Rhetoric Race and Religion
With the shutdown I’m tempted to say “I told you so.” What did you expect?Religious morons hijack the GOP (with a big assist from my dad and me in the 1970s and 1980s) and now the lobotomized GOP has hijacked the rest of us and taken the country and world economy hostage.
The shutdown is the religious right’s biggest “victory” and a loss for the rest of us that threatens everything we love. But it’s not all “their” fault. Some of our best and brightest dropped the ball too. Contrary to the religious right’s persecution victimology complex our elite chattering classes have been far too polite about religion. They’ve given a free pass to people who say they are serving God. This American “god” is a weird hybrid of Ayn Rand and what’s left of poor old Jesus after he got sold, packaged and enslaved by southern white “libertarian” fact-free bigots.
For instance Paul Krugman and the New York Times, have unintentionally sinnedagainst their readers by not taking religion seriously enough. They have been overly polite about the horrible effect evangelical fundamentalist religion has had on our American “shutdown” politics. They are analyzing the shutdown but offering no solutions because they duck the truth. Until Krugman and the Times editorial board and the rest of the media, attack the religious extremist root cause of the shutdown nothing can change. It’s time to disrespect religion.
Krugman’s latest column in the Times illustrates my point handily. I’ll reproduce some of it here and add what he was too polite to say. Maybe I’m more attuned to what Krugman won’t say — that right wing religion has become right wing politics — because I was once an evangelical leader with a famous evangelical father (religious right founder Francis Schaeffer). I fled. But I remember.
Read the rest here
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