Right-wing evangelical theocrats love them some Rick Perry

By Michael J.W. Stickings

The Republican presidential field is still embarrassingly weak (and even more embarrassing because the best Republican candidate by far, Jon Huntsman, isn't really catching on at all), and there is still a good deal of talk about some savior coming to the rescue.

With Huckabee not running this time, social/religious conservatives perhaps more than any other core Republican constituency seem to be driving that talk. Much of the rest of the party is already represented, after all, particularly the moneyed establishment (Romney) and the Tea Party (Bachmann, Paul). The theocrats only have Santorum, a distant also-ran with zero electability, and Gingrich, a joke of a candidate who's in it to glorify his ego and fill his coffers, and also Bachmann, though she doesn't seem to be what they're looking for.

The so-called "social conservatives" (actually moralizing right-wing evangelical theocrats) used to be a powerful force in the party, if not the dominant one, but they've been reduced to a bit of an afterthought, even though they still wield enormous influence at the grassroots level. And so it would be foolish to ignore them.

And who are they now looking to as their savior? Why, Texas Gov. Rick Perry, of course, who has done a great deal to appeal to them, presenting himself as their kind of theocrat. They're pushing him to run and no doubt he'd be a formidable candidate if only for their support. Could he actually win the nomination? Maybe. Or maybe he'd be the #2. (How does Romney-Perry sound?) Either way, social conservatives aren't about to let this election cycle pass without trying to wield their influence, and they may just be able to do that through Perry.

For more on this, see Amy Goodman's piece at Time: "Christian Right leaders have sought to find a new – preferably electable – candidate to carry the social conservative banner." They've picked Rick Perry.

Is the Religious Right coming around on same-sex marriage?

By Michael J.W. Stickings

As Mother Jones is reporting, the theocratic, evangelical right may finally be realizing that it is losing its battle against marriage equality. As Jim Daly, president of James Dobson's Focus on the Family puts it:

We're winning the younger generation on abortion, at least in theory. What about same-sex marriage? We're losing on that one, especially among the 20- and 30-somethings: 65 to 70 percent of them favor same-sex marriage. I don't know if that's going to change with a little more age -- demographers would say probably not. We've probably lost that. I don't want to be extremist here, but I think we need to start calculating where we are in the culture.

They're not winning on abortion and they're certainly not winning on same-sex marriage.

Now, Daly certainly doesn't speak for the entirety of his movement, but "it can't help the anti-gay religious right to have such a prominent social conservative say that the crusade against gay marriage has essentially been lost and that it's time to accept that reality and move on." 

The Religious Right isn't coming around on same-sex marriage, certainly not, and I suspect that Daly won't find much agreement among his fellow Christianists. Still, it's somewhat encouraging that reality -- if not yet freedom, equality, and justice -- is breaking through into the darkness.

God control

By Capt. Fogg

I've said quite a bit about gun control; pretty much all I'm going to say, actually. There is something far more pernicious, more dangerous and more in need of control however and that's God. It's hard to deny, although that doesn't prevent most people from denying it, God has been on the wrong side of things as often as the right side: slavery, conquest, persecutions, genocide. You name it, God has been the universal justification as often as the universal opponent.

So it isn't surprising that God now seems to be against Net Neutrality. Sure he is -- and our founding fathers who don't seem to have believed in the kind of god who gets involved in such matters as free markets thought so too. That's the thing about God's likes and dislikes and mysterious plans: people just make them up as they go along.

Take David Barton, for instance, allegedly one of the country's most influential Evangelicals. He thinks that government should stay out of the lives of selected people and should, in the name of freedom and less intrusive government, regulate the most private and personal consensual sexual behavior. That's nothing new, of course, but it may surprise you that according to the Gospel as invented by Barton, God hates net neutrality and wants the internet dominated by the powerful and rich. God and the Puritans brought us prosperity because we're not socialists. The rest of the world got their prosperity from the Devil apparently and Jesus was just joking about rich men and heaven. How can we question that?

