The Ongoing Christianist Menace

As 2008 comes to an end, a retrospective shows that the Christianists scored some significant victories - Proposition 8 and other anti-gay ballot initiatives being among them - even as the younger generations seem to increasingly reject the anti-gay mantra of hate merchants such as James Dobson, the men at Concerned Women for America, et al. But we cannot let down our endeavors for defeating the rabid Christianists who in their own way are just as big a danger as the radical Muslim fundamentalists. Both groups seek to impose an intolerant and brutal religious belief system on all people. As such, the message is clear: LGBT Americans and others who oppose theocratic government must keep up the battle to blunt the undermining of the separation of church and state.

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As I have noted numerous times, while they whine incessantly about religious freedom and endeavor to depict themselves as victims of religious persecution, it is in fact the Christianists who despise religious freedom - for all but themselves - and who seek to undermine the religious pluralism that has made the USA successful in the past. Frederick Clarkson has a column that does a good retrospective on 2008. Here are some highlights:

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For a year or more in the run-up to the elections, we heard claims that the Religious Right is dead, dying or irrelevant and that the so-called Culture Wars are over, or about to be. Such declarations have turned out to be spectacularly wrong. There are many reasons for the staying power of the Religious Right. Among them is an extraordinary infrastructure developed over decades, especially at the state level.

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The Religious Right is on a mission, or rather a cluster of interrelated missions. They are religious in nature and transcend not only electoral outcomes but the lives of individuals and institutions. . . . For the aggressors in this largely one-sided war -- war is not merely a metaphor. It is far more profound and animating idea, stemming from conflicts of "world view," usually described as a "Biblical World View" against everything else. That is why we have seen decades of violence against abortion providers and against LGBT people, and almost nothing from other sides who are merely exercising their civil rights to believe differently or to seek greater equality under the law.

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[T]he Religious Right remains strong in the Republican Party, but that it intends and is capable of, waging and winning theocratic battles against LGBT and women's civil and human rights, as well as disrupting secular public education.

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There is a religious war going on in America in which one side seeks to thwart, and even to roll back, advances in civil rights. This poses one of the central challenges of our time for those of us who are not part of the Religious Right; those of us for whom religious pluralism and constitutional democracy matter, along with such closely related matters as reproductive freedom, marriage equality and free, quality and secular public education.