In the run-up to the 2008 election, Focus On the Family composed a "Letter from 2012 in Obama's America." The widely-disseminated letter made 34 predictions concerning what America would likely look like after four years under an Obama presidency.
To give you a sense of its tone and direction, here's how the letter began:
October 22, 2012We are now in October of 2012, four years after this foul piece of fear-mongering (disguised as Christian wisdom) was penned to scare evangelicals away from voting for Obama.Dear friends,
I can hardly sing “The Star Spangled Banner” any more. When I hear the words,
O say, does that star spangled banner yet wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave?I get tears in my eyes and a lump in my throat. Now in October of 2012, after seeing what has happened in the last four years, I don’t think I can still answer, “Yes,” to that question. We are not “the land of the free and the home of the brave.” Many of our freedoms have been taken away...
It should come as no surprise, as Fred Clarke noted recently, that the letter ends up going 0-for-34 in its predictions. But I don't want to focus on its ineptitude.
Instead, I want to expose the depths of the Christian right's crazy (and politically-motivated) delusions that even Clint Eastwood can't touch. I want to stab evangelical soothsaying – a festival that arrives every four years – in its pseudo-prophesying heart.
And all I have to do is present, without comment, a number of the letter's predictions distilled (so you don't have to read the whole, god-awful thing).
It is a festival of hate, xenophobia and utter delusions. Enjoy:
It's now October 2012, and all I have to say to Focus On the Family and evangelicals who play this apocalyptic game everywhere is the following:
- The Boy Scouts of America will be disbanded rather than be forced to "hire homosexual scoutmasters and allow them to sleep in tents with young boys."
- Pornography is now on television at all hours, making it impossible to prevent children from seeing it.
- First graders will be forced to take "the goodness of homosexuality" classes.
- Home-schooling becomes largely illegal as everyone is forced into using public education standards. Christians flock to Australia and New Zealand! (Seriously.)
- In the military, "homosexuals are now given special bonuses for enlisting in military service" and active duty members or chaplains are expelled if they don't like the new rules.
- Guns are taken from everybody! Only police & active duty military personnel get to keep them.
- Terrorists are blowing up bombs everywhere, and Obama seems impotent to do anything about it. (Osama must still be running things.)
- Russia begins to take over Eastern Europe, invading and taking as satellite states "Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic and Bulgaria, with no military response from the U.S. or the U.N."
- As the world crumbles, back in America health care becomes socialized, and everyone must wait years before receiving cancer treatment and the elderly don't get to use hospitals anymore.
- Christian doctors will flee their practices across America rather than be forced to artificially inseminate homosexual couples.
- All Christian adoption agencies will be closed rather than be forced to give children to homosexual couples.
- Taxes go through the roof for everyone, particularly the middle class, and nobody can survive any longer.
That is all.Shut your xenophobic, ignorant pie holes and wallow in your delusion-induced shame.