If Timothy McVeigh had been a Christian

By Jack Cashill

In fact, Oklahoma City bomber, Timothy McVeigh, was a self-proclaimed atheist, whose mantra was "Science is my religion." That, of course, did not stop the media and the self-appointed liberal "watchdogs" from blaming the bombing of the Murrah Building on the Christian right.

Chief among the watchdogs in the Midwest, perhaps nationwide, is one Leonard Zeskind, an unrepentant Marxist-Leninist and author of the paranoid classic, Blood and Politics: The History of the White Nationalist Movement from the Margins to the Mainstream.

Zeskind had learned the arts of ritual defamation from his Marxist mentors well and deeply. For the last two decades at least, he and others of his ilk have traveled the land warning how the "the God, guts and guns crowd" was intent on turning America into "a white Christian nation." If these faux Cassandras ever had a poster boy, of course, it was Timothy McVeigh.

Let us suppose they were right. Let us suppose that McVeigh was a member of some particularly wrathful Christian sect, one with worldwide tentacles. Let us say that church members believed in polygamy, genital mutilation, the suppression of women's rights, capital punishment for homosexuals, and the violent imposition of their own law upon the land.

Let us say, too, that the less overtly hostile members of that sect chose to build a 13-story church and cultural center overshadowing the Oklahoma City National Memorial & Museum at the site where the Murrah Building once stood. Giving them the benefit of the doubt, let us say that they too pretended that their project was something other than an end-zone dance on the memories of the dead.

Given these circumstances, would any liberal anywhere in America, let alone President Obama, make self-righteous noises about this sect's right to religious freedom? Would any liberal anywhere impute bigotry to those who challenged the Church of McVeigh's towering thumb in America's eye?

No, of course not. Our progressive friends would be leading the assault against the center. Hell's bells, they are inevitably the one leading the assault when the local Presbyterian Church wants to expand its parking lot.