Christophobic McCarthyism

How can one know that Christian evangelicals have become a force to be reckoned with in American politics?

Just read this:

Secular humanists and leftist activists convened here [in New York City] over the weekend to strategize how to counter what they contend is a growing political threat from Christian conservatives.

That one sentence says it all, doesn't it? The heathen left lose a few elections fair and square (well, they cheated, it just wasn't enough...) and suddenly there's a "growing political threat." Threat to what, one might ask? Well, they never quite get around to actually explaining that.

Understanding and answering the "religious far right" that propelled President Bush's re-election is key to preventing a "theocracy" from governing the nation, speakers argued at a weekend conference.

So now the "religious far right" is what got the President re-elected? Not, say, voters who trusted Bush on national security issues? Or voters pleased with the economic recovery "propelled" by the Bush tax cuts? Or voters sold on the need to modernize Social Security? Or voters who objected to Democrat obstructionism of the judicial confirmation process?

Can you say "scapegoat"? And doesn't it sound eerily like how Jews were targeted in Germany in the early 1930s?

"The religious right now has an unprecedented influence on American politics and policy," said Ralph White, co-founder of the Open Center, a New York City institution focused on holistic learning. "It is incumbent upon all of us to understand as precisely as possible its aims, methods, beliefs, theology and psychology."

"Understand" or "falsely attribute"? The "aims, methods, beliefs, theology, and psychology" of religious conservatives are a WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) phenomenon. There's nothing buried or secret or concealed. They're simply good, normal, decent people with traditional values and beliefs who saw the culture dragged simultaneously down the crapper and into the political arena without so much as a token gesture to the democratic process via the unelected judgocracy. In order to stop their "progressive" disenfranchisement and slide into second-class citizenship, they got involved in the political process. The godless left failed to take them seriously, and, with the exception of the Clinton "burp in the universe," they have helped exact a stiff price for that arrogance at the ballot box to where only now are libs waking up to the whirlwind they have unleased.

And rather than examine themselves, they're indulging in flattering delusions and demonization.

"This may be the darkest time in our history," said Bob Edgar, general secretary of the left-leaning National Council of Churches and former six-term Democratic congressman from Pennsylvania. "The religious right have been systematically working at this for 40 years. The question is, where is the religious left?"

Feeling sorry for itself, apparently. It may be the darkest time in Edgar's history, perhaps, if he's so hopelessly solipsistic as to elevate his organization's bigoted sensibilities above, say, the Civil War, slavery, the Great Depression, World War II, and the Cold War.

The crazy quotes just keep a-coming.

The United States is "not yet a theocracy," Joan Bokaer, founder of TheocracyWatch.org, said Friday night, but she argued that "the United States is beginning to fit the model of a reconstructed America."

Theocracy: "A government ruled by or subject to religious authority; a political unit governed by a deity (or by officials thought to be divinely guided)."

The United States is not Vatican City. It is not the Papal States. George W. Bush is not God, no matter what people like Ms. Bokaer claim he thinks of himself. The closest it came to any of this was John Kerry's candidacy a year ago, as a matter of fact, which would have been a profound insult even to the devil.

Christophobes, in other words, wouldn't know "theocracy" from their avatars, but use it as a boogey-word the way Senator Joseph McCarthy did "commies." Which is awfully ironic given their eagerness to appease a genuine theocracy like Iran.

But then, the mullahs aren't Christians, are they?

Tax cuts combined with increased funding for faith-based social programs and decreases in welfare spending, Ms. Bokaer said, were examples of "the theological right ... zealously setting up to establish their beliefs in all aspects of our society."

Welfare spending isn't decreasing, unfortunately. But you can see the extent of the scapegoating with this comment. The entire conservative agenda is being shoved into one catch-all stereotype transparently designed to split the Republican base along cultural lines.

But what about "Bush Democrats," who have been driven away from the Donks by their former party's takeover by these deviant militants?

