Some people are still laughing in the United States at the idea that there is persecution against Christians in this country, because the Establishment Government Lapdog Media they go to for their news blacklists it. From news reports from recent years:
(1) Pro-lifers put in prison and with a record for speaking in public.
(2) A creationist in prison on tax charges because the judge censored the grounds for the defense, and because a state-loving envious Pensacola Bible College official denounced him (We pay Caesar, why not him?).
(3) Laws against street preaching.
(4) Lawsuit during Clinton years to rob a church of funds donated as tithe by a couple that declared bankruptcy.
(5) Constant IRS demands to audit Christian organizations, even when there is no statutory authority. For which reason the Billy Graham organization refused.
(6) Recognizing the attack against religious conviction in exemptions for “religious organizations” while refusing to exempt individuals.
Obamacare is only one case, where the dictates from H.H.S. “compromised” by exempting “religious organizations” but only ones with a majority of employees who are also members. Although done for propaganda and tactical reasons, it is a de facto recognition of a “legitimate” religious right by the government. But individuals are still disallowed. The Bill of Rights is a list of negative individual rights, not collectives-only rights.
–It’s equivalent to an establishment of the “exempted” religious organizations, in which a burden falls on individuals that does not hit artificial state-recognized groups.
(7) After Waco, nobody can even quote Paul to say “Ye have not yet resisted unto blood”. It was not a mainstream “sect”, but it was a brazen and violent aggressive attack on religious freedom.
(8) After the raids on a peaceful community in west Texas during which children were cut off from their families and phones confiscated, and all the children yanked away from their parents with all that trauma, on the basis of what we know was probably a bogus complaint, and the social workers were not able to get even one complaint of abuse from the children about their parents even after they confiscated phones and cut off all communications between the children and mothers, even after weeks of haranguing at them!
And the amazing thing that should shock us all is that nobody charged those abusive Texas authorities with criminal child abuse!
So we haven’t reached persecution in the scale of mass executions of Christians and probably other freedom-minded folks, which may or may not be televised or censored.
But we are definitely already at the stage where “First they came for the Polygamist cult..” as quoted in the Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_they_came_…
And to talk like it’s some preposterous idea in the illusory America, let’s add another from history:
(9) The Mormons were hounded out of state after state, with laws passed by legislatures specifically aimed at their unorthodox practices that harmed no one outside of themselves; their founder was arrested and then shot in cold blood by a mob whipped into a frenzy in Iowa; and after they settled in the remote areas now known as Utah, the government sent the Army to threaten them into changing their doctrines.
(10) Suppression of the best defense evidence in the trial of well-known Christians, such as Jim Bakker
(11) In the raid on the Northeast Kingdom Community Church in Vermont, the judge issued a scathing rebuke against the state and the government operatives found no evidence at all in the children of the accusations of child abuse after a raid in which they stole away the children:
http://www.nytimes.com/1984/07/11/us/sect-parents-in-heated-town-meeting.html
One comment from a parental victim: “What? Our children are ‘culturally deprived’ because they don’t watch Mickey Mouse?’ Come on, guys!
See, when the apologists for government indoctrination centers talk about home-schooled kids missing out on being properly “socialized”, they really mean socialized into the way THEY want them to be.
And they always say it’s “for the children”.