Jennifer Roback Morse, the president of the National Organization for Marriage’s Ruth Institute, hosted Religious Right leader Chuck Colson on her radio show on Monday. During the program, Morse compared the position of marriage equality opponents to that of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the renowned Lutheran pastor involved in the anti-Nazi resistance who was executed by the Nazis in 1945. Morse said that “the parallels” between Nazi Germany and contemporary America “are really quite chilling” and what happened in Nazi Germany “is happening to us”:
Morse: We need to be strong and we need to stand together here on these issues of the sanctity of human life, traditional marriage and religious liberty because if we don’t stand up for it now we’re going to lose it. I’ve been reading Eric Metaxas’ biography of Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the parallels are really quite chilling because the Nazis were able to scare people into being silent, and they scared people by threatening their jobs, and they scared people by creating an atmosphere of intimidation. I hate to say it but it is happening to us and it happens because good people remain silent and the plain fact of the matter is that there are more of us than there are of the people who want to silent us, and even people on the left are on our side on this type of issue so I think it’s very important that we keep speaking because if we don’t use these rights, if we don’t use our free speech rights we will lose them.
