When a firefighter runs into a burning building to save someone, he doesn’t first ask about the creed, color or religion of the endangered. Nope, he just goes right in.
But when that firefighter wants to share his thoughts about his Christian faith in the public square, well, if that man lives in Atlanta he is dead man walking.
Sorry, Kelvin Cochran. You forgot to kiss the ring.
Cochran was suspended from his job as Atlanta’s fire chief in November, and then fired earlier this week because of fallout from a book he wrote more than a year ago. A black man and a Christian, Cochran used his writing to mentor young black men about the importance of Jesus as well as to lay out the problems with all sex outside of marriage — heterosexual or otherwise.
Or as translated by our struggling culture’s increasingly ubiquitous ‘smarter and more tolerant than you’ dictionary: He hates gays.
We all know the drill by now. A few aspiring sensitivity training gurus get the vapors, tattle to the powers that be, and then pseudo justice is served when heretics like Cochran are made to pay for their crimes against humanity.
Such is the thin gruel of our times, but in a week where free speech has suffered actual death blows at the hands of Muslim terrorists there is cause to pause and realize the absurdity of it all.
The satirical cartoonists who lost their life Wednesday in Paris are being championed as freedom fighters because of how they expressed themselves through the use of their pens and ink. They often drew crude pictures that disparaged not only Islam but all manner of religion, but we need not agree with all of their principles to believe it was their right to do so.
One might even call them evangelists of a sort.
Now Cochran was certainly an evangelist as well. And funny, he also used pen and ink to write the book that has come under fire. Wait, come to think of it, Cochran wrote about religion, too, and sometimes in a way that offended people.
Huh. Welcome to the rabbit hole, Alice.
If Cochran and Charlie Hebdo are exercising the exact same freedoms, why did Cochran get fired? Is the city of Atlanta carrying out its own form of jihad by suppressing expression it finds objectionable? Could much of today’s secular progressive mindset have far more in common with the terrorists’ brand of Kool-Aid than any Christian you know?
A Muslim cleric wrote a passionate op-ed for USA TODAY following the Paris massacre that said Islam not only does not mean “peace,” but instead calls for “submission.” He went on to say that Muslims do not believe in the freedom of expression.
Are you listening Atlanta?
If there was any true justice in this story, Atlanta’s homosexual community would step forward and ask Cochran a simple question that could solve everything. Will you drive to my house if it is on fire, and will you do your best to save me if my life is in peril?
Because Cochran is a man who doesn’t use Kalashnikov rifles and beheadings to do his evangelizing, we can be confident of what his response would be. Especially given the several years Cochran served the city of Atlanta with distinction, even rising to the ranks of fire administrator for the Obama Administration. In light of that, those that disagree with his religion should put on their Charlie Hebdo t-shirts and demand he get his job back.
Consider that if a black man who once served in the Obama Administration is not immune to the intolerance of the Rainbow Jihad, then these religious bigots truly have no plans to let any of the rest of the faith community peacefully dissent in the name of the First Amendment, either.
Yet perhaps especially because Cochran is a black man, the Rainbow Jihad can’t let him go and get all preachy about his view of the world. If his message sticks and the black population around him is transformed in body and in spirit, then there goes a reliable voting bloc for the left.
That just won’t do. Cochran’s enemies will yammer on about the imperative of separating church and state, but they don’t really care about that fiction. They are fighting for their own church, which is the state.
Kiss the ring, or you will be made to care.