Jerry Falwell with a pretty face

Sarah Palin is a culture warrior against the Enlightenment.

Fundies

I grew up among fundamentalist Christians. As is true of Christians in general, many fundies are genuinely sweet people who pray sincerely for the redemption of people like me. A few of them will tell you that they will pray for you in that arrogant way of those who suppose themselves godly and most others ungodly.

Fundies see the world differently than I do. For them, what is right is immutable from what was put down on paper in an incomplete but poetic translation of a 2000-year-old book and its even older predecessor. No learning about what it true in the world can change that law.

I see the world first through what is and only then ask what should be. I notice that the Bible, which the fundies suppose to be the inerrant, literal word of God, is littered with the ignorance and conventional belief of its time of writing - firmament of stars, piscine whale, morality of enslavement, etc. It makes much more sense to me that its authors were men striving for moral meaning. The myth of divine inspiration would be much more plausible had God revealed something now known but then not, say, that the earth revolves around the sun in an ellipse.

What do these fundies, for whom belief trumps knowledge, want? The answer is: everything. They want everyone to be like them. They want a society where everyone goes to a "Bible-believing" (meaning, literalist) church on Sunday morning, where the Ten Commandments really are the foundation of American law, where the Enlightenment is forgotten as a bad dream.

Political fundies want to bring their beliefs, no matter how refuted, into the public square, but they want them to be immune from criticism or even question. They want their imputation of sin to be enough to carry the day, no matter that many others may dissent. They are not tolerant of dissent.

For those fundies who claim that liberals are intolerant of their dissent, the key distinction they need to learn is between tolerance and blind acceptance. All creeds have the same legal status, but that doesn't mean they are all equally plausible, nor that we should refrain from pointing that out, just that we should refrain from punishing those who hold those beliefs. So, just as I am tolerant of magic crystal believers, Scientologists, and cultists of every kind, I am tolerant of people who believe that the world was created in six days. Their beliefs are ridiculous, and I'm happy to say so, but belief is no cause for punishment. The golden rule bargain that I make when ensconcing this tolerance into secular law protects me as well when I believe something far-fetched or wrong-headed.

What do political fundies (Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, James Dobson, etc.) want?

• No abortion for any reason - This is their great uniting cause. It has added Catholic voices to their Protestant and usually anti-Catholic beliefs. This shades into prohibitions of any birth control other than abstinence.
• Subservience of women in their traditional roles
  
• Nothing taught in public school that might lead a child to question fundamentalism, no evolution, no sex ed of any kind, no acceptance of homosexuality or, often, even sexuality in general, no science that transcends engineering and seeks causes that might not point back to God
• Prayer everywhere inflicted upon non-believers
• Punitive approaches to social problems, such as drugs, crime, and poverty - Their root cause is sin and alienation from God, so the people just have to decide to escape them.
  
• Free market economics - Huh? Never mind that Jesus threw the money-changers out of the temple; they're back. Never mind that Jesus pursued his ministry among the destitute poor, not the prosperous; now the poor will be always with us, and it's their fault anyway.
• Subdue the earth - Environmentalism is nature-worship.
• Messianic foreign policy - Some even want the bring the Apocalypse, but at least they generally want to intervene for religious reasons, and they are not shy about declaring our current conflict a war of faith.
• Public support for their proselytizing

In short, political fundies reject the great achievement of the Founders in constituting a secular government that could escape the constant sectarian killing that had beset Europe for generations. For a while.

GOP contender - McCain

John McCain is not a fundie and not one of the wealthies, and he has disappointingly shown a tiny wee skosh of perspective about bullying everyone in sight.

For cryin' out loud, he's against torture, which is now a core Republican value. You'd think that the Republican base would show him some solicitude since he has actually been on the receiving end of North Vietnamese torture, but the inner dominatrices that they've become really embarrass them. They wish he would just keep quiet about the torture so they can ignore the moral meaning of that brass-studded leather underwear they have on.

Oh, sure, he didn't actually prevent any torture, but he publicly showed up the President in the middle of some presidentin', and that sort of fealty to what's real instead of what's Republican is a sure sign of deep-seated disloyalty.

It's not the only one. There's McCain-Feingold, too, which unfairly restricts the wealthies from jamming their propaganda down all our throats over their airwaves. Never mind that everybody is taking Rte. 529 around that. (Huckabee's even pushing the definition of 'non-coordination' to include people who used to be part of his campaign, sort of like those Romney lobbyists who don't run his campaign.)

But McCain served in the military, heroically, some say. Doesn't that put him in good with the bullies?

Look, if you haven't been paying attention for the past fifteen years, logic might compel you to think that matters to Republicans. It doesn't. What you say outweighs what you did. Saxby Chambliss or Max Cleland? Duhbya or McCain? Duhbya or Al Gore? Duhbya or Kerry? Veterans groups went along with the attacks for purely ideological reasons. Republicans who have never been under fire will swiftboat anyone they need to. They're attacking McCain again even now.

But of course the worst of McCain for the Republican base is that he tried to take down Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell (may he rest in ... a lake of fire). Since their followers are Christians, there's never going to be any forgiveness for McCain's transgression.

What McCain does have is the man-crushes of all the late-middle-aged dopey white pundits. Chris Matthews and Tim Russert act like 12-year-olds with this month's Penthouse around McCain. It's really hard to explain. Maybe they bonded over shared self-service colonoscopies.

In sum, McCain, despite being a doctrinaire conservative on every significant issue, has offended all three of the core constituencies. Against that, the media fellate him regularly (if you're offended by the word, what are you doing here? - also I heard it on "House" just last night), and that helps him keep a good attitude. I don't see how he can possibly win any vote but the press bus, but I have to admit I was premature to stick a fork into his campaign. I'll still wind up right, I think, but McCain can't win without a major implosion of both his opponents.