February 26, 2014
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Like a cornered animal, which turns instinctively to
confront pursuing predators, the Christian Right, knowing it represents
the views of an ever shrinking number of Americans, is engaged in an
existential fight to the death. Veto or no veto, Arizona’s anti-gay bill
is just another of its many efforts to transform America’s secular
democracy into a tyrannical theocracy.
The Christian
Right’s dirty little secret is they are acutely aware that changing
demographics are running against them. While they may believe the earth
is a mere few thousand years old, they’re not complete idiots. They can
read polls, and the data tells them this: millennials are abandoning
religious belief. According to
a recent Pew survey,
one in four Americans born after 1981 hold no religious belief, which
is nearly double the national rate of atheism. Other studies confirm
this trend, including a recent study by the Public Religion Research
Institute showing more than half of non-religious Millennials have
abandoned their childhood faith.
With
this in mind, the nation’s radical religious fundamentalists see an
ever-shrinking window to impose their Bronze Age worldview on the gay,
atheist, liberal, immigrant, heathen, and science book-reading masses.
The American Taliban is as deeply troubled by the thoughts of a gay man
“sneaking a peak” of a heterosexual man in an NFL locker room as much as
they’re freaked out over seeing Cam and Mitchell, the gay couple on
"Modern Family," adopt an Asian child. For the intellectual infants of
the American species, progressive culture is nothing more than a 24/7
infomercial for gay sex and abortion. That frightens our unfriendly
theocrats because biblical fundamentalists are more concerned with the
goings on in the bedrooms of others than they are within the
guilt-ridden, sexless confines of their own.
Salon
columnist Brian Beutler writes that measures like Arizona’s SB1062 bill
have emerged in a number of states out of “a wellspring of conservative
panic about the country’s abrupt legal and cultural evolution into a
society that’s broadly tolerant of gay people.” He adds, “Rather than
deny the shift, or stop at trying to reverse it in legislatures, the
courts and at ballot boxes, conservatives are instead attempting to
erect a legal architecture that will wall them off from the growing
portion of American society that supports equal rights for gay people.”
These
“religious freedom” bills did not arrive here overnight; they are three
decades in the making. Prior to the election of Jimmy Carter in 1976,
no serious presidential candidate ever claimed to have been “born
again,” and the emphasis of faith for a politician seeking high office
was as rare then as a candidate declaring his atheism is today. When
Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson established the Christian Right (aka the
Moral Majority) in 1979, no serious political commentator believed they
could play a significant role in electoral politics. The screenwriter
Norman Lear joked, “The Moral Majority is neither the moral point of
view, nor the majority.”
Long story short, the
Christian Right swept Ronald Reagan into the White House in 1980. The
Sarasota Journal wrote as much on Feb 9, 1981: “The merging of the
political right with the religious right has taken the country by
surprise.” It’s now 2014, and the most intellectually and morally
stunted segment of American society continues to take this nation by
surprise.
The Christian Right has not only moved from the fringes to become the main strain of the Republican Party; it is
the Republican Party. These radicals continually surprise us for the
fact casual political observers mistakenly believe they represent the
far-right fringe. You cannot sugarcoat the fact that a majority of
Republicans in Arizona’s House, and also a majority of Republicans in
Arizona’s Senate voted for this anti-gay law. Likewise a majority of
Republicans in Kansas’ House voted for a similar bill. They voted for it
because they want the freedom to discriminate against individuals they
claim the Bible finds abhorrent.
Worryingly, this act is
a small part in a big pantomime to transform America into a theocratic
nirvana—one that is absent gays, Muslims, immigrants, atheists, and
science books. To achieve this, the instrument of choice is
nullification. It is nullification of the federal government that weds
theocrats together with libertarians and the neo-confederate movement.
Since 2010, state legislatures have put forward nearly 200 bills
challenging federal laws its sponsors deem unconstitutional. Typically,
laws the nullifiers believe challenge “religious liberty,” the
Affordable Care Act, and gun control.
In an editorial
for Talking Points Memo, Josh Marshall observes that since the election
of Obama and the rise of the Tea Party, “there's been more and more
reaching back to the discredited ideas of nullification, interposition
and even, at the truly fringe extreme, secession. They are each efforts
to preserve power for disempowered minorities after they've lost battles
in the standard majoritarian system. More simply, they're workarounds
to get out of the consequences of losing political fights. And by
definition they are rearguard actions. American history and
constitutional jurisprudence has consistently ruled against them.”
Marshall
is right in part. But the point he misses is that elections are no
longer determined by majority view, but rather by the availability of an
endless pipeline of campaign cash, and on that social conservatives are
no longer playing second fiddle to establishment Republicans. Thanks to
Internet fundraising and changes to campaign finance laws, it’s now a
case of the tail wagging the dog. According to the Federal Electoral
Commission, Tea Party and social conservative groups raised nearly three
times as much as GOP establishment groups in 2013, which is how you end
up with a majority of Republicans in both houses of the Arizona
congress voting for SB1062 in 2014.
Salon's Beutler
writes, “The bad news is that this phenomenon isn’t limited to
homophobia, and doesn’t always masquerade as an exercise of religious
freedom. As America grows more liberal, conservatives are retreating
into a variety of interlinking, but isolated subcultures and, when
necessary, making or manipulating law to insulate themselves from
contact with the masses.”
The Christian Right’s ideology
drives virtually all social policy debate within the Republican Party,
whether it's immigration, women’s reproductive rights, the death
penalty, or same-sex marriage.
Chris Hedges says the
Christian Right’s ideology calls for the “eradication of social
'deviants,' beginning with gay men and lesbians, whose sexual
orientation, those in the movement say, is a curse and an illness,
contaminating the American family and the country. Once these 'deviants'
are removed, other 'deviants,' including Muslims, liberals, feminists,
intellectuals, left-wing activists, undocumented workers, poor
African-Americans and those dismissed as 'nominal Christians'—meaning
Christians who do not embrace this peculiar interpretation of the
Bible—will also be ruthlessly repressed. The 'deviant' government
bureaucrats, the 'deviant' media, the 'deviant' schools and the
'deviant' churches, all agents of Satan, will be crushed or radically
reformed. The rights of these 'deviants' will be annulled. 'Christian
values' and 'family values' will, in the new state, be propagated by all
institutions. Education and social welfare will be handed over to the
church. Facts and self-criticism will be replaced with relentless
indoctrination.”
While the Christian Right is becoming the
dwindling minority, it remains an existential threat to civil rights,
secularism and our democratic values. It's a threat fueled by a
seemingly unlimited supply of campaign finance, and a rabid base that
believes it’s fighting for its place in a 21st-century world it can’t
reconcile against an ancient book that says gays are an abomination. You
know, like shellfish.
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