Posted on 10/12/2006 5:44:29 PM PDT by SandRat
If the Christian base of the GOP gets its way, "All government employees — federal, state and local — would be required to participate in weekly Bible classes in the workplace, as well as compulsory daily prayer sessions." We would all have to carry religious identity cards that "would provide Christocrats with preferential treatment in many areas of life, including home ownership, student loans, employment and education."
Non-Christians would be indulged as second-class citizens, "but younger members . . . would be strongly encouraged to formally convert to the dominant evangelical Christianity." Homosexual sex would be illegalized, while "known homosexuals and lesbians would have to successfully undergo government-sponsored re- education sessions if they applied for any public-sector jobs."
All of that is according to James Rudin in his book "The Baptizing of America." I learned about it from a brilliant essay in the August-September issue of First Things: A Journal of Religion, Culture, and Public Life, in which Ross Douthat surveys the scare literature demonizing "Christianists," "theocons" and "Christocrats" — people who were under the impression that they were actually law-abiding, tax-paying, patriotic American citizens who happen to subscribe to the Christian faith. Little did they know they're actually all about rounding up infidels and torching the Constitution.
Liberal paranoia isn't solely Christophobic. "On the Media," a public-radio program that purports to be an objective watchdog of the press, recently interviewed Lawrence Wright, the author of the acclaimed book "The Looming Tower"; Wright also wrote the script for the mediocre 1998 movie "The Siege," starring Denzel Washington. According to "On the Media," the film was "prophetic" in that Wright had successfully "predicted" what would happen if America were attacked by terrorists. In the movie, Muslims are rounded up and put in concentration camps in sports stadiums, while martial law is declared in New York City. I guess I forgot to read the newspapers the day that happened.
A recent dispatch in The New York Times reported from a conference at Yale on the 100th anniversary of Hannah Arendt's birth. Arendt, recall, was the author of the brilliant but flawed "The Origins of Totalitarianism," which explored the rise of Nazism and Stalinism, and "Eichmann in Jerusalem," which covered the trial of the bureaucratic mastermind of the Holocaust. At the Yale conference, according to the Times, political scientist Benjamin Barber "dismissed the idea that Islamist fundamentalism was in any way totalitarian but suggested that given the current administration in the United States, an 'American Eichmann is not altogether impossible.' "
Others at the conference conjured similar phantasms. Writer Jonathan Schell said America hasn't quite fulfilled Arendt's checklist for totalitarian systems, but "we are on the edge of that abyss." And so on. We've been on the edge of that abyss for a while.
During those dark years of John Ashcroft's tenure as attorney general, Rep. Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y., lamented that the government had become "thought police." Sen. Russ Feingold, D-Wis., said Americans had become "afraid to read books, terrified into silence" simply because the government was given the same power to investigate suspected terrorists that it long had to scrutinize drug dealers and mob kingpins. One is tempted to invoke Orwell's dictum that some things are so stupid, only an intellectual could believe them. But, truth is, lots of otherwise normal people believe this stuff.
Yet Orwell's point is still relevant. Intellectuals look at the world through literary prisms of theory. They come up with a vision of the world and then select facts accordingly.
The waves of paranoia currently sweeping through America could be seen as the democratization of intellectual dementia. Criticisms of President Bush, Christians, the right wing, the Patriot Act, whatever: These are all fine. But presumably, such large claims against America should come with ample evidence to back them up. Instead, we get the opposite. The smaller the example, the greater its significance. And that trick is the intellectual class's gift to America.
My opinion
Jonah Goldberg
Bush Derangement Syndrome.
LOL!
I don't get the sense that the evangelicals are sitting out this election. I don't think any sane conservative can honestly say they want to trust the House or Senate to Pelosi or Reid.
DUY! My sister has that big time.
My lib sister picked a fight with me this weekend over some non-consequential thing, and used the opportunity to slam President Bush. I don't get why people have gotten so very deranged to have a President with integrity, political skill, values, honor, and faith, especially compared to the sleaze we had before.
By the way, this piece has great new tagline potential. See below.
I like the tagline. It sounds so deep and intellectual. ;)
I'm keeping mine to remind people just how important this election is.
