Family values

Click image for full Elena Steier cartoon.

No preconditions

McCain and Graham are not the mullahs in this metaphor. James Dobson, Rush Limbaugh, and Tony Perkins would be the mullahs. McCain and Graham are more like Ahmadinejad, a couple of bloviators who need their feathers smoothed so that they can maintain their misplaced self-importance.

The Obama administration is grown up enough to meet and talk with people who oppose them. They don't do the middle school social shunning the Republicans prefer.

Dobson: Bible means what I say

James Dobson can accuse Barack Obama of editing the Bible to fit his worldview, but he can't recognize his own editing. Dietary laws in the Old Testament aren't relevant, but despising homosexuality is. Etching the Ten Commandments in stone in Alabama in a courthouse is a cause celebré, but slavery is passé.

Dobson may call himself a Bible literalist, but the Bible, especially the Christian Bible, is so filled with contradictions that Obama is right to say that it's not a clear basis for a modern secular government. No matter what Dobson's "traditional interpretation" may be, there's no way it's less a distortion than Obama's.

And, of course, Jesus was a liberal (though not a statist liberal).

Still and all, Obama has to expect to be attacked about everything. His Christianity is just another thing that thoroughly political wingnuts like Dobson, far from trying to understand and accommodate even in honest disagreement, will try to muddy up with invidious comparisons.

Skipping the advice part

Theocons and Bushists alike got what they wanted on the Supreme Court because of the Gang of 14, not despite it. It was a faux compromise in which the Democrats got taken for everything and the Republicans gave up nothing at all. Roberts and Alito are both on the Court, aren't they?

Yet that wasn't enough for the right-wing radicals. They wanted the nuclear option. They wanted to go to war against Democrats and the traditional, rule-based collegial way the Senate has deliberated about judicial appointments for decades.

The oddest thing is that the deal cut by Democrats will severely hinder the next Democratic President's appointment of more liberal judges. Witness what happened to Bill Clinton while the Republicans held the Senate. He got Steven Breyer and Ruth Ginsburg. Breyer especially is very centrist.

The avidly hypocritical Republicans will filibuster any Democrat's nominees without compunction. They will call moderates extreme, where for their part the Democrats have called Republican-appointed extremists moderate. Four of them sit on the Supreme Court.

It really doesn't make sense that James Dobson, Orrin Hatch, and Richard Land dislike McCain for the outcome of the Gang of 14 negotiation. They must dislike him for the disloyalty they perceive in it.

As ever, they simply want silent obedient consent.

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.

Bushist heir

Rudy Giuliani, the obvious Bushist heir to the unitary executive, that is, to the realization of fascism, isn't conservative enough for the righteous wing, so much so that they are willing to threaten the Republicans with a holier than thou Nader (but then that's redundant).

Of course, given Dobson's history of proteges like Ted Haggard, they'd better be very careful not to nominate a closeted, self-hating gay man! That would really blunt one of their obvious lines of attack. Maybe that's one reason Dobson is against a third-party effort.

I'm really looking forward to the ads featuring Rudy in a dress!