| Topic: |
Religions > Atheism |
| User: |
"Jason Spaceman" |
| Date: |
02 Jun 2005 06:34:40 AM |
| Object: |
Commentary: Monkey Business |
From the article:
----------------------------
Everybody always talks about religious conservatives, but nobody ever does
anything about them.
By Matt Taibbi
The topic for my column this week is religious conservatives. There are a few
reasons for this. The 80th anniversary of the Scopes Monkey trial is
approaching, for one. For another, the city of Dover, Pennsylvania, has just
approved the teaching of "intelligent design"?the latest semantic end-around
for use in questioning Darwinism. But the real reason to talk about religious
conservatives is because the last few months have been something of a
coming-out party for them as a mainstream political force.
Beginning with the Terri Schiavo affair, and continuing most pointedly with the
latest fight against the filibuster, what we have seen lately is something new:
the congressional leaders of the ruling political party (Tom Delay, Bill Frist)
signing on with the more extreme representatives of the evangelical movement to
push highly dubious and eccentric political objectives. The presence of such
people as James Dobson and Al Mohler side by side with leading congressional
Republicans has even led some respected political commentators to wonder aloud
if a schism is developing within the Republican party, if the fiscal
conservatives who have long been stomped on in the Bush years are finally going
to start wondering what payoff they're getting for their political support.
Even Andrew Sullivan, that foul ***** of right-wing commentary, admitted as
much recently in the New Republic. "Conservatism isn't over," he wrote. "But it
has rarely been as confused."
All of this talk has led to false hope among progressives, who think they see an
opening in the Republicans' apparent strategic error in backing fundamentalist
causes. The decision by Tom Delay to jump in bed with the snake-handlers in the
Terri Schiavo case?when polls showed that even a majority of evangelicals
opposed him?seemed to indicate a rare suspension of electoral judgment by his
party. There is a feeling among the pointy-headed secular set that the
evangelicals are a doomed anachronism who will die out with increased exposure
to the open air, and that hitching a political wagon to their causes must
result in failure.
--------------------------------------
Read it at http://www.nypress.com/18/22/news&columns/taibbi.cfm
J. Spaceman
--
My email address (notreally@jspaceman.homelinux.org) is fake. Email sent to it
will only get caught in my spam tarpit.
.
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