The Religious Right’s Slow-Motion Suicide I’m not sure what’s come over me and I suppose it’ll pass, but at just this moment I’m feeling a little bit sorry for evangelical conservatives. They were apparently pretty droopy, these proceedings over the weekend at the Values Voter Summit, as my colleague Ben Jacobs described things. Oh, yes, Ted Cruz fired them up, and some of the old stalwarts put in respectable appearances, but they have to know deep down that they’re like the horse-and-buggy lobby after Henry Ford has hit town. It’s only a matter of time. I refer here chiefly to same-sex marriage, the big issue on which the cultural right now represents a quickly shrinking minority. You know the storm clouds are gathering when even Michele Bachmann is throwing in the towel—she declared same-sex marriage “not an issue” and even “boring” at the meeting. But it’s not just same-sex marriage. The country has liberalized culturally in a range of ways in the past six or eight years, and it’s not only not going back, it’s charging relentlessly forward. The religious right also has no leaders anymore of the remotest interest. Back in the ’80s, Jerry Falwell was a figure to contend with; to loathe, certainly, but also to fear. Today? Pat Robertson has lost his marbles, seemingly, and after him, who? Tony Perkins? No one even knows his name, or if they do, they inevitably think of the guy who played filmdom’s most famous matricidal cross-dresser and aren’t entirely sure that this Tony Perkins might not be that Tony Perkins, which is not quite the type of association they’re looking for. It’s a group that is losing power, and I think the leaders and even the rank-and-filers know it. Their vehicle, the Republican Party, is going libertarian on them. Rand Paul, whether he wins the 2016 nomination or not, is clearly enough of a force within the party that he is pushing it away from the culture wars. He is joined in this pursuit by the conservative intellectual class, which knows the culture wars are a dead-bang loser for the GOP and which finds the culture warriors more than a little embarrassing, and by the establishment figures, the Karl Rove types, who stroked them back in 2004 but who now see them as a liability, at least at the presidential level. There are still, of course, many states where these voters come in quite handy in that they elect many Republican representatives and senators. If you think of the famous three legs of the Republican stool (the money conservatives, the foreign-policy conservatives, and the cultural conservatives) and think about which of those legs have had the biggest policy impact during periods of Republican governance in recent history, you have to conclude that the money and foreign-policy conservatives have made out like bandits (in some cases all too literally). The money crowd got all the deregulation it could realistically hope for. The neocons got two wars. The social conservatives haven’t done nearly as well. They’ve gotten some judicial appointments, but Roe v. Wade is still law, and that turncoat Kennedy is probably going to let the gays marry. Now we’re getting to why on one level I feel a pang of sympathy for them. The disasters the Republican Party has brought us in the last decade—the economic meltdown and the wars—were the fault of the other two legs of the stool. Yet we know that these two groups are going to have permanent power in GOP. The money people own the party, and the neocons still dominate in Washington and—Rand Paul notwithstanding—will always have a considerable degree of influence in the party. The social conservatives are the only faction within the triad that hasn’t heaped wreckage upon the nation (not for lack of trying), and yet they have far less power in the upper echelons of party than the other two groups. And when they complain, as they occasionally do, that they’ve largely been paid back for all their work in the vineyards with lip service and symbolic little executive order-type things, they have a point. It’s a little like labor in the Democratic Party. And now, 2016 is going to be a pivotal election for them. Many of them want Ted Cruz, who won the Values Voter straw poll. But of course this is ridiculous. Cruz isn’t going to be the nominee. In fact Cruz’s win, and the fact that Jeb Bush and Chris Christie weren’t even invited to the meeting, is a sign of their retreat from serious politics toward something entirely gestural. Bush, from these people’s perspective, is too squishy on immigration, and Christie last October decided to stop fighting the tide of history on same-sex marriage when a decision by the state’s Supreme Court led Christie to withdraw an appeal his administration had lodged against a pro-same-sex marriage lawsuit. That’s a childish way to do politics. If somehow they were to get their way with Cruz, then Hillary Clinton will easily be elected president, and she’ll almost certainly have the time and opportunity to flip the Supreme Court back to a liberal majority, and they’ll be finished for the good, the cultural right, and they will have contributed mightily to their own well-deserved demise. OK. Whew. I’m over it. Michael Tomasky
40% are democrat or liberal, it's been that way since the beginning of time. "You have money and I don't, so you should give me some of your money." Even if I am a rich liberal, "The government should make me give my money to the poor, because if I do it on my own without the government forcing everybody else to do it, others may not do it and they will get ahead of me." 20% are fiscal conservatives. Most states are run by fiscal conservatives whether they are republican or democrat because the state constitution demands a balanced budget. 20% are cultural conservatives. They will vote for anybody the Bible tells them to. If the republican is not a strong cultural conservative, they will revert back to the lowest form of human existence, namely a democrat. A person who believes if you have more money than me, that's not fair. Hard to win an election when only 20% are on your side. Gotta court those cultural conservatives and hope no one in their family is a homosexual. There is still 20% in the middle who describe themselves as fiscally conservative and socially liberal. Those are the votes both parties need to win. And both parties are doing a piss poor job.
