I guess we should have seen it coming given the fact that Christianists always love to depict themselves as victims. Now in a Washington Post column Michael Gerson - who served as President George W. Bush's chief speechwriter from 2001 until June 2006 and once wrote as a ghost writer for Chuck Colson - whines about "an unholy war on the Tea Party" and claims that allegations that Michele Bachmann, Rick Perry, and Sarah Palin are unfounded. Indeed, Gerson would label those who want religion out of politics as the ones who are intolerant. What Gerson ignores is the fact that the U.S. Constitution promises freedom of religion to ALL citizens. That means no one group gets to imposes its beliefs on everyone else. It's a concept that the Christianists and Dominionist refuse to accept. Here's a sampling of Gerson's disingenuous bullshit:
Now the heroes of the Tea Party movement, it turns out, are also closet theocrats. “If you want to understand Michele Bachmann and Rick Perry,” argues Michelle Goldberg in Newsweek/Daily Beast, “understanding Dominionism isn’t optional.” A recent New Yorker profile by Ryan Lizza contends that Bachmann has been influenced by a variety of theocratic thinkers who have preached Christian holy war.
As befits a shadowy religious sect, its followers go under a variety of names: Reconstructionists. Theonomists. The New Apostolic Reformation. Republicans. All apparently share a belief, in Goldberg’s words, that “Christians have a God-given right to rule all earthly institutions.”
The Dominionist goal is the imposition of a Christian version of sharia law in which adulterers, homosexuals and perhaps recalcitrant children would be subject to capital punishment. It is enough to spoil the sleep of any New Yorker subscriber. But there is a problem: Dominionism, though possessing cosmic ambitions, is a movement that could fit in a phone booth. The followers of R.J. Rushdoony produce more books than converts.
Bachmann is prone to Tea Party overstatement and religious-right cliches. She opened herself to criticism by recommending a book that features Southern Civil War revisionism. But there is no evidence from the careers of Bachmann or Perry that they wish to turn America into a theocratic prison camp. If this kind of attack sounds familiar, it should.
In the case of Dominionism, paranoia is fed by a certain view of church-state relations — a deep discomfort with any religious influence in politics: Even if most evangelicals are not plotting the reconstruction of Cromwell’s Commonwealth, they nevertheless want to impose their sectarian views on secular institutions. It is a common argument among secular liberals that the application of any religiously informed moral reasoning in politics is a kind of soft theocracy. Dominionism is merely its local extension.
Such secularism shows a remarkable lack of self-consciousness. Like any ideology, this one has philosophic roots that are subject to argument. Yet secularists often assume their view is the definition of neutrality and thus deserves a privileged public place. The argument that religion is fundamentally illiberal thus provides an excuse to treat it illiberally. Pluralism is defined as the silencing of religious people. Thin charges of Dominionism are just another attempt to discredit opponents rather than answer them. . .
As the saying goes, you are known by the company you keep and Gerson, Bachmann, Perry, and Palin have all kept some pretty nasty company who make it 100% clear that their goal is to force their religious views on the nation. The fact that they are being called out by those who want to maintain religious freedom for ALL is the result of their own acts, statements and associations. They're not victims of anything but the consequences of their own actions.
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