been Justice Antonin Scalia and the other Roman Catholic members of the Court.
George is a close friend and co-conspirator with fellow ultra-conservative far right Roman Catholic ideologues including with Scalia who became the ringleader of the GOP’s Court-driven Hobby Lobby lunge into theocratic politics. George is the de facto father of the twinned war against gays and war against women. Scalia is his follower and close friend. And George has the support of the U.S. Roman Catholic bishops, the Mormon leadership and the most conservative of the evangelical leaders. Charles Colson was George’s close confident. Together they hatched the plan that in the end (and after Colson died) became the Hobby Lobby case.

There’s a lot more–Schaeffer manages to bring in the Manhattan Declaration, Karl Rove, the Becket Fund First Amendment law firm, sociological researcher Mark Regnerus of the University of Texas, the U.S. Commission for International Religious Freedom, and the National Organization for Marriage. He no doubt wanted to include the Knights Templar and the Illuminati but had space constraints.

Fisking nonsense of this sort is pointless, just as arguing with paranoid schizophrenics about whether the government is really using mind-control rays on them is pointless. But what does it say about the religious left in this country that Frank Schaeffer continues to be treated as though he has something meaningful to say?