She compared the Federal Communications Commission's threatened crackdown on indecency on television with the Taliban, the repressive Islamic rulers of Afghanistan who harbored Osama bin Laden's terrorist network until toppled by a U.S.-led invasion.

"Indecency police are a major part of theocratic states," Ms. Bokaer said, flashing a picture of Islamic women covered head to foot under the title, "Taliban: Ministry for the Protection of Virtue and Prevention of Vice."

There's your answer. Anybody who doesn't shake his fist (with extended middle finger) in the face of the Almighty has no place in American politics, as far as Ms. Bokaer and her friends are concerned. Even though the Taliban was toppled by the very same Bush Administration to which she compares it.

But that doesn't matter to her, nor does the mutual exclusivity of the terms "Christian" and "theocracy" (quite unlike Islam), or the historical fact that the founding fathers of our country were, in fact, devout Christians, or that secular extremism is, in fact, the new development of the last forty years, because this is all about pissing in the face of opponents her side can't defeat electorally and driving them out of the process so she and her comrades can have it all to themselves again.

Can a strategy (if one can even call it that) that is all but guaranteed to reduce the Democrat party to an even more pronounced rump status really succeed in "excorcizing" the "religious right"?

Captain Ed doesn't think so.

The ignorant, bigoted, and the paranoid members of the Left, in this case, hold positions of power in the Democratic party. [People for the {Soviet Socialist} Way] in particular has a central place in their electoral politics and strategies, especially when it comes to fighting judicial nominees. These people want to recreate Salem 1692, only they want to discredit faith in itself as a source of values. That's what the modern Democrat Party has decided to endorse in 2005.

When Edgar asks what happened to the religious Left, he misses the point. Religious liberals - and there are many - have finally awoken to the fact that the Democrats don't just oppose conservatives, they oppose faith and believers expressing their values in the public square. They want to impose a secular prerequisite on any political debate, where any argument that might come from faith-based values such as opposition to abortion have been predetermined to be invalid and therefore extremist. That cuts out not just conservatives, but a wide swath of the center-left as well from engaging in political debate.

These paranoid bigots have almost guaranteed the demise of the religious Left. The Democrats have made clear in their rhetoric that they hate faith, and they hate those who practice their faith.

This is a collectiv(ist) wail of raging frustration, as caustic and noisome as their comic book depictions of the supposed "nativist" wing of the Right.

It shows what they really believe, and that they believe themselves to be entitled to rule without opposition. It shows that they are wannabe totalitarians. And it illustrates that, with all due respect to Senator Salazar (which isn't much), the only "anti-Christs" in the current equation are the ones people like him see in the mirror.

UPDATE/BUMP TO 5/2: Stanley Kurtz at NRO has uncovered a horrifying plot against the national security of the United States.

The Dominion, a mighty planetary alliance and trading consortium from the other side of the galaxy, has been persuaded by the American religious right to intervene in the current domestic culture war in order to impose its vision of an Old Testament theocracy on the heretofore global hyperpower.

Using their Jem'Haddar storm troopers and Vorta overseers, the Dominion will, on conservative evangelicals' behalf, take over the federal government and suppress other religions through genocide and mass murder, rather than through proselytizing; reestablish slavery; reduce women to near-slavery by making them property, first of their fathers, and then of their husbands; execute anyone found guilty of pre-martial, extramaritial, or homosexual sex; and bring back the death penalty for witchcraft.

In return, the United States of God will join the Dominion, giving the Gamma Quadrant power its first toehold in this part of the Milky Way. The transition is expected to take only a matter of months, and....

What? It isn't the "Dominion," but "Dominionists" that the heathen left is raving about? You mean those "kingdom now!" kooks whose translation of the Bible appears to have come out of a box of corn flakes?

Nuts. I was hoping the Chrisophobes had finally conjured up a conspiracy theory that might be fun for a change.

Never mind.

UPDATE II: Hey, who knew that Pat Robertson was a Vorta?

Y'know, I always did wonder about his ears....