The House of War: Book One Of : THE OMEGA CRUSADE (12 page)

“The Federal government is not your enemy. The Federal government is your partner in this greatest of human endeavors. To assure you of it, I have asked the Governor to withdraw the National Guard. Governor Morley has
graciously agreed to my request. National Guard troops are heading back to their bases, even as I speak. You need not fear that the Federal government will force you to do anything tonight or punish you in any way for your beliefs. All that is asked of you, my fellow Americans, is that you do not allow those who would use religion to divide us to prevail over the law that would unite us. Do not believe them when they tell you that Christmas is being outlawed. It is a lie. The law is merely asking you to perform the rituals in the churches for which they were designed. For the sake of peace, I bid you comply with the law of the land. For the sake of law and order, I plead with you to do as Jesus Christ himself admonished and ‘pay unto Caesar what is Caesar’s.’

“Good night, my fellow Americans. And may God bless us all.”

William Jennings O’Neill nods and beams a wide smile before his image fades and is replaced by the Presidential Seal.

Boos ripple through the crowd in gathering numbers and rising volume.

Good try, Mr. President, Elmer Kidd says to himself.

“Resume taping, Ernie.”

“We are rolling, jefe.”

The Presidential seal is replaced by a shot of the local newscaster.

“Charles Hughes, reporting from the National Mall,” he says. “I don’t know if you can hear the demonstrators’ response, but the President’s address has not been received too well with the people out here. Behind me you can see the protest’s organizers already climbing the stairs to the stage. Let’s listen to their response to President O’Neill.”

Kidd sees four men and two women climbing onto the stage. Leading the pack is a tall, thin, black man with a bouncing shock of salt and pepper afro. Elmer recognizes him immediately. It is none other than the fire and brimstone breathing Reverend, Jeremiah White. Kidd has a whole chapter of his book dedicated to the colorful Reverend and his tussles with the Feds and various state governments.

Jeremiah Bernard White rose from near anonymous street preacher to a nationally televised Evangelical rock star overnight. Someone, on a lark, videotaped one of his fiery diatribes to a crowd of homosexuals celebrating their Decadence festival on Bourbon Street and posted it on YouTube. They thought his delivery hysterical and taped him with the aim of getting people to laugh at the ‘crazy homophobe preacher.’ And many did find much to laugh at in
his choleric histrionics. Many more though found his unapologetic, politically incorrect assail on homosexuality to be right on the mark.

It was the year 2015 and the American Psychiatric Association had just removed pedophilia from its list of mental disorders. It happened right on the heels of Supreme Court’s approval of Congress’ Marriage Equality Act. The ruling legalized same-sex marriage in all fifty states. The parallel between the pedophile and the gay community which similarly lobbied to have homosexuality removed as a mental disorder in 1973 as prelude to their campaign for society’s approbation was not lost on many. For those who didn’t get it, Reverend White was happy to explain.

“Step by step, homos have taken their filthy ways from the privacy of their bedrooms into courtrooms, through boardrooms and finally to the classrooms where they can have our children within their sleazy reach. And now, on their tails, come the pedophiles, making the same arguments in defense of lifestyle, the same complaints of discrimination, the same demands for rights and protected status; they’re following the same tried and proven trail blazed by their perverted predecessors. It is a path that will lead them right to your sons and your daughters; and, it will get them there sooner rather than later. It will be easier for pedophiles. The trail has already been blazed. The precedents have already been set. The roadblocks are already razed.

“Queers, you see, have not only loosed a physical plague on the world, a plague that has killed millions of people, they have also, through their sick, selfish and slavish devotion to sin, spawned and spread an immoral pandemic that makes it possible for every other abhorrent abomination and disgusting degeneracy to thrive with the advancement of their own wicked ways.”

His video went viral. When asked to account for his sudden popularity, Jeremiah White claimed it was because he dared to say what most people were thinking. Whenever he was accused of homophobia, the Reverend laughed and insisted “There ain’t a thing about homos anybody need be phobic about. It’s a stupid word queers invented to shut people up. They use it to keep us from stating the obvious, that homosexuality is a sexual disorder, a mental disease that requires treatment and not our approval or our applause.”

