Something to ponder
Dec. 18th, 2004 10:10 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pecuniumI'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 tokibbles 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.
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.
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For me the journey's been the other direction...
Date: 2004-12-18 10:34 pm (UTC)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?)