Onward Christian Soldiers

The GOP’s religious war against America

© Bryan Zepp Jamieson

4/17/05

http://zeppscommentaries.com/Religious/falangists.htm

Dating back to the 1970s, when America’s far right started taking over the Republican Party, the GOP has enjoyed an incestuous relationship with those Falangists that exist out on the dark fringes of the Christian community. It was meant to be just one part of a rather vile coalition of monied interests, racists, authoritarians, and other reactionaries, all of which subsist under the broad spectrum of the extreme right.

It’s pretty unlikely that the central faction in this movement, the monied interests, had any expectation that the religious nuts were going to be anything more than a means to the end. They were a cheap date: make lots of promises, get what you were after, and then move on. That’s what the GOP did in the 80s, when they had Reagan make lots of promises to the religious right about abortion and school prayer and the like, only to have Reagan turn his back on them once in office.

Not that there’s anything unusual about that. Democrats have their constituencies that they only pay attention to during campaigns and not after they get elected, and it’s been a pretty standard part of American politics going back to when Congress picked Aaron Burr as Jefferson’s running mate in order to appeal to the Federalists. "Find ‘em and forget ‘em" has always been a time-honored tradition in politics.

The religious nuts, in a healthy society, are usually just a noisy fringe, a source for humorous material and a relatively benign reminder of why free societies don’t pander to religion or allow it to have positions of governmental power. It’s pretty unlikely that the powers that took over the GOP envisioned them having much more say in party politics than the other fringe groups, such as the KKK and the neo-nazis. They would be a few million votes in a close election, and then avoided with alacrity thereafter.

But since the 1980s, America has not been a healthy society, and in societies in distress, fringe movements like extremism and religious fundamentalism grow rapidly. Thus it was that America felt a sense of distress, partly brought on by the declining quality of American life stemming from Reaganomics, and partly fueled by the right-wing media-driven sense of crisis during the Clinton years. As a result of this ongoing malaise, the Falangists not only became 20% of the voting population, but captured the GOP entirely. They went from having one of their members as the Secretary of the Interior during the Reagan years to having the President and half his cabinet, plus significant portions of the House and Senate, by 2002.

The ongoing effort to turn the Senate into a rubber stamp for judicial appointments is only the penultimate step toward consolidation of power, since the Judiciary is the only branch of government they don’t control.

They don’t make any bones about what they want. The Washington Times (owned by Sun Myung Moon, a man who demonstrates that you can buy up religious nuts) uncritically quoted Tom DeLay, beleaguered House Majority Leader, as saying "I blame Congress over the last 50 to 100 years for not standing up and taking its responsibility given to it by the Constitution. The reason the judiciary has been able to impose a separation of church and state that's nowhere in the Constitution is that Congress didn't stop them. The reason we had judicial review is because Congress didn't stop them. The reason we had a right to privacy is because Congress didn't stop them."

Gosh. Try to imagine a House Majority Leader interested enough in American history to know that the Constitution specifically forbids religious tests for any office or position of public trust in America – that was the "Wall of Separation" Jefferson referred to. Imagine if DeLay were competent enough to know that Judicial Review was codified by Marbury vs. Madison in 1803. Tom, that’s more than "50 to 100 years" ago. Honest. Imagine a man whose mind isn’t clouded by venality and ignorance, and thus knows that the right to privacy is one of those that the Ninth Amendment had in mind.

Of course, DeLay wants judges to account for themselves to politicians like himself. Just like Hitler did. And for exactly the same reasons that Hitler had.

It’s hard to imagine a venal, ignorant fool like DeLay in any postion of power, and of course in a healthy country, he wouldn’t be. But he’s learned that religious fundamentalists wear their religious alliances like a ring through their noses, and all he has to do is Jeezus-wheeze a lot, and the Falangists’ eyes glaze over and they begin referring to DeLay, a two bit crook and demagogue, as a good man, a godly man. It’s painful to watch.

Then there’s Bill Frist. Frist, a former cardiac surgeon, is as good a Senator as he is a doctor. (He’s the one who gave us a neurological evaluation of Terri Schiavo based only on a few minutes spent watching a carefully edited videotape of her).

Frist today involved himself in some wingnut televised event called ""Justice Sunday." This is a collection of bible bangerss and jeezus wheezers, joined by a deep antipathy to American values that they deem "liberal;" values such as freedom from religious persecution (they don’t see it as persecution when they are the persecutors, you see) or separation of powers (there’s a technical term for nations that don’t have an independent judiciary: they’re called "dictatorships"). Like most right wingers, they like to drape the flag over their seething hatred for American values.

It would have been unimaginable for the Majority Leader of the Senate to involve himself in a nasty little Falangist hatefest like this a few years back. No responsible Senator would go anywhere near a group where quotes like "Christians claim that the judiciary has been enemy to numerous moral issues" and "[J]udges are not only deciding for amorality but immorality. They are not only deciding on other than Judeo-Christian ethics for an issue’s base but have given in to baldly unethical postulates. As the liberal, anti-Christian dogma of the left has been repudiated in almost every recent election, the courts have become the last great bastion for liberalism" are uttered. It would have been a disgrace.

It’s still a disgrace. Bill Frist is a disgrace. But Frist feels the same way these anti-American nutcases feel, and the idea of shutting down an entire branch of government and making it some sort of biblical mockery of itself is just hunky dory with him.

The Falangists and their mewling sycophants in elected office, such as DeLay and Frist, are what one follower jubilantly proclaims as "Christians [who] are marching to war on immoral judges and their unethical decisions."

That’s almost correct. Except they aren’t Christians, and they aren’t just marching to war against judges and decisions they don’t like.

They are marching to war on America.

It’s time for America to stop them.