Something to ponder

[pecunium]

I've been ranting about the aims, policies and potential of the radical right/relegious types to do damage to the country.

But I am a fairly (these days, and for an American) liberal fellow, so I am expected to have such silly thoughts. Chuck Baldwin isn't (and a hat tip to kibbles for pointing this out to me). If he's concerned, my fears seem less ill placed.

I AM A CONSERVATIVE CHRISTIAN, AND THE RELIGIOUS RIGHT SCARES ME TOO

have marched and protested against abortion clinics. I have led several pro-life rallies and even led our church to construct A Memorial To Aborted Babies. I have conducted small and large (some drawing crowds numbering in the thousands) pro-life, pro-family rallies and meetings in the Pensacola area and in many towns and cities across the state of Florida.

When Ronald Reagan was running for President, I helped Dr. Jerry Falwell register more than fifty thousand new conservative voters in my state. I have attended White House functions with former President Reagan and former Vice President George H.W. Bush.

I supported and defended Chief Justice Roy Moore and his fight to display a Ten Commandments monument at a pro-Ten Commandments rally in Montgomery, Alabama and even on national television.

I am an annual member of the National Rifle Association and a life member of Gun Owners of America. I have been the featured speaker at several pro-Second Amendment rallies....

When people are told that they are voting "Christian" by voting for Republican Party candidates, it is being intimated that they are voting non-Christian by voting for any other candidate. This is not only silly on its face, it is downright dangerous!

I don't remember anyone saying people voted "Christian" when they elected the outspoken Christian candidate, Jimmy Carter, President. Yet, Carter, in his personal life, demonstrated as much, if not more, Christianity than does George W. Bush. If you recall, Carter even taught Sunday School in a Southern Baptist Church while President....

The willingness of the Religious Right to give President Bush king-like subservience is easily seen in the way they demonize anyone who dares to oppose him. This is very unnerving.

Are we heading for a modern day religious inquisition, this one led not by the Catholic Church but by the Religious Right? Are we witnessing the type of marriage between Church and State that America's founders originally feared?

I used to believe that liberals were paranoid for being fearful of conservative Christians gaining political power. Now, I share their trepidation....

Let's be honest, I don't care for this man's politics. I don't share his vision of religion. I think he has desires for intrusions of church into state.

But, looking at his last paragraph, I can say I am willing to have him on my side in this fight, because I think he will be an honest opponent, if the playing field is level.

Of course, the sad truth is, neither George W. Bush nor the Republican Party in Washington, D.C. represents genuine Christian or even conservative principles. If they did, they would take their oaths to the Constitution seriously and then neither liberals nor conservatives would have anything to fear, for the U.S. Constitution protects the rights and freedoms of all men.

Comments

[ms-tek.livejournal.com]

=(

This world scares me.

[kibbles.livejournal.com]

Because of my conservative lifestyle on the homefront (stay at home mom) I happen to subscribe to a lot of mailing lists with conservative women on them, some more fundamentalist than people are used to. But when it comes to a lot of these deeply religious women, they're not all rabid like the religious right when it comes to politics. And some of them are members of 'peace churches' like Mennonites.

I've got to keep trying to put posts up where Christians are voicing their opinions about the current political climate. I think they need exposure so that people feel safe about coming out as Christian and know that they are not alone. It also would show others that not all Christians, or even all conservatives, are batshit insane.

I also read some union sites, not the BAN CORPORATIONS sorts that are super socialist/communist (one union group believes that work should be abolished, I kid you not) but the blue collar, working class, traditional Democrat union sites. They're feeling alienated by both parties. They once were one h ell of a force and if they could be another part of the picture, we'd be in better shape.

If we can put all these fragments together, I think we'll find one hell of a group, there. But we all have to realize there are others like us out there. Or at least close enough to work with.

For me the journey's been the other direction...

[bellatrys.livejournal.com]

realizing that yes, we *were* batshit crazy, only maybe not as batshit crazy as some, but still seriously bonkers, and breaking out of Theocon programming has not been easy. (I mean, really, I can't even *think* about the idea that premarital sex might not be a hell-worthy offense without the sort of mental feedback squeal of the Manchurian Candidate victims...or that I'm not evil or deranged for not wanting to be either a mother or a nun, let alone have all the children I can physically produce. OTOH, I can rationalize away just about anything vicious done by a government in the name of "double effect," thanks to my casuistic training.)

Part of the problem was that we (that is my immediate family) were too educated, world-traveled, and from a non-Catholic and middle-to-lower-middle-class background to start from, and thus not startng with the same assumptions as rich cradle Catholics (or at least Cradle Christians) who had never left their social strata in the states except to hand out largesse to a mission now and then - and so literally couldn't imagine that our friends and coworkers weren't joking when they talked up the New Crusades and Inquisition Denial and the need for Theocracy and heresy hunts, and weren't just being edgy rebels when they said racist and anti-semitic things. "Oh, that's just so-and-so trying to be shocking," was the feeling.

Now many of them are disillusioned to some extent with the hypocrisy and bloodthirstiness and intellectual dishonesty (particularly science-related) of the Conservative Catholic Academic movement - but instead of returning to their liberal roots, they're playing it safe with "spiritual narcissim" - that "cocooning" that was so popular in family magazines a few years ago, but with a churchy flavor. Keep your head in the sand, say lots of rosaries in hopes it will make things miraculously get better (the way praying the rosary brought down the Berlin Wall and ended the Marcos regime, you know) and just say that everything is part of God's Big Plan, somehow, when people try to talk to you about addressing the evils done in our name.

(No, I'm not looking forward to Christmas, can you tell?)

I've been wondering when the "pro-lifers"

[bellatrys.livejournal.com]

would wake up and smell the coffee on a large scale, so to speak, and realize that they've been used by people who have no intention whatsoever of delivering and no respect for their cause at all.

I kid you not, I had that discussion with someone, as to how for instance, none of those GOP candidates who make such a deal out of their respect for the unborn had ever done anything beyond a meaningless gesture, once elected, and their response was that no politician could be openly pro-life, they wouldn't be re-elected if they were.

And yet they go on voting for politicians based on their claims of opposition to abortion knowing full well that they're not going to do anything, because their bishops tell them they can't in conscience vote for anyone who is "anti-life". And consider themselves more moral than those of us who vote on social justice issues as a whole.