Now that the fascists (read Christian Fundamentalists) have lost their control of the government of the United States and their leaders are falling like fleas off of a freshly dipped dog to sex scandals, "contribution" scandals, and just saying stupid shit, the Religious Right and their skin head, racist, gun rights, wife beating brethren are going ape shit nuts, to put it mildly.
Throughout the Bush years, homophobia and professions of anti-racism were twinned in a weird way, as if the latter proved that the right wasn't simply still skulking around history's dark side. At a deeply surreal 2006 event at the Greater Exodus Baptist Church, an African American church in downtown Philadelphia, leaders of the religious right invoked Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks on behalf of gay marriage bans and Bush's judicial nominees. At the end of the evening, several dozen clergymen, black and white, joined hands in prayer at the front of the room. "Black Americans, white Americans," said a beaming Tony Perkins, leader of the Family Research Council. "Christians, standing together." The whole premise of compassionate conservatism -- which shoveled taxpayer money towards administration-friendly churches like Greater Exodus Baptist -- was that the right cared as deeply as the left about issues like inner city poverty.
What a difference an election makes. Even if you believed that compassionate conservatism was always a bit of a con, it's amazing to see how quickly it has vanished, and how fast an older style of reaction, one more explicitly rooted in racial grievance, has reasserted itself.
Today's grassroots right is by all appearances as socially conservative as ever, but its tone and its rhetoric are profoundly different than they were even a year ago. For the last 15 years, the right-wing populism has been substantially electrified by sexual anxiety. Now it's charged with racial anxiety. By all accounts, there were more confederate flags than crosses at last weekend's anti-Obama rally in Washington, DC. Glenn Beck has become a far more influential figure on the right than, say, James Dobson, and he's much more interested in race than in sexual deviancy. For the first time in at least a decade, middle class whites have been galvanized by the fear that their taxes are benefiting lazy, shiftless others. The messianic, imperialistic, hubristic side of the right has gone into retreat, and a cramped, mean and paranoid style has come to the fore.
To some extent, a newfound suspicion of government was probably inevitable as soon as Democrats took power. At the same time, with the implosion of the Christian right's leadership and the last year's cornucopia of GOP sex scandals, the party needed to take a break from incessant moralizing, and required a new ideology to take the place of family values cant. The belief system analysts sometimes call "producerism" served nicely. Producerism sees society as divided between productive workers -- laborers, small businessmen and the like -- and the parasites who live off them. Those parasites exist at both the top and the bottom of the social hierarchy -- they are both financiers and welfare bums -- and their larceny is enabled by the government they control.
Read the whole article here.
Their hate is spilling out into the public discourse in a plethora of ways. From "Teabaggers" in the streets, gun toting extremists at town halls, and talking heads on major "News Networks" (that's
you CNN and FOX), to members of Congress and Senators saying the most outrageous things in news conferences and even on the House and Senate floors, the radical right has come completely unhinged.
We have everything from radicals in high office calling for the citizens to arm themselves against the government to Senators advising illegitimate rogue governments to resist the US Government exhortations to resolve their issues democratically. We have former White House advisers calling for US Military Generals to stage a coup right here in the US!
And now they are getting back to their roots of open hostility and the advocating of violence against African Americans, Latinos, non-Christians, and the GLBT community, insinuating, if not out right declaring, that these people are not
REALLY people at all. Many of these
religious fanatics feel that members of these groups are no more than a sick dog and should be
"put down" for their own good!
Yeah, whether you want to admit it to yourself or not, this is how these people think.
This all leads me back to their own
"god", Jesus of Nazareth and his teachings. You know, they guy who said that the only" commandment" that He professed was "Love", because if you followed that one you would naturally follow all of the other ones. (I'm para-phrasing here, but I think that I got it pretty close).
Of course, this is all academic to rational, thinking people. But it never ceases to amaze me how the more fanatical people of
any faith are, the farther they drift from their own teachings.
These people are just sad. They make me sad. I don't know, perhaps that is their subconscious plan: if they make us all feel sorry for their pathetic world view, maybe we'll leave them alone to keep screaming their lies from the mountain tops.
Yeah, I grow weary at the spectacle of these morons expressing their myths as fact and therefore justification for their bigoted, discriminatory, hateful, murderous behavior. But pity is no reason to stop calling them what they are... just as loudly and with just as much passion as they spew their hate.
I agree that this will likely not solve the "Cracker Problem". But we can't allow their voices to be the only ones being heard. Religious Fundamentalist are by their very definition mentally unstable. I mean, hell, they believe in gods and fairies! (Actually, they call them "God", "Jesus", "Holy Spirit", and "Angels". But let's face it, it's the same thing).
So to speak truth to fiction, these people who are trying so hard to convince everyone that their
hate is justified are using
myth as their basis in fact at the root of their argument. Can anyone actually tell me that these people are even worth reasoning with?