Before long, Reverend White was making highly rated appearances on the 700 Club, the Christian Broadcasting Network, Fox News and other outlets, all of which happily paid the exorbitant fines that went along with their hosting
of the firebrand preacher. As his popularity grew so did his opposition. Every homosexual interest group lobbied the government to do something about the man they took to calling, ‘Reverend Revolting.’

“AIDS is a just punishment for the abomination of homosexuality,” Reverend White said in his last televised interview. “And AIDS is only a tiny taste of the torments homosexuals have waiting for them in Hell for so shamelessly breaking God’s law. They only think they’re flaming now!”

After the campaign against Jeremiah, the government upped the ante against all religious programming, branding them ‘outlets for hate speech.’ The FCC began shutting them down as they crossed their various ‘Tolerance Lines.’ By 2017, Christian content was banished from both television and radio. References to Jesus or anything overtly Christian on subsequent programming were bleeped out, the same way cursing once was. The Reverend and his cohorts still thrived on the internet but there was legislation in the works to drive them from the web as well. The Net Neutrality Act making its way through Congress promised to do for the world-wide web what the Fairness Doctrine did for radio and television.

Elmer thinks it rather clever of the protest organizers to have Jeremiah White deliver the first response to the President. It put the networks in a difficult position. He imagines there is a lot of hand-wringing going on at the studios right now as execs hurriedly weigh the pros and cons of defying the FCC by broadcasting the government banned Reverend’s image and message to the American public. The fines for doing so will be stiff ones and the court costs fighting to keep the daring execs out of jail, even stiffer. On the other hand, Jeremiah White made for such exciting television that some will undoubtedly consider the penalties a small price to pay for the ratings. Others will do it just to stick it to the government.

The Reverend, unconcerned with any of that, approaches the podium, waving and smiling at the cheering crowd. He stretches the goose-necked microphone stand to accommodate his six-foot-six frame and gestures for the crowd to settle down. After another near minute of applause it does so.

“So,” Reverend Jeremiah White begins. “What did you think of the President’s speech?”

Two hundred and fifty thousand people boo.

“Are you listening, Mr. President?” White says with a large, toothy grin. “You can’t blame that reaction on me. That is an un-coached, spontaneous
appraisal of your speech, Mr. President. You can’t blame it on my ‘fear-mongering.’

“Do you want to know what I think of your speech, Mr. President? Probably not, I figure, but you’re going to get an earful of it anyway.”

The crowd laughs. The Reverend waits for them to settle down again.

“I think you’re full of it, Mr. President. I think you’re so full of it the excrement can’t help but pour out both ends. You are, in fact, so full of it, Mr. President, there ain’t enough room in you for an original idea. That’s why we got to hear you peddle that tired, old cliché about religious differences causing so much strife, war, bloodshed and all throughout history.

“You secularists keep insisting that if we just keep God and religion out of politics, we can have ourselves a real peaceful, lovey-dovey sort of society. Yet all the insistence in the world will never convince us of it because we know better, Mr. President. We are not the fools you think we are! We know our history, Mr. President. It is full of blood-soaked examples of what befalls regular folk like us when government folk like you decide that religion is nothing but bunk and God is nothing but the imaginary friend of the ‘ignorant and the ‘unenlightened.’ We know that y’all like to talk about crusades and inquisitions so that no one mentions revolutions and party purges. We know that y’all love to point to the blood spilled in God’s name so that no notices the body count accrued in the name of man and his pursuit of secularism.

“The Godless government of the Soviet Union is just one such example we might consider. The Soviet secularists decided that religion was nothing but bunk and God was a lot of bourgeois baloney. They said religion had no place in the public sphere, no role to play in the building of a ‘worker’s paradise’ and then proceeded to kill off twenty million of their own people. That’s many multiples more than were killed in all the crusades and inquisitions put together, Mr. President. I did the math for you sir, because considering the state of the economy, your grasp of mathematics is as piss-poor as your grasp of history.”

