Letters to the Editor
domini
Published Letters: 1093 Editor's Choice: 76
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Thre triumphalists are more dangerous than people think
[Read the article: "Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism"]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Most of these Christian nationalists are called "triumphalists" in the recent political literature, because they want to cause God's kingdom to come on Earth, and they think they can force the events of the End Times. What have they done?
They have infiltrated Congress well enough to get abstinence education and limit opposition to the funding of religious groups to do social work. They have eroded Roe v Wade. They have scared politicians to the point that most won't even talk about abortion. They spawned the "War on Christmas" craziness. They intimidated Congress and the President into voting their way on the Schiavo case (thank God for an independant judiciary). They are influential in the Rpublican party, and are singlehandedly pushing the anti-gay marriage state and federal amendments. They provide the marginal support preventing marijuana/drug legalization at the federal level. Triumphalists got one of their own at the FDA, and he's preventing the morning after pill from being allowed over the counter. They are getting press over relating contraception with abortion (although that is backfiring in some cases, it's not fast enough). They have, through Dobson, a huge part of the talk radio mobilization mechanism. They provide marginal support for aid to Israel in the US, and a lot of the money for building settlements and supporting the pro-settlement conservatives in Israel. They are influencing foreign policy, from funding family planning in the UN, to one of their own being charge of dealing with refugees at the State Department. The fundamentalist run amouk at the Air Force Academy, and the muting of sensible safeguards against such violations of non-Baptist religious rights are from fundamentalist threats to legislators. More judges favorable to extending the right to proselityze to unwilling audiences are on the bench.
What have the trumphalists/Christain Nationalists not been able to do? They have not made a dent in American materialism and appetite for porn (although they are both it's biggest consumers and biggest detractors). They have not killed public schools in the suburbs. Contraception may just be the wall that smacks them down. Americans appetite for oral sex (which triumphalists hate because it is non-procreative) is up by about 30% since 1980, according to one recent survey. They haven't stopped teen sex, women working (over 73% of mothers of young children work outside the home, and that number is rising), demand for abortion (up since welfare reform), raised birthrates (still falling in the US), regulated business (who profit from things they hate-Time Warner, liquor companies, etc), outlawed divorce (it was tried- and that "covenant marriage thing is not working,either), outlawed premarital sex, outlawed cohabitation, or stopped positive portrayls of gays in the media. Provocative dress is still legal.
They are getting a lot of what they want, and quietly working for the rest. Abstinence education is, for them, a success, because it has a federal mandate (through funding). The whole issue of the pharmacists and conscience clauses was manufactured to attack contraception, and is quietly taking choices away in rural America. Feminism is knee-jerk reviled. The right to abortion, and privacy, is endangered.
We need to deal with them, or they will restrict our rights. It will be quiet, and take another 35 years. But in the 35 years since 1970, they have won a lot of battles. Don't underestimate them. WIth Patrick Henry College as a feeding groud for congressional aides, they are becoming dangerously infiltrated. These are not the evangelicals of the Eighteenth Century, or even of the 1960s. They are much more sophisticated than that.
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Jews are not threatening to enforce their religion on unbelievers
[Read the article: "Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism"]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Nor is Israel threatening to take over the US. Israel would like for the Arab Middle East to simply acknowledge it's right to exist,and leave it the heck alone. American Jews are fairly well assimilated. Unless July is a crackpot "Protocols of the Elders" idiots (Protocols is an anti-semitic forgery lifted whole cloth from the slavic forgery created by the Tsar's secret police in the early Twentieth Century to justify putting slavic activists in jail), July knows that Jews are not a threat. I am a Southerner and a Christian, from Louisiana (I've done time in Southern Ohio, which is a very Southern area as well), and I am not offended. The importance of the South as a presidental swing-pick area has been well documented (because of Super Tuesday- created by SOuthern politicasn to create just this kind of power). The problem of tax transfer from Northern nd Western states to Southern states is also well documented. The problems of education in those states are also well documented.
Christian triumphalists (as opposed to real Christians) want to create the Kingdom on Earth, adn to "know the day and the hour" which violates two of Jesus's commands in the Gospels. They arrogantly think they can force God's hand by being "warriors" (the well documented case of the Lt Col, now a one star, who was discussing the role of psuedo-Christian warriors in bringing about the KIngdom, is also well documented).
Jews are not promoting abstinence education, attacking science, attacking contraception, attempting to change mattiage by taking away the right of spouses to make medical decisions for incapacitated spouses, interfering with the availability of vaccines and medicines, nor having an outsize influence on policy-making. This "threat" July sees is merely anti-Semitism, rearing it's ugly head.
We need to 1. vote, 2. fight the gerrymander, which creates safe seats, and safe seats empower extremists, 3. move all state primaries to the same day, to dilute regionalism. These are easily available to individual activism.