Respect for All

By Patricia Goldsmith
Created Nov 20 2006 - 8:26am

So it seems Republican voters have finally turned. With the arsenal of
election-rigging techniques the Republican Party has been working up since
2000--including caging and purge lists, push polls, insufficient machines in
Democratic areas, uncounted provisional ballots, robocalls, unfair rules
from corrupt secretaries of state--it has long been abundantly clear that
Democrats will never take office with a narrow win.

And those are just the surface obstacles. The deep structure of our
electoral system tilts to the right: the senate is an anti-democratic
institution with empty-box red states getting the same number of senators as
far more populous blue states; the mid-census gerrymandering of districts
favors Republicans across the country; and the electoral college's
winner-take-all rules and weighting in favor of smaller states blunt liberal
gains.

Given all of that, it's hard to fault Howard Dean's fifty-state strategy of
putting up conservative Democrats to run in conservative states. It worked.
That's the good news and the bad news.

The good news is obvious but after such a long drought of hope, it bears
repeating and savoring. We all have to heave a big sigh of relief at seeing
the backside of the likes of Rick Santorum, George Allen, and Mike
DeWine--or better yet, let out a whoop of joy and do a happy dance. John
Conyers heading the House Judiciary Committee, Henry Waxman with subpoena
power, Bernie Sanders in the Senate--it feels like a weight has been lifted.

The bad news is it consolidates the political center very far to the
right--to the right of the Constitution, in fact, if recent legislation is
not rolled back. If we're not careful, the Democratic win could end up
representing a profoundly pragmatic, middle-manager solution to an all-out
assault on our freedom. Impeachment off the table, a return to pay-as-you-go
rules, implementing the 9/11 Commission recommendations--these all indicate
a return to the Clinton credo of winning by inches when what we have lost is
our whole way of life.

In an attempt to hold on to the voters who gave them this political
opportunity, Democrats are willing to restrict debate around the question of
how we got to this sorry pass in the first place. They want to start
cleaning up the wreckage before we have a chance to think about what our
recent history means. We can't let that happen, not least because it would
be a mistake to imagine the culture war is over.

But many on the left have never acknowledged its existence in the first
place. Progressives like to use the phrase "social wedge issues" instead.
Sounds less like a paranoid fantasy. But it is a paranoid fantasy, on a mass
level, and we would do well to remember that as we sift through the rubble
of our system of checks and balances.

While BushCo has been rolling out one initiative after another in a
deliberate effort to transform our entire culture--so fast it literally
makes your head spin--the left's response has been to painstakingly compile
evidence of wrongdoing in area after area, slowly connecting the dots of
criminal intent and design over the whole expanse of our government and
legal system. It's like doing an ergonomic analysis of a wrecking ball's
destructive swathe through our government--a reaction right-wing culture
warriors counted on.

Whereas they are at war. That means, quite simply, that they have rejected
the normal rule of law. They do not recognize the legitimacy of secular
authority. They are answering to a higher power in a fight against evil. The
pagans and the feminists, the gays and the lesbians, the abortionists,
People for the American Way, liberals, the Democrat Party--we are what's
wrong with this country.

Not only will they not tolerate us, they consider tolerance itself a great
moral weakness, one they do not want taught to their children. The
pervasiveness of tolerant attitudes in secular culture is one of the prime
motivations behind the culture war: they need to stamp it out. That's the
explanation for the apparently nonsensical fuss over Sponge Bob and
Postcards from Buster. As Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council [1]
said about the Mark Foley sex scandal: "When we elevate tolerance and
diversity to the guidepost of public life, this is what we get--men chasing
16-year-old boys around the halls of Congress."

In this climate, the defeat in Arizona of a law against civil unions is big
news. The fact that a ban on gay marriage passed in Virginia with less than
60 percent of the vote is earth-shattering.

When liberals frame marriage equality as a wedge issue, they answer an
obvious question: Why are these initiatives politically useful to the right?
We can all see that marriage equality has the ability to set progressive
constituencies against each other at the same time that it distracts the
whole country from real concerns. But in a recent article titled, "War,
religion, and gay rights," [2] James Carroll asked a better question: "When
gay people openly assert their identities as such, whether through parades
or the demand for full and equal social recognition, reactionaries cannot
stand it. Why?"

The answer lies in that one all-important word: "equal." The true crux of
the religious right's morality is hierarchical, unequal sex roles.

Not very long ago, rigid sex roles encompassed all the knowledge necessary
to be a good man or a good woman, a good citizen, parent, child. Those
roles, with strict dress codes to match, enforced patriarchal inequality and
went deep into the economy, designating high-paying, high-status jobs for
men and lower-paying jobs, if any at all, for women. It took a bloody civil
war to break up the slave economy and begin a movement toward racial
equality. It's no wonder that efforts to break up thousands of years of
unquestioned male economic and social dominance have resulted in a cold
civil war.

Gay marriage equality and insistence on a woman's right to control her own
body are direct affronts to the type of family Christianists see as the
foundation of civilization, a family where Mother obeys Father and children
obey both parents, a family where unquestioning obedience to authority is
seen as the bedrock strength of the society. These societies need to be
strong precisely because of their intolerance: there can be only one One
True God. All fundamentalist theocracies are, by their very nature, at war
with other fundamentalist theocracies and with secular society.

This explains how it is that so many of our fellow countrymen--the most
religious among us, if you take them at their own estimation--could
enthusiastically support pre-emptive war, torture, and the overthrow of
civil liberties, secular society, and the rule of law. In other words, we
are where we are today not in spite of Christianist family values but
because of them.

Although it may have been politically astute for Howard Dean [3] to follow
up the success of his fifty-state strategy with a Saturday Democratic radio
address showing that he is not embarrassed to talk about religious beliefs
and family values, we would all be better off if we returned our focus to
the primary political unit of a democracy, which is not the family but the
individual. All individuals should be equal under the impartial rule of law
and are entitled to respect.

On the other hand, we are not obligated to respect others' religious
beliefs, especially if they are subversive to the rule of law and infringe
on others' pursuit of happiness. I certainly do not respect the Christianist
family values that have contributed to our slide toward authoritarianism. As
far as I'm concerned, they are a very big part of the problem. In this age,
with its 24/7 spin and media saturation, any culture that does not produce
individuals capable of critical, independent thought is already halfway down
the road to fascism.

As for me, I take the right-wing culture warriors at their word when they
say they will not tolerate us. We defeat them or they defeat us, that's the
deal. And it's fine with me. Like the Dixie Chicks say, I'm not ready to
make nice. Just the opposite, baby.
_______

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"A little patience and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their
spells dissolve, and the people recovering their true sight, restore their
government to its true principles. It is true that in the meantime we are
suffering deeply in spirit,
and incurring the horrors of a war and long oppressions of enormous public
debt. But if the game runs sometimes against us at home we must have
patience till luck turns, and then we shall have an opportunity of winning
back the principles we have lost, for this is a game where principles are at
stake."
-Thomas Jefferson