Part Two: The Disclaimer

They hijacked America, hogtied, blindfolded and gagged the lady ... and have been gleefully rolling her around in her own excrement ever since.

Immediately following 9/11, we all identified "they" as al Qaeda ... but as time passed, it became apparent that the real terrorists weren’t sporting turbans and long scraggly beards and target-shooting with AK-47s at training camps on foreign sand.

"They," in fact, turned out to be pure home-grown red-blooded Americans, the kind of people who go to Wal Mart every Saturday, church every Sunday, drive large shiny new SUVs with bumper stickers reading "Keep the Commandments" or "Adam and Eve – not Adam and Steve!" and, to this day, are still waiting for that big communist invasion very much like the one we saw back in the 80s, when John Hughes married the A-Team and gave birth to a stinking piece of cinematic vomit called Red Dawn.

They’re handing out decrees of God in the Oval Office, erecting graven images in your state capitol, indoctrinating your kids in the public schools and passing Old Testament ordinance in your neighborhood. And if that isn’t close enough to tickle your taters, they’ve already gained access to your bedroom, and even kept the Do-Not-Disturb sign as a souvenir.

After all, what is a terrorist but an enemy of freedom, and a terrorist act but a statement against individual liberty? If you want to talk about a bunch of fruitcakes ramming jet planes into two New York City skyscrapers because their version of God sees America as the Devil, the question of course applies. However, if you wish to talk about a state supreme court chief justice denying a gay mother custody of her children entirely because his version of God sees homosexuality as the Devil, the question also applies.

I don’t think God, however, is too happy about either example ... and as a Bible-believing Christian myself, I can easily imagine my Savior actually being embarrassed enough to keep postponing His inevitable role as mankind’s Comeback Kid.

Welcome to the Asshat Files, ladies and gentlemen: a radioactive multi-pronged uberblog dedicated almost exclusively to raising the level of public awareness on exactly two issues that have been chomping at my proverbial keister and thus driving my lopsided grassroots activism for ten years now. Those two issues are:

1) The constant threat certain groups of evangelical Christians in this country – my own brothers and sisters, mind you – pose to civil and religious liberty as that liberty has been defined by the First Amendment to the United States Constitution and subsequently interpreted and upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court.

2) How the first issue illustrates part of a bigger problem – bigger, if only from an actual Christ-centered perspective: the continued tarnishing of the public’s general perception of the faith itself by the very people who acknowledge and profess Jesus Christ. Or, more succinctly, Christians acting like asshats and killing their own cause.

The Asshat Files will award both issues far more than their fair share of attention through use of standard argumentation on related key issues contained within numerically-ordered "case-files", each ranging from the very general to the very specific.

These case-files will appear as blogs separate from the one you’re reading now, starting with "Case-File 001: Nothing Patriotic Here," due to show up some time this evening. Subsequent files will appear on this blog-profile almost on a daily basis.

This is my disclaimer. It should be officially noted for the record that I am not here to trash Christianity, but to defend it by exposing the particulars of a very serious problem I and many others see within the Body of Christ.

What should also be officially noted for the record is that I am utterly, undeniably and most unapologetically pissed off because of the fact.

Does my anger actually bear any relevancy in the context of what I’m presenting?

I’m not sure, but I think it does.

Again, as noted in my little self-indulgent metaphor above, only time itself will bear the final answer to that question ...