Lexington Herald-Leader columnist Tom Eblen (18 September) latched onto what he called “[Ky. Governor] Bevin’s ramblings about the need to ‘shed blood’ if Clinton is elected” for one of his periodic rants concerning the evils of republicans/evangelicals. The context involved a tirade against such elements as Limbaugh and Fox News, crediting them with turning the GOP into a “white nationalist party” as if the Democrat Party isn’t at least 75% white, nationalist or not.
He actually was citing Hillary’s “basket of deplorables” as the current repubs – folks who are “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic” and irredeemably so…hopeless cases. Despite the fact that everyone besides Eblen knows Bevin was not talking about an imminent bloodletting, it is instructive to see from where Bevin could be coming, i.e., a look at both current events and history. The major thrust of the column concerned persecution of Christians.
The media, including the uber-liberal H-L, has constantly related accounts for years regarding the beheading of Christians in Muslim-governed countries, unarmed people slaughtered like animals, as over the recent weekend in NYC and Elizabeth, N.J., not to mention 9/11. Given a modicum of power, as is happening in Europe, Islamists would do the same in the U.S., their terrorist tactics just the beginning. Clinton has announced that hundreds of thousands of Muslims would be admitted to the U.S. in her presidency. That’s not a “Bevin rambling,” just a truth. The bloodshed of Christians is already in the U.S.
The lessons of history are instructive. Those Christians who withstood the rigors of the “Mayflower episode” in the early seventeenth century were fleeing Great Britain account religious persecution occasioned by their refusal to pay homage to the official Church of England. That’s not even ancient history. In that day, Christians were burned alive at the stake or hanged.
To teach Mayflower Christians a lesson, Britain later deployed the strongest navy and at least the second strongest army in the world, occasioning bloodshed on a grand scale…again, not even ancient history. The colonists/Christians paid dearly in blood and treasure in that eight-years of hell in the 1780s. Jesus told his disciples to arm themselves with swords, and that’s precisely what the George Washington-era Christians did to save this nation then and also in 1812-15.
Flash forward to 1861. To save the nation, Lincoln and citizens acting largely upon Christian convictions (observing Christian beliefs as initiating and constructing the Constitution) repelled those who would split the nation and in the process freed the slaves. The cost was incomprehensible—an average of 340 deaths of mostly white males per day…for four long years. This was a bloody Christian-persecution matter of only 150 or so years ago.
Eblen's approach to blood/guts motivation as a less sanguinary but equally vindictive matter was seen ten years ago when he as then-H-L managing editor in collusion with the editorial folks attempted to destroy the University of the Cumberlands, which had expelled a homosexual student not for his orientation but for “outing” it, actually flaunting it in social media along with pictures of men kissing each other. The private school had that right, as noted in its student-handbook, and as a “Christian” matter as outlined in scripture. At the time, neither the military nor the Boy Scouts allowed homosexuals to serve as a practical matter.
On seven days of a nine-day period, the paper made the subject front-page-above-the-fold stuff, positioned in the area devoted to the most important news of the world. In addition to the huge front-page segments, pictures, and headlines, the paper dedicated a huge plethora of columns and pictures to the subject on its interior pages, all in the front (A) “news, editorial, op-ed” sections.
Eblen furnished the date/information concerning a statewide protest to be held at UC, Williamsburg, Ky. On the evening TV- news accounts of that “protest effort,” there seemed to be more interviews with law enforcement people standing around sort of slack-jawed obviously wondering why they were there than with the participants, maybe 35. The UC Christians were persecuted by Eblen and his gang...or so they thought.
The same thing happened four years ago when the paper attempted to bankrupt Hands On Originals, a local shirt/sweater-printing company that refused, as a Christian-beliefs matter, to produce T-shirts for the local LGBTQ organization. The paper even advertised a grand “protest” downtown nowhere near the HOO location that was virtually ignored by the citizens. There was a lawsuit, of course, and the Court ruled in favor of HOO.
So...there's Bevin's “rambling” and Eblen's “rambling,” the former a credible warning, the latter a mean-spirited bit of hypocritical hogwash.
And so it goes.
Jim Clark
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