"Lord's Resistance Army are Christians."

Rush Limbaugh (my emphasis):

"Is that right? The Lord's Resistance Army is being accused of really bad stuff? Child kidnapping, torture, murder, that kind of stuff? Well, we just found out about this today. We're gonna do, of course, our due diligence research on it. But nevertheless we got a hundred troops being sent over there to fight these guys -- and they claim to be Christians."

Apparently, claiming to be Christians is all it takes to get certain influential people in this country to take your side.

It really is a tribal mindset - very Manichean, very Us vs Them. The saddest part is how "Us" gets defined. I seem to recall someone once being quoted as saying "Not everyone who says to Me 'Lord Lord ' shall enter the kingdom of heaven but he who does the will of My Father in heaven." (Not to mention that whole uncomfortable sheep/goats "Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me" thing.)

So for Limbaugh and his ilk, what's important is that "Lord's Resistance Army are Christians. They are fighting the Muslims in Sudan." Never mind whether that's true (it's only true sometimes, other times LRA is given sanctuary there). Never mind how they're fighting. It's Us (Christians) vs Them (Muslims) and that's all that counts.

Frankly, although it seems to me that we have quite enough on our plate at the moment, I welcome this. It might do a helluva lot of good - LRA is fairly small by this point and the problem has morphed out of a purely Ugandan one to a massive "Great Lakes of Africa" regional disaster, and it can't hurt that we're finally doing something about the slaughter in the region, something that actually is encompassed in our rhetoric about morals and helping civilians and trying to do good in the world.

But then, again, I'm emphatically not in either of the camps Limbaugh so fervently defines and defends.