There's a conference coming up in Washington DC the end of this month to discuss the "War on Christians". You gotta love this kind of over the top rhetoric:
Conference convener Vision America says "The War On Christians And The Values Voter in 2006" will be the first "to consider the savage and accelerating" attacks by groups such as the ACLU and Anti-Defamation League.
Oh yeah, savage attacks. Those poor folks in Uganda being slaughtered by the machetes of the Lord's Resistance Army have nothing on the poor Christians in America, who hold virtually exclusive control of every branch of government. Why, if they're not allowed to force others to pray in schools, the next thing you know they'll be rounded up into camps, forced to watch Brokeback Mountain and probably end up in a Phnom Penh-style killing field littered with dead bodies.
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Oh, why do I know all this... people like those will claim in one breath that they are the "silent majority" and that they are persecuted.
Conservative evangelicals seem to consider themselves an eternal persecuted minority. Every act that does not match their view of the world is a sign of humanity's sinful degradation or even Satanic conspiracy. Despite the scope of their political and cultural influence, they remain the holy remnant on a world going to hell in a handbasket.
They took a lesson from the Arab Toon Tantrum: when people of your own faith start questioning your orthodoxy, start screaming about "persecution." Any pretext will do; you can even make a few up, like Bill "Loofalafel" O'Reilly did with his "War on Christmas" schtick.
I guess if you can't shove your religious views down other peoples' throats on the taxpayers' dime, then you're persecuted!
Why do I hear the sewer scene from "Life of Brian" in my head?
"What has the ACLU done for us?"
{little voice} "Well they got that street preacher in NM freed that none of us lifted a finger to help..."
"Ok, there is that, but what else?"
{another little voice}"They fought to allow students to pass out Bible's in school..."
"OK, there is that, but what else?"
and so on...
Reminds me of a great Jon Stewart riff about that. Something along the lines of:
Apolgies for butchering what was a brilliant rant, but I couldn't find a transcript of it.
The war they claim is so baloney. Especially when you compare it with their war on science. There is a link going around (which I put as my URL) describing hwo the FDA has totally hijacked the scientific process in makign the morning-after pill available. The website is raising support and awareness for Dr. Susan Wood (who resigned from the FDA in protest of their ridiculous actions) who is travelling around the counrty on a peaking tour. I also saw that she had an op-ed in the Washington Post today which was great and talked about the same things. Seriously check it out.
While I don't disagree with Ed and commentators, you guys are missing the point. This conference and its brethren are designed to induce and then reinforce the feelings of persecution you identify and provide tactical political tools.
Today on scienceblogs there are also [as I write] a couple blogs on Fumento/Powerline's hawking the future talking point that peer-reviewed journals are political and deserve no special treatment in policy considerations, the latest in a string from dlamming demonstrating amoral rhetorical techniques for foot soldiers to take to the mainstreets of America, and an Ed-blog on the beginning of an initiative drive in Nevada to enshrine anti-evolution teaching requirements into the state constitution [imagine the cost of fighting against, say, 15 or 20 of these in different states].
These tactical communications get repeated ad nauseum until they become an integral part of the political process in the U.S. The bad guys learned how to do this through science. One example: as much of an idiot as Deutsch was, he had the arguments memorized, the tactics down, more or less, and understood who the targets were. He got into a position where he was censoring NASA! These techniques work very well.
Dr. Free-Ride has a related story today about science journalism screwing up which leaves out some critical points and misses a chance to educate scientists. I'm going to try to make a short comment there about this later.
I've tried to point out that, even just here at scienceblogs, the theory and practice of the Far Right's success is being played out every day. If you ask the right questions, it becomes experimental observation. I summarized this Monday on Dr. Free-Ride's discussion about scientists being baffled by the public's opposition to research, etc., here.That summary points back to two posts I did last week that discuss this in more detail.
These are representative building blocks of the technology the right has used to engineer the current state of affairs. Exposed. Pay attention.
Oh. I thought this was going to be a meeting of all those anti-Christian types to discuss plans for escalating the war.
Whenever I hear this sort of thing, it reminds me of an old made-for-tv movie about Adolf Hitler. About the only thing I remember of this movie was Hitler giving a speech where he said something to the effect, "They claim they are oppressed...they claim they are the minority...how can that be? WE ARE THE MINORITY!"
It's kind of like poor Dick Cheny, the Victim of a recent accident in Texas. Poor boy. And wasn't there recently a law passed somewhere that said marriage is a union between two non-Christian people?
Re Skookum's comment, I'd certainly agree that there's no point in being continually dumbfounded by the lies and audacity. It's part of their game, and they (their leaders, certainly) have some fair knowledge of what they're doing and don't care if it isn't scrupulously factual.
When a great-uncle of mine died in Detroit in the 1970s, he left a large library of religious books and tracts, mostly from before WW2. Among them were an anti-catholic book written by a former priest converted to Protestantism, and an anti-Protestent screed by a Catholic. Both were pretty brutal on each other. Something amusing that I remember about these books (and I wish I still had them so that I wouldn't just be spouting off from fuzzy adolescent memories) is that each side accused the other of playing loose with the facts in their propaganda and justifying it on the basis of the depravity of their opposition. (That's a bit hard to follow, but I can't think of how better to put it at the moment. The Protestent reader learned that the Catholic propagandist thought that Protestents were so evil that they could be lied about without compunction, and vice versa. The former priest, especially, could claim an inside track about this. Of course neither side would admit that their own side could be this way).
What is new and shocking, I think, is not the sleazy nature of the propaganda, but that the declared enemy is now the moderate, secular mainstream.
countlurkula: That's not surprising at all. The extremists' worst emeny is a moderate coalition that can brush off their slogans, see through their lies, and organize a sensible policy that will deliver the results the extremists can never deliver. With the moderates dead, divided or silenced, all the extremists can point to each other to justify themselves. The most extreme and illustrative example: Hitler and Stalin.