There is more laughter and another short pause.

“Then there is the Godless government of the Red Chinese,” the Reverend continues. “Them secularists butchered over sixty million of their own people in pursuit of their religion-free utopia. Tens of millions more were killed by secularists like Pol Pot, Castro and Hitler, all men who ruled with no thought to any world beyond the reach of human reason. I could be wrong, but I don’t
believe Genghis Khan killed raped and pillaged in pursuit of any particular theological point. And Alexander the Great didn’t slaughter his way across a continent for any god other than his own ego.

“It is an indisputable, historical fact Mr. President, the blood spilled in the name of God is but a drop in the ocean of blood spilled in the name of man. Throw in the hundreds and the hundreds of millions butchered through abortion by the modern heresy of religion-free government and it becomes crystal clear that secularism is more than just a dirty word, Mr. President. Secularism is a scourge on mankind, risen straight from the bowels of Hell!”

Applause explodes from the throng. Reverend White pulls the microphone out of the goose-necked extender and begins pacing in front of the podium while he waits for the clapping and choruses of amen to die out.

Reverend White goes on. “It’s all mighty-whitey of you, Mr. President, to want to protect us religious folk from each other, but who, I ask you, is going to protect us from the likes of you?”

More laughter and applause spreads through the crowd. He waits for silence before continuing.

“The President would have us believe that Christianity is not being attacked by the new law. The law, he says, is merely making room for ‘other faith traditions.’ The President wants Koranic and other scripture given an equal place with Biblical scripture. Well I say America has made plenty of room for other faiths. America has welcomed them all to her shores. America has been the most generously pluralistic society in history precisely because America is a Christian nation. And a Christian nation is an open society unlike secularism, which dismissing religion from the get-go as it does, is inherently discriminatory. It is the secularist, who dismissing the spiritual, is narrow of mind and closed of heart. It is the Christian who has the open heart and the open mind. It is the Christian who taught the world the meaning of generosity.

“Generosity is not pandering, however. There is no ground on which to equate the words of Jesus Christ, the Son of God, who spent his life healing and curing and bidding us to love our enemies with the words of a false prophet like Mohammad, who was, after all, nothing but a warmonger and a pedophile. There is no equating the foolish fatalism of Buddhism, Hinduism and other Eastern nonsense about reincarnation with the optimism of the Christian hope in salvation. The howl-at-the-moon hedonism of the pagan is a moral corrosive
that destroys families and societies and is in no way comparable to the purity of Christian joy.

“Yet this is not about Islam or any other flim-flam sham of a religion. This is, has and always will be about Christianity. Secularists, like the President, assert that there is no difference between one religion and another with a very distinct purpose in mind. They bundle all the faiths together, so that they might dilute and diminish Christianity in the mix. They equate the various religions with their varying values in the hope of undermining the absolute morals that Christianity, the one and the only true religion, champions. Christian morals offend them because Christian morals would constrain them. That is why they are so eager to be rid of Christianity. They wish to obliterate the concept of objective good and evil.

“You hear it all the time, don’t you? ‘There are no absolutes.’ ‘One man’s right is another’s wrong.’ ‘Don’t be so judgmental, so black and white about things.’ ‘There is nothing good or bad except thinking makes it so.’ They love to quote Shakespeare, these secularists, but they never mention that the bard put those words in the mouth of a man playing at being mad, crazy, bat-dung-bonkers! For it is madness to believe that good and bad and right and wrong are human constructs. Banish from public discourse the absolute morals that Christianity gives us and the rules, the laws of right and wrong, become relative, situational, negotiable and ultimately disposable. Forbid mention of the hereafter, of Christianity’s Heaven and Hell, and all that people will have left to concern themselves with is the here and the now. Expediency will then trump decency and honor. Give the people no reason to think of something beyond and greater than mankind, a Creator they must one day answer to, and soon enough they will lose themselves to orgies of self-indulgence. Deny spirituality and materialism grows rampant. Dismiss the love of God as unnecessary and you will, in its place, make more room for the love of money, the love of power and the love of all sorts of depravity.