In keeping with my general policy of not linking to noxious mediocrities--who, experience has shown, crave any attention--I am just going to quote a posting that is interesting not because of who said it (though he purports to be a philosopher), but because of what it reveals about the right-wing mindset (it resonates with rhetoric one hears from Andrew Sullivan, Christopher Hitchens and others of that slimy ilk). The author was reacting (badly, it appears) to my reference to Bush & co. as fascist theocrats. Our right-winger comments:
Nobody wants a theocracy in the U.S. except the Islamo-fascists, and they want it everywhere. The fear among some leftists that the re-election of G.W. Bush is moving us towards theocracy shows just how delusional their thinking is. The problem with leftists is not so much stupidity as their ideological fixations. The latter prevent their minds from functioning properly. They see threats that aren't there and fail to see the ones that are. They ignore the very real theocratic threat of militant Islam, all the while fabricating a Christian theocratic threat.
It is becoming increasingly clear, I'm afraid, that people on the right are now in the grips of a number of paranoid fantasies since September 11 (perhaps they were in the grips of different paranoid fantasies before that, but they were better disguised). It would be an understatement to say that the events of 9/11 were horrific beyond anyone's imagination: religious zealots flying passenger planes in to the country's tallest buildings, sending them collapsing to the ground, killing thousands. But, unless one has lost one's mind, that does not mean there is a "very real theocratic threat from militant Islam."
"Very real"? So, next time, instead of 19 zealots with box cutters, they'll have 38, and they'll take over the White House, and force more than one million military personnel and several million federal and local law enforcement officers to put down their weapons and surrender? There may, indeed, be a real threat of more criminal violence from Islamic fanatics, but there is no theocratic threat at all from these people: talk about delusions! Osama bin Laden can't even overthrow the heinous regimes in places like Saudi Arabia, how exactly is he going to bring Islamic theocracy to America's shores? (Imagine the headlines: "World superpower surrenders to man in cave" and so on.)
Sadly, what is not delusional, indeed what is rather obviously factual, is that there are homegrown political movements in the U.S. committed, unmistakably, to theocracy. I have quoted many pertinent examples in recent months; but let's just start with the platform of the Texas Republican Party (here's a useful overview), a platform to which the current President of the United States, and many other leading figures nationally, are signatories. Ours is "a Christian nation," and therefore "human life is sacred" because "created in the image of God" (and thus "must be protected" from "the moment of fertilization"); we must have a "return of Bibles and other religious books to the shelves of all public schools and libaries," not to mention "equal treatment" for bogus theories like Intelligent Design Creationism. Because "homosexual behavior is contrary to the fundamental, unchanging truths that have been ordained by God," sodomy should be criminalized, the federal courts should not have jurisdiction over the constitutionality of such statutes, homosexuals should be barred from adopting children, and no state or public efforts should be permitted that might result in better understanding of or respect for homosexuals.
With such an agenda, is it any surprise that the Texas Republican Party platform seeks to "dispel the myth of the separation of Church and State." In a theocracy, it is a myth.
And what else but "theocracy" describes a major Christian conservative's call for President Bush to pursue "legislation defined by Biblical norm"? Or proposed congressional legislation that would exempt from judicial review any government actions based on the government official's "acknowledgement of God as the sovereign source of law, liberty, or government"?
"Nobody wants a theocracy in the U.S."? By my rough estimate, organizations representings somewhere between forty and one hundred million people in the United States want a theocracy.
What must be the intellectual and psychological condition of someone who fails to notice?
(Just a sidenote on "stupidity," for the amusement of my philosophy readers: the author of the posting discussed above professes, elsewhere on his site, to the following philosophical views: "My philosophical position may be described as onto-theological personalism: I defend the view that individual persons form an irreducible and ultimate ontological category, and that within this category self-subsistent existence is the prime person. This is the theme that unifies my seemingly disparate investigations." Unity at any cost, it appears.)
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