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September 6, 2008

Yep, those religious fundamentalists are scary!

Donald B. Hawthorne

OMG. LOL!

H/T to The Anchoress. Read her whole post, too.

Not to sound like a broken record, but:

...It could be that a great many voters have taken a good look at the fundamentalists on the religious right and the fundamentalists on the political left and made up their own minds about which pose the greater threat to their own private and public values.
Comments

The fundamentalist on the Right

Bombing abortion clinics
Bombing gay bars
Murdering Doctors
Blaming Gays and Feminist for 9/11

Posted by: Truman at September 6, 2008 3:34 PM

Donald,
Letting the Wall Street Journal define Liberals is like having Satan define sanctity. You'd never know it when he got through with it.

With very little change here's another look at the Wall Street Journal's take:

U.S. conservatism picked up Liberal fire, but not Liberal light. It has also managed to wed politics to religious fundamentalism and to confuse the two in the public’s eye. The conservative belief that greed carries with it the capacity for good obfuscates the real Christian message of peace through sharing and brother (or sister) hood. It perverts the Sermon on the Mount and destroys the real miracle of the loaves and the fishes, that of common commensality and sharing. This makes “opposing arguments about shortcomings, costs or unintended consequences” unpersuasive.
Barry Goldwater used the force of his personality to infuse his supporters with a sense of transcendent mission — the philosophy of the Rand Corporation. The emotions this movement inspired collided with the one deeply moral political phenomenon that postwar America has experienced--Martin Luther King's civil-rights movement. Proof of that is Lyndon Johnson’s prescient comment that the Democrats had just handed over the South to the Republican Party, and political snakes like Strom Thurmond and Jesse Helms found no problem abandoning the Democrats to join with the fundamentalist conservatives and getting themselves reelected by race-baiting - Remember Helm's ad showing a Caucasian getting a rejection slip while an unqualified African-American got the job. There are plenty of yahoos on the Right who still put credence in the fairy tale. - The Rev. King's multiracial civil-rights marches and their role in overturning de jure and de facto segregation in the U.S. were a political and moral achievement brought about under Liberal presidents and over the opposition of fundamentalist Rightists like the Aryan Nation and The Ku Klux Klan whose members strongly favored segregation and its inherent inequalities.
OldTimeLefty

Posted by: OldTimeLefty at September 7, 2008 3:35 AM

First, calling greed a conservative belief is like calling deceit a liberal belief. The evidence to support each is anecdotal – and logically absurd. Also, sounds to me like you are saying that the “Christian message of peace through sharing and brother (or sister) hood” means that the economy of the Christian is anti-capitalistic. Absolutely untrue. Your belief ignores the “freedom” and “responsibility” concept also within the Christian message. Finally, it says a lot that the examples you refer to are at least two generations old. Much has changed since Barry Goldwater, the original civil rights movement, Lyndon Johnson and Jesse Helm’s political ads. The Aryan Nation and Klu Klux Klan still exist but their size, power and message is significantly less than it was during the time you are referring. But there are also ‘leftists’ out there that are just as prejudiced and violent.

Posted by: msteven at September 8, 2008 1:30 PM