God wills it -- just like God willed the Crusades and the extermination of European Jews: just like he willed the divine right of kings and the right of the Church to approve their power. He demanded a secular Democracy in the Colonies, some of them, while simultaneously mandating the power of George III, Rex Dei Gratia.

Face it, it's long since been far out of hand and the will of god has become indistinguishable from the background noise of commerce. Did God have an interest in boosting tobacco sales. He obviously, if we're to believe this radio troll, has an interest in the rights of corporations which exceeds his concern for the poor. Does God like free markets, or does he like kings? Does the Bible speak against Net Neutrality or call it Socialism. Does God hate Socialism or does he like you to share everything you have with the poor and sick? Depends on whom you ask and of course I won't be asking the Religious Right, which I can't tell from the Religious Wrong of late.

One thing our constitution does uphold, is the free exercise of religion, so lunatics and tyrants and even evil men like Barton get to rave on unmolested. The government can't really exercise God control and more than God can control the evil spewed out by Barton's forked tongue. It's up to me and you to be aware that whether or not it was God, Guns and Guts that made America "great" those things will serve any master with equal ferocity. Mention God and nobody can shut you up, nobody can really contradict you and millions will follow you through the gates of hell, raging and bellowing, cheering and jeering like the lost souls we are.

(Cross-posted from Human Voices.)

St. Paul, Defender of the Faith.

By Capt. Fogg

One of the things I have liked about Congressman Ron Paul is that he's often been on the side of deregulating private life and consensual behavior, but either he doesn't mean what he says or he is willing to say what he doesn't mean in order to curry favor with the Great Regulators of the Religious right.

Speaking in Iowa recently, Mr. Paul said:

"The Defense of Marriage Act was enacted in 1996 to stop Big Government in Washington from re-defining marriage and forcing its definition on the States. Like the majority of Iowans, I believe that marriage is between one man and one woman and must be protected."

That resonates in my ears as a statement of his religious persuasion and of course he was speaking to a group of religions conservatives representing denominations opposed to letting people decide for themselves about such matters. Other religions might have other ideas and indeed some do. In other words these are people quite open about forcing their definition on Americans.

I find it curious that proponents of defining marriage according to religious definitions always use the word "is" where one expects "should be," "ought to be" or "must be" and there must be a reason for it. Marriage, after all is a human institution and marriage customs vary amongst groups of humans. Perhaps "is" is a way to pretend that it's written into the fabric of the cosmos like general relativity or the uncertainty principle. It isn't.

Of course Paul couched his opposition to doing away with the Defense of Marriage act in terms of states rights and whether or not he was following in the tradition of all the other "states rights" defenses of so many other things we now see as unjust, it's a defense of something with as limited a future as our embarrassing misogyny laws of recent memory. A minority of the country oppose preventing people from marrying whom they will and I can't help but find my feeling that the history of humankind's progress toward democracy is once again being thwarted by the notion of a divine will that opposes our allegedly innate liberty.

When someone who has been so stalwart in defending the Constitution and restraining government power, promotes such peremptory views on the most personal of choices, it seems a jarring discontinuity that makes on question the man and everything else he's described as being unconstitutional. It's hard to understand why he's willing to use government power to defend a certain Faith when that is something the government is expressly forbidden to do.

Yes, I know. I've been talking a lot about religion of late, but to me, there is no other force in American affairs more intractable than the movement to force compliance to religious standards on people who have or wish to have no affiliation with those standards and prefer the right to make personal choices according to their own consciences. That ability, that kind of freedom is the beating heart of liberal democracy. If we lose that, we lose it all.

It's sad to see Congressman Paul speaking this way. I once had high hopes for him, if not as Presidential material, certainly as a voice of reason and restraint at a time when the Republican party seems increasingly controlled by anti-democratic, anti-libertarian influences. Now he seems far less of a libertarian, far more of an authoritarian and indistinguishable from any other politician grovelling before the powerful.

(Cross posted from Human Voices)