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
Good read.
Good article. Thanks for posting.
This sounds like Islamists to me.
If we had to take an IQ test to vote, most Demonrats would lose the right to vote.
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?
Now imagine all the Christians in government--including both houses, and I'm guessing the SCOTUS, and the White House--were overnight replaced by Muslims. How long do you think before we have a real theocracy?
---more--different title--
--http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1717516/posts
I post on a big Christian forum and the liberals that post there think we are just like the islamic jihadists. In fact the site's been hit by seminar posters all trying to stir the pot and encourage the evangelicals to sit out the election because of the Foley situation.
Well, I guess this guy must be a one of them...
Benjamin Barber "dismissed the idea that Islamist fundamentalism was in any way totalitarian..."
Intellectual ignorance at its finest.
But, truth is, lots of otherwise normal people believe this stuff.
Yes it is. I stepped in some "STUFF" walking across the parking lot today.
Well, I do agree that most of those examples are phantasms, except the Patriot Act and RICO statute abuses. Those are real and ongoing.
When those laws are perverted to prosecute prayer meetings and to punish "un-PC" conduct, the line has been crossed big time.
Right fear, wrong religion.
LBT
-=-=-
That could be my sister-in-law. She suffers from BDS. They've sent their children to a private, Christian school. She's decided they will be pulled out because the board is staffed by "Right Wing Republicans." You can't even talk to her, I don't try.
Worse, it is lefitsts who hold protected jobs in government agencies, wielding the same police power they supposedy fear, while imagining it in the hands of those who will never wield it!
I have a looney lib sister too.
BDS?
I hope nobody--Christian or otherwise--is dumb enough to believe "sitting out" this election, or any other, is a good idea. I agree with whoever it was, further up the thread, that said if this country were going to become a theocracy, it would have already happened.
Isn't it fabulous that the Secular Progressives in this country can say, with impunity and a straight face, that it is Christians that endanger the freedom of this country? Most of the signers of the Constitution were Christians, furthermore, they would unashamedly admit the fact!
My father often used the same Orwell dictum. He was a very intelligent and educated man, but he never lost sight of the purpose of education, unlike the "Ivory Tower" dwellers he so abhorred. The "intellectual autocrats" simply cannot accept the fact that anyone, out here in "fly over country", has the gumption, let alone intellect, to dispute their distorted perspective.
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