FOLLOWING
THE ILLOGIC OF THE FAR RIGHT WING
Since God is
a Republican, why is He so angry with those who claim to
carry His
message and all the “Red States”?
TAGS: POLITICAL COMMENTARY,
CYNICAL OPINION, SARCASTIC OBSERVATION,
OKLAHOMA TORNADOES, REPUBLICAN EXTREMISTS, CHRISTIAN COALITION,
MORAL MAJORITY,
REPUBLICAN GOD, GOD’S WRATH, GOP HYPOCRISY
(Sunday June 2, 2013 Guthrie, OK) Surveying the tremendous damage inflicted by the tornadoes that tore through this part of Oklahoma last week, it could be said that the devastation is of biblical proportions. Televised images cannot do justice to the reality of seeing entire communities reduced to just so much debris. The evidence of the fierce power of those tornadoes is everywhere; homes are just kindling, semi-trucks strewn upside down along the roads, cars tossed aside like empty soda cans. That more people were not seriously wounded or killed by that barrage of twisters is almost miraculous. Certainly in some neighborhoods and rural areas life and death was a matter of inches. It’s as tragic as it is humbling to view this landscape beneath a clear blue sky. No sane person could stand here and say that it was by the wrath of an “angry” God that this death and destruction was delivered. Or could they?
If one was to extrapolate from
a widely and strongly held belief among hardcore Right-wing extreme Republicans
then it would be self-evident that God was angry about something these
Oklahomans did to invite His ferocious wrath.
After all, the far Right-wing of the Republican Party has invoked the
notion of a wrathful God punishing people of all sorts be they gay, lesbian,
AIDS victims, abortion providers, women who have had abortions, and the host of
people who exist along that dark and dismal edge of their self-righteous, God
fearing, marriage protecting, anti-abortion, monogamously heterosexual,
Bible-thumping, Creationists, absolutists, and sanctimoniously self-assured
“real” America who know with firebrand certainty that God is on their side
and that He is likely a Republican just as they so proudly are.
Idiocy, bigotry, intolerance,
and prejudice, are equally ugly no matter who dons the armored coat of
ideological narrow-mindedness and provincial morality. Since the days of their spiritual hero Ronald
Reagan the Republican Party has been on a hard march towards an extreme
ideology that puts them further and further afield from mainstream Americans
with each passing political cycle. Every time they promote yet another piece of
legislation that restricts the rights of some Americans to vote, limit the availability
of abortion, move to disenfranchise one group or another while espousing their
moral superiority, they demonstrate their extremism with crystal clarity.
ONE NATION UNDER THEIR GOD
The Right-wing fundamentalist,
evangelical element of the GOP has been on the rise since the mid 1980’s. Lead at various times by a cast of zealots
they have now taken control of that Party.
Last week former Senate Majority Leader and 1996 Republican presidential
candidate, Bob Dole, said in an interview that he doubted that “Reagan or
Nixon” could make it in today’s GOP. Gone
are the days of statesman who put partisanship aside and worked towards
compromise and, in so doing, managed to pass many important pieces of
legislation. Once the “social issues”
became the dominant rallying cry of the Right, the statesman began to vanish
only to be replaced by increasingly rabid fundamentalists and single-issue
candidates.
The first leaders of this
march were men like Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson and Ralph Reed. Suddenly there were GOP factions such as the
Moral Majority, the Christian Coalition, the Family Research Council, and a
growing number of smaller ideologically similar organizations that eventually
were absorbed into the GOP. The politics and concepts espoused by these
organizations and their increasingly outlandish “leaders” were so moronic that many in the
mainstream media and the casual citizen observer could not take them
seriously. But serious they were.
As they evolved in their fire
and brimstone rhetoric they began to blame every natural disaster and calamity
on the victims. To them God was
punishing gays for their lifestyle.
Hurricanes, earthquakes, and wildfires were sent by their God to punish people
across the country and around the world in places like Haiti, Africa, and other
“non-Judea-Christian” populations. The
absurdity of this belied the support such proselytizing was garnering in rural
parts of America and throughout the Deep South.
The enemies were “Northern Liberals”, New York City and media elites
and, of course, Hollywood. These newly
empowered Republicans saw it as a mission to wrest “their” America back from
the Godless heathens of the large urban centers especially those in the
northeast. Their message began to
resonate more and more as their brand of politics made it into the churches in
rural America and more and more social issues were held up as “proof” that
their way of thinking was the ONLY way of thinking because it was in accordance
with “the words of God.” It must be
immensely comforting and satisfying, inspiring even, to know that you are doing
the work of God.
IMAGINE…
What it must be like to have
such bedrock faith. If Liberals were to
adopt the Conservative interpretation of the world they would surely draw the
ire of the Right-wing punditry and commentators and unleash a storm of bloviating
the likes of which we’ve never seen. The
hypocrisy would be epic and make no mistake about it, hypocrisy, double
standards, and narrowly selective “reasoning” are hallmarks of today’s
Republican extremists. Many of the House
Republicans who launched the impeachment against then President Bill Clinton
were themselves ultimately forced from Office due to their own marital
fidelity. Some of the most ardent of the
mega-church preachers who proclaimed homosexuality a “curable lifestyle of choice”
found themselves caught up in scandalous homosexual liaisons.
What if some Democratic
politicians took to the airwaves claiming that the tornadoes that roared through
here last week were the manifestation of God’s ire at the people of Oklahoma? In the wake of the historic Hurricane Katrina
that destroyed much of New Orleans and the gulf coast, there were Republicans
who said on air that that storm was God’s way of punishing “the gays who have
an agenda” in New Orleans. That was just
a sound bite of standard GOP fare whereas if any Democrat dared to apply the
same “reasoning” to the etiology of the savage storms, floods, and in some
areas, droughts that have been a scourge on the “Red States” over the past
several years, they’d be unmercifully castigated, ridiculed and hung in
effigy.
The point is that Democrats,
even the most far leftwing outliers in their “big tent” Party typically do not
speak in such terms. Even the most
devout among them haven’t stooped so low as to lay the blame on God for a
calamitous event that has struck in the Red States. Oklahoma, a bastion of rock-ribbed Christian
Conservatives has been enduring a wicked weather pattern that has produced a
series of brutal storms. No Democrat has
stated or implied that God is somehow punishing Oklahomans.
Those elected officials most
of whom spend their lives in politics have a responsibility not only to their
oath of office but to thinking before speaking, to trying to employ logic over
lunacy and to be ever aware that their words matter, there words reach a wide
audience and have longevity in the public record. They are not the sole purveyors of truth, be
it scientific or Divine. Using the name
of God to promote public policy that is far from being “Christian” in any way,
shape or form is deceitful, disingenuous and “sinful” according to the teachings
of Christ.
There is also a fundamental
principal in our Constitution that addresses the “separation of Church and
State” that is to many in the GOP just an antiquated ideal conjured up by our
feeble-minded forefathers that has no appreciable relevance today. Once any Party, organization or group begins
to pick and choose what segments of the Constitution are and are not relevant
today, than the fabric that binds us as a people and as a nation with become
frayed to the point of being unsustainable.
Our country was founded on religious freedom; the Constitution specifies
that The State will not form or impose any religion on the people, that our
freedom of expression extends to religious expression.
Matters of God and Faith just
like those of morality, conscience, responsibility, choices, and personal
liberties are best left to each of us provided we infringe on no one else and
that our behavior is legal. Once we are
able to create ever narrower divisions among us we are well along the path to
the perilous loss of coherence among us.
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