Shudder! That is just ONE essential reason to vote pubbie this election!
I used to be quiet about my faith and beliefs, but I'm not anymore. I think of Peter in the NT and how he denied Jesus. I don't ever want to hear a rooster crow in my mind...
That's because "intellectual autocrats" never take the Second Ammendment into their considerations. They live in a world where only words have power. That's why their highest power is a smart lawyer, and a crooked judge.
They've physically disarmed themselves (except for one liberal friend who has a M1 carbine, but won't talk about it), and try to disarm everyone else. Except for their hired guns.
Those same "christorcrats" that they fear will enslave them are actually the guarantee that this will never happen. The conservative with a gun makes the world safe for both himself, and the liberal who would oppress him.
Lots of wisdom in this brief piece, and a great last paragraph. A subject this large though, deserves an entire book. My take on it would have to include my perception that a great deal of this "paranoia" is just that, an ACT that deserves to be put inside quotation marks, because it is so trumped-up and bogus. The Left have become very skilled ACTORS, who can feign moral outrage at the drop of a hat.They can also, without blinking an eye, or dropping a stitch, project all their own shortcomings , sins of omission, and failures onto the opposition. And the oppositon couldn't seem to care less.
Leftards are so full of sh*t. It would be almost funny if only they hadnt killed so many people and denied so many their freedom.
I'm making the world safe for as many liberals as I can. But do they appreciate it? Noooooo.
There is an engineer that I work around (I will not say with) who has such a severe case of Bush Derangement Syndrome that he does not get any work done. Just spews HATEBUSHHATEBUSHHATEHATEHATEBUSH-WAAAAAAHHHHHH!
Then again, this is Minnesota, the Loon State.
That reminds me. When Clinton and Bush were running against each other, our Christian school had a straw vote. Bush got about 516 and Clinton got 1 vote. We found that the 1 vote was from a Kindergarten student and his parents would have died had they known. Liberals would have a hard time being comfortable with that.
"The US government is filled with Christians, since the population on the whole is majority Christian. So why haven't the Christians imposed this supposed theocracy already--how big a majority are they waiting for?" ~ Darkwolf377
Like clock work, when election season rolls around, the secular progressive leftists open their trick bag and start pulling out the same tired old, "how can we fool 'em again today?" playing cards. They've cried wolf so many times now about the same "fear" that it's become laughable.
Ralph Reed set them straight in no uncertain terms back in 1996 when they tried to paint him with the same brush as various religious fringe movements, as noted here:
"...there are some ways of thinking he [Ralph Reed] knows and rejects. He mentions very specifically the Reconstructionist movement promoted by R. J. Rushdoony and his associates.
Reconstructionism-sometimes called Theonomy or Dominion Theology-is a bastard form of Calvinism contending that the American constitutional order must be replaced by a new order based on "Bible Law."
Reed's rejection of this school is notable because, rightly or wrongly, his boss Pat Robertson ... has sometimes been accused of advocating a modified brand of Reconstructionism. Reed's words are unequivocal and, given the diverse constituencies on which the Christian Coalition draws, bold: "Reconstructionism is an authoritarian ideology that threatens the most basic civil liberties of a free and democratic society.
The pro-family movement [Reed's standard term for the cause he champions] . . . must unequivocally dissociate itself from Reconstructionism and other efforts to use the government to impose biblical law through direct political action.
It must firmly and openly exclude the triumphalist and authoritarian elements from the new theology of Christian political involvement." ~ Richard John Neuhaus First Things 10/96 http://www.firstthings.com/ftissues/ft9610/neuhaus.html
In a review of Ralph Reed's book, - Active Faith: How Christians Are Changing the Soul of American Politics. Free Press. 312 pp.
http://www.amazon.ca/Active-Faith-Christians-Changing-Politics/dp/0684827581
I think you mean that "stuff" typically found in that cow lot Rush keeps talking about.
The "stuff" left behind as a calling card by dogs.
I used to be too, until Christian values started being attacked all the time. I've never been the sort of Christian I probably should have been, but it REALLY bothered me when liberal judges, and their minions, started telling me "when" and "how" I would be allowed to practice my faith! I mean when a court wants to decide whether Christmas is Christmas, it's time to worry.
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