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I want to be nice, but it’s getting more and more difficult.

That’s because Christian political extremists seem determined to impose their personal beliefs on everyone else while insisting they are simply trying to protect their own religious freedom.

As I heard a lawyer say on television, that’s like complaining because I hurt my hand when I hit you in the face.

Their actions and the defense they offer for them are nothing short of bizarre, yet they act as if the problem is the rest of us, not them.

I have honestly tried to understand what is motivating these people. How can they be so illogical, but talk as if what they are saying actually makes sense?

Here’s the results of my analysis.

First, they are suffering from what Alvin Toffler called “future shock” back in 1970. It is the inability to cope emotionally or psychologically with the rapid rate of change. It is not change itself, but the speed with which it is happening that throws them off.

Second, their response to the rapidity of change is not only to resist it, but to make that resistance a holy cause. Since God is the same today, yesterday, and tomorrow, they baptize their resistance as a way to show they are standing up for God.

Third, they are ignorant, not in the pejorative way that term in often used, but in the literal meaning of it, which is to “lack knowledge or information.”

These zealous Christians have quite limited knowledge of the Bible, yet they believe they are following what it says. Indeed, they are convinced that a Sunday School understanding of scripture makes them just as able to talk about what the Bible says as the world’s foremost scholars.

Put bluntly, but I think fairly, they don’t know enough to know that they don’t know.

But what makes their ignorance dangerous is that facts are irrelevant as far as they are concerned. I heard one of them say in an interview that he didn’t want evolution taught in public schools because it wasn’t in the Bible, adding, “If it’s not in the Bible, it doesn’t belong in our schools.”

That’s what makes being nice to these people so difficult.

They can believe whatever they want to, but when they want politicians to make what they believe into law in the name of protecting their right to believe what they want to, more than what they believe is at stake…the kind of society we want starts hanging in the balance.

So to be honest, I just don’t want these people running our country, our states, our local governments, our public school systems, or anything else that affects the general welfare.

Ignorance may be bliss for the beholder, but not for anyone else.

But I will try to be nice to them, even as I do everything I can to keep them from practicing their brand of politics on me or anyone else.

Being nice doesn’t mean I have to be foolish.