"Satanic Cockroaches," Christian Terrorism, and the King of America

posted on 6/25/2019 by the Salt City Sinner

Hemant Mehta at Friendly Atheist recently wrote about one particularly hateful character, Cheryl K. Chumley. Ms. Chumley boasts the hilarious title of “online opinion editor” at the Washington Times, where she wrote this:

 Nothing shows cultural degradation like a nation that was forged by Christian faithfuls on a quest for religious freedom and built by Judeo-Christian principles being torn asunder and cast into judicial, legislative and cultural confusion by the likes of group that hails Satan during a prayer moment at a government get-together. … The First Amendment is being twisted and turned inward and used as a weapon of cultural and political destruction against America by cockroaches that, just a few short years ago, were constrained to dark corners. And they were constrained to dark corners because the moral majority wouldn’t tolerate it otherwise.

Mehta does a great job of taking apart Chumley’s idiotic argument:

 The “cockroaches” she speaks of are groups who just wanted to make sure the government wasn’t promoting one religion over all others, just as the Constitution requires. They’re patriotic cockroaches, dammit. Even the Satanist would tell you she doesn’t worship Satan and follows an excellent moral code. … We’re lucky that the people she demonizes are actually defending or strengthening the Constitution while the Christians currently in power are busy putting brown babies in concentration camps. We could all do without those supposed Judeo-Christian values.

I don’t need to go over what Mehta has already ably covered. I will say, however, two things about Chumley that Mehta did not get to in his article. Pointing out the staggering hypocrisy of the Right in the United States – particularly the Christian Right – can feel like a never-ending exercise in futility, but in case anyone is still keeping score, let’s roll that stone up the hill one more time.

First of all, both of Ms. Chumley’s dumb little books are published by WND Books, the same imprint that brought you Jerome Corsi’s Where’s the Birth Certificate? (which, reminder, was not even a hard question to answer back when Corsi’s racist, money-grubbing collection of half-baked lies came out), Joel Richardson’s The Islamic Antichrist, and Scott Greer’s No Campus for White Men. I would argue that the white nationalism of WND and their publishing house are far more un-American than the Seven Tenets of the Satanic Temple – and what’s more, nobody from the Satanic Temple has committed arson or made terroristic threats in the name of Satan. That’s not the case with Cheryl Sullenger, an author and contributor at WND who is also a convicted anti-choice Christian terrorist.

Second, it’s worth pointing out that Chumley’s hateful little diatribe was published in the Washington Times, the same paper where she edits all that high-quality online opinion content. That would be the same Washington Times that was founded in 1982 by the Reverend Sun Myung Moon, head of the Unification Church and self-proclaimed second coming of Christ and “King of America.” Say what you want about the Satanic Temple: we have made no claims to godhood, nor do any of us have delusions of monarchial grandeur. Again, before Ms. Chumley calls me a cockroach, and if she is concerned about the end of some imaginary Christian America, she ought to examine her own conduct.

But I suspect that degree of honesty and self-knowledge is beyond Cheryl Chumley’s grasp.