More: You Shouldn’t Have to Endure Bible-Thumping to Eat

By Amanda Marcotte

With the dramatic increase as of late of people needing financial assistance for everything from health care to food to shelter, I’m beginning to see an uptick in conservative attempts to tie assistance to moralizing, conformist demands that you listen to and obey the edicts of right wing religious assholes. First, this attempt to turn the high rate of Medicaid-covered childbirth into some kind of moral issue regarding their idiotic sex rules for other people, and now this: Todd Starnes is trying to make it an issue that the federal government requires religious charities that take federal money to refrain from proselytizing. The group was using the food distribution as a hook to get people into a roomful of religious materials and pushing Bibles on them. Starnes is defending this as necessary behavior.

For the past 31 years, the Christian ministry has been providing food to the hungry in Lake City, Fla. without any problems. But all that changed when they said a state government worker showed up to negotiate a new contract.

“The (person) told us there was a slight change in the contract,” Daly told me. “They said we could no longer have religious information where the USDA food is being distributed. They told us we had to take that stuff down.”….

In other words - the Christian Service Center had a choice: choose God or the government cheese.

So in a spirit of Christian love and fellowship, Daly politely told the government what they could do with their cheese.

“We decided to eliminate the USDA food and we’re going to trust God to provide,” she told me. “If God can multiply fish and loaves for 10,000 people, he can certainly bring in food for our food pantry so we can continue to feed the hungry.”

I love how he had to work the dog whistle phrase “government cheese” in there, making sure that you understand that while he loves this little charity, he has contempt for the people they serve.

As Megan Hatcher-Mays at Media Matters notes, Starnes is creating a “false choice” here. As he reluctantly admits, it’s not like the church was told to stop existing or that they had to curtail their religious propaganda in any of their other activities. Just that when they were very specifically working with grants from the federal government, they couldn’t use the federal resources to try to get people to join their church.

Read more at RawStory.

Also, to assholes like Todd Starnes, Matt Barber and Bryan Fischer, telling other people that they’re going to burn in eternal Hell if they don’t accept Jesus, along with poor-shaming and slut-shaming, is TEH MOAST IMPOARTANT PART OF TEH CHRISTIAN RELIGION!!11!!!!!

[Jesus flips desk]