Bombs Explode in First Day of Fighting; War Against Christians Claims Famous Martyr

Among those (stink)bombs that went off at the Omni Shoreham Hotel in Washington, D.C. yesterday, on the first day of the "War Against Christians" conference ... indicted former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay ... getting all pious on our ass. DeLay took time off from conferring with his lawyers to declaim that OF COURSE there's a war on Christians, and he's one of the sadder casualties. Not DeLay -- because DeLay is not that creative -- but another speaker at the conference compared modern-day American Christians to Jews in Nazi Germany, struggling on a daily basis NOT to be turned into bars of soap. (I'm not making this up.)

We note for the record that whereas the Right Wing gets apoplectic when liberals compare various functionaries in the Current Regime to Nazis, it's perfectly fine to refer to Right-Wing Christians as the moral equivalent of Jews suffering through Nazi genocide.

About which, here are two additional viewpoints by other Christians who, strangely enough, don't feel the need to whine:

"Certainly religious persecution existed in our history, but to claim that these examples amount to religious persecution disrespects the experiences of people who have been jailed and died because of their faith." --K. Hollyn Hollman, general counsel of the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty.

"This is a skirmish over religious pluralism, and the inclination to see it as a war against Christianity strikes me as a spoiled-brat response by Christians who have always enjoyed the privileges of a majority position." --Rev. Robert M. Franklin, a minister in the Church of God in Christ and professor of social ethics at Emory University.

Dana Milbank, in the WashPost, on the stale air in the room at the Omni Shoreham.