Ecclesiastes 10:2 New American Standard Bible A wise man's heart directs him toward the right, but the foolish man's heart directs him toward the left.
Chapter 5 Alice In Wonderland Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.
Some Right-Wing Christians Enthusiastically Promoting a Form of Genocide Adam Lee Recently, Charisma magazine, a major media outlet for evangelical and Pentecostal Christians, published an open call to genocide. The article in question, titled "Why I Am Absolutely Islamaphobic" [sic] and written by Gary Cass, begins with the premise that "every true follower of Mohammed" wants to "subjugate and murder" non-Muslims, and therefore it's impossible for Christians to live together peacefully with them. Cass proposes three solutions to this problem. One is for Muslims to undergo mass conversion to Christianity; the other is mass deportation combined with eugenics - either "force them all to get sterilized" or kick them out of America "like Spain was forced to do when they deported the Muslim Moors." But he says both of these plans are unlikely to work, so "really there's only one" solution, which is: Violence: The only thing that is biblical and that 1,400 years of history has shown to work is overwhelming Christian just war and overwhelming self defense. Notice Cass' statement that war has been "shown to work" by "1,400 years of history." The only thing he could be referring to is the Crusades (presumbly beginning with the Spanish Reconquista, around 700 AD), which often entailed the massacre of civilians in captured areas. Most of us know the Crusades as a bloody and barbaric era in our history and think that a repeat is something to be avoided at all costs, but Cass is openly cheering the idea. "Overwhelming self defense" is another bizarre and disturbing contradiction in terms. By definition, anything more than the minimum amount of force to stop an imminent threat isn't self-defense. The idea that self-defense requires waging "overwhelming war" on entirepopulations, rather than against specific aggressors, is the hallmark of paranoid and racist fantasies which believe civilization is under threat by "the other" and must be protected at all costs. Like many deluded, macho wannabe crusaders, he fantasizes about the collapse of society, urging his readers to buy guns and form militias: First trust in God, then obtain a gun(s), learn to shoot, teach your kids the Christian doctrines of just war and self defense, create small cells of family and friends that you can rely on if some thing catastrophic happens and civil society suddenly melts down. Finally, he closes with a bloodcurdling statement that can only reasonably be interpreted as a call for genocide against Muslims: Now the only question is how many more dead bodies will have to pile up at home and abroad before we crush the vicious seed of Ishmael in Jesus' Name? ...May we be willing to take the lesser pains now so our children won't have to take greater pains later. Notice, again, that he envisions "pil[ing] up" dead bodies, and not just "abroad", but also "at home." Most assuredly, the irony of this escapes Cass, but he himself is advocating exactly the same thing as what he accuses his enemies of wanting. He wants to subjugate or kill Muslims (with either mandatory sterilization and deportation, or "overwhelming war"). Most chilling, he calls this the "lesser pains" and says it's necessary so that we won't have to take even more drastic actions later. After facing a storm of criticism from both Christians and atheists, Charisma pulled Cass' article down. But there's no explanation, no retraction, no apology; the original link now just goes to a 404 error page. Rather than reflect on what that led them to consider this piece reasonable to publish in the first place, or acknowledge they were wrong to run it and say what they'll do differently in the future, they chose to flush it down the memory hole, to try to pretend it never happened. (It's still available at its author's personal website, where it's prefaced with a banner that reads "Why We Cannot Coexist" -- further proof that he's advocating violence against Muslims in general and not merely those who commit acts of terrorism). Cass is by no means the first or the only Christian to defend genocide. Phil Robertson (star of the reality TV show Duck Dynasty) appeared on Sean Hannity's show recently to argue that we should either "convert them