Little to add to the facts recorded here:
Flip Benham was going to burn a Koran at Mississippi's state Capitol on July 18 but he couldn't get a fire permit. The blaze was to be the culmination of an antiabortion rally that Benham, director of Operation Save America, billed as an "ecclesiastical court." His attack on Islam might seem like a non sequitur, but to Benham, it made perfect sense. "Islam is the same thing as abortion and homosexuality," he said. "It's the black-colored glove covering the same fist, which is the fist of the devil." Benham had T-shirts made up, black with white lettering, proclaiming, "Homosexuality Is Sin! Islam Is a Lie! Abortion Is Murder! Some Issues Are Just Black and White!"
About 100 people gathered for the rally in the vicious heat, many of them, from huge-bellied men to toddlers, wearing Benham's T-shirts. It was three days into Operation Save America's weeklong siege of the Jackson Women's Health Organization, the last abortion clinic in Mississippi....
Benham's "ecclesiastical court," a ritualized indictment of the Supreme Court for breaching God's law, dramatized his contempt for the current legal regime. Before him sat a small grill like the kind football fans use at tailgate parties; he asked the two dozen or so children in attendance to gather around it.
One by one, as Elysian hymns poured from the speakers, Benham produced the texts of objectionable Supreme Court decisions. He started with 1947's Everson v. Board of Education, the case where Justice Hugo Black wrote, "In the words of Jefferson, the clause against establishment of religion by law was intended to erect a wall of separation between Church and State." He went on to decisions outlawing school-sponsored prayer and Bible reading. As each decision was introduced, a man sounded a shofar. Benham shouted denunciations and asked the kids to rip up the pages and throw them onto the grill. Someone pounded a bass drum....
Benham then produced a rainbow gay flag. As he lamented the way homosexuals "stole the colors of the rainbow," several men in attendance grabbed pieces of it and ripped it to shreds. Then he held up a paperback copy of the Koran and said, "We have one more issue that we must deal with. With this issue we have three choices. We can either kill them, be killed by them, or we can convert them to Christ." Several cheers went up in the crowd, and then, after several more minutes of preaching, Benham began to tear the Koran apart. He offered pieces of the book to the men in the crowd -- hands seemed to reach out from all directions to take them -- and they destroyed the pages further, throwing the scraps onto the grill.
Hard to know what phrase other than "fascist theocracy" describes the aspirations of these disgusting people.
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