No Legitimacy; No Surrender

Paul Krugman has an excellent column in the NY Times today about the dangers of letting the religious right continue to strengthen their stranglehold on the government unfettered. Connecting the dots between Congress’ intervention in the Schaivo case, “conscience legislation” (i.e. pharmacists legally able to refuse to fill prescriptions based on their religious beliefs), and the encroachment of religion into the public educational system, he isn’t really saying anything that one hasn’t been able to find on blogs such as this one for quite some time, but it’s a good sign (I think, I hope) that we’re starting to see from people in positions like Krugman’s a determination to quash this radical uprising before it gets completely out of control.

The notion Krugman poses, that we’re collectively wary to address the threat to our nation’s future posed by the extremists within our own borders, goes back to what I wrote earlier in the month about the need for selective intolerance. Cloaked in the protective chain mail of their religion, Christian fundamentalists, and more importantly their political ideas and objectives, have become unassailable.

Any criticism of the increasingly voracious appetite of the religious right for power within and over the government is denounced as religious intolerance, irrespective of the source of the criticism; even other Christians, moderates and liberals alike, are held in contempt by their conservative counterparts, dismissed and vilified as “false” Christians—a denouncement the media is strangely willing to embrace as it fans the flames of this culture war, conjuring elaborate stories of Christmas-haters out of the thinnest of air, and inevitably juxtaposing the godly conservative Christians and the heartless, bah humbug secularists. If one only existed in the false reality of television news, one would never know there were plenty of Christians who respect the public sphere, and the non-Christians with whom they share it. So it becomes a Christian versus non-Christian (or, if you’re watching Fox, anti-Christian) argument, a specious and likely deliberate misconstruing of reality; two sides indeed exist, but they are comprised of those who have respect for the public sphere and everyone who travels in it, and those who have no respect for anything but satiating their ravenous hunger for control.

After 9/11, and the disclosure that its perpetrators were Islamic fundamentalists, great pains were taken by government officials, the media, moderate and liberal religious leaders of all religious, and lots of average Americans, to carefully and thoughtfully address the difference between Islam and its teachings, and radical Islamic fundamentalists and their (mis)interpretations of its teachings. Over and over we heard, as we collectively wrung our hands and hoped against backlash attacks on our Muslim neighbors, Fundamentalists do not represent the tenets of Islam; most Muslims are not like that. It was an important distinction to make; liberals were keen to see it made, as well we should have been. Yet within our own borders, we cower from the ideological brethren of the perpetrators of 9/11—a radical element seeking to advance an agenda designed to undermine the American democracy, operating under a shroud of religion, both as their protection against censure and the justification for their radicalism.

Krugman notes, ominously, that we are seeing with escalating frequency “politicians willing to violate the spirit of the law, if not yet the letter, to cater to the religious right. … And the future seems all too likely to bring more intimidation in the name of God and more political intervention that undermines the rule of law.” As politicians bow every more willingly to the demands of the radicalized Christians, the latter become further emboldened in their goals and strategies, howling for the involvement of a state governor, Congress, and the President himself, who jump to attention at their behest on behalf of a woman whose live they want saved.

"Christians are a lot more bold under Bush's leadership, he speaks what a lot of us believe," said [pastor and parent Ray Mummert, 54, of Dover, PA, a town currently deeply at war over teaching Darwin or Christian creationism in its schools].

They got a mandate, too, you see.

"We've been attacked by the intelligent, educated segment of the culture," he said.

Though such a comment seems, well, fairly amusing, the truth is—it’s quite unnerving. They don’t need intellect; they’ve got faith. They don’t need education; they’ve got the Word of God. Intelligence and education can be challenged. Faith and the very word of God Himself, however, are untrumpable.

Or so we allow them to be, resisting categorical denunciations of such manifest lunacy, because that’s just what they believe is still an acceptable excuse for good Christians, no matter how unChristlike and indefensible their behavior. But is it really acceptable that these alleged supporters of the nebulously-named “culture of life” have murder on their minds because they aren’t getting what they demand? How far are they willing to go…if we aren’t willing to stop them?

These people deserve to be regarded with the same disdain we reserve for the other dregs and bottom-feeders who endlessly scrabble around in the muck, yowling sanctimoniously about how right they are and eating each other alive—the white supremacists, the neo-Nazis, Ralph Nader. They don’t deserve a place at the table of ideas at which the national debate is commenced. They don’t deserve to have one of their members substitute on news shows. They don’t deserve legitimacy in any way.

If we continue to consent to offering it, we must brace ourselves for a grim future indeed.