or kill them", referring to ISIS. Ironically, this is exactly the choice that ISIS offers to religious minorities under their dominion - either convert to their brand of Islam or die. Robertson, like Cass, is the mirror image of the radical theology he claims to despise. The roots of this genocidal mindset come from the Bible itself. In the Old Testament, after the Israelites escape from Egypt, they arrive at the promised land only to find that it's already populated by the Canaanites and other pagan peoples. What follows, according to the biblical book of Joshua, is a campaign of slaughter in which God instructs his people to invade and massacre everyone already living there: "When the Lord thy God shall bring thee into the land whither thou goest to possess it, and hath cast out many nations before thee, the Hittites, and the Girgashites, and the Amorites, and the Canaanites, and the Perizzites, and the Hivites, and the Jebusites, seven nations greater and mightier than thou; and when the Lord thy God shall deliver them before thee; thou shalt smite them, and utterly destroy them; thou shalt make no covenant with them, nor shew mercy unto them." —Deuteronomy 7:1-2 And, according to the Bible, God's people did as they were instructed: "And that day Joshua took Makkedah, and smote it with the edge of the sword, and the king thereof he utterly destroyed, them, and all the souls that were therein; he let none remain... So Joshua smote all the country of the hills, and of the south, and of the vale, and of the springs, and all their kings: he left none remaining, but utterly destroyed all that breathed, as the Lord God of Israel commanded." —Joshua 10 Prominent Christian apologists such as William Lane Craig have defended these ghastly verses, arguing that if God commands you to do it, you're justified in committing any act of violence, up to and including the slaughter of helpless men, women and children. (In fact,Craig argues that the most morally troubling part of this is the psychological toll that would have been inflicted on the Israelite soldiers who were tasked with carrying out the mass execution.) As we see with Cass, this genocidal, God-is-on-our-side mindset isn't purely a matter of ancient history, but continues to inform the beliefs and ideas of Christians today. Of course, there's no question that Islamic terrorism does exist. Groups like ISIS are extraordinarily violent and brutal. Moreover, they seem to take sadistic glee in broadcasting proof of their own atrocities, like the killings of journalists. But in the final accounting, they're no more than a bunch of thugs with guns. They're no match for America's military. They can't invade us, occupy us, or overthrow our government. They pose no existential threat to America or to the world. But they count on us overreacting, lashing out with disproportionate and irrational panic (which is, after all, why they're called "terrorists" - they seek to accomplish their aims by creating terror). Meanwhile, mundane, ordinary, everyday gun violence kills more Americans every year than international terrorism ever has or ever will. If ISIS and similar groups are a threat to anyone, they're first and foremost a threat to other Muslims, who've suffered the most from their ruthless and violent quest to impose a harsh theocratic state. But, again, the starkly black-and-white worldview of American fundamentalists doesn't allow for this kind of nuance. In their eyes, all Muslims think and believe the same way, want the same things, and are all equally and irredeemably evil. Conversely, they believe all true Christians are good and righteous by definition. Good and evil, in the worldview of both Christian and Muslim fundamentalists, has no relation to your actions; it's solely a matter of whether you profess allegiance to the right side.
ISIS, Al Queda, et al. are on the verge of obtaining nuclear weapons and other WMD's. Anyone naive enough to believe that they pose no threat to the US's mainland needs to have their head examined. Our military takes them as a very credible threat.
Seriously. What jackass makes a statement about how gun violence kills more Americans than terrorism ever will? The all-seeing, all-knowing moonbat oracle.
hmmm the same on the verge of obtaining nuclear weapons and other WMD's Saddam Hussein kept on 45 minute standby which had Some Right-Wing Christians Enthusiastically Promoting a war on terror. That worked.