American Judeofascism --a primer:
"If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it people will eventually come to believe it."
-- Joseph Goebbels
Christian political extremists in the US (which I shall henceforth refer to as "the Religious Right") are only a small minority of the population, but they are well-organized and wield political power far beyond their numbers. They have their own tv stations and they run the Republican party, yet they claim to be victims of "religious persecution". They skillfully manipulate public opinion through letter writing campaigns, to make their extremist views look mainstream. They lie, but they lie so loud and so consistently and so pervasively that many people think they are speaking the truth. When they make up a new untruth, they inject it into their own media machine, at which time it becomes repeated over and over on far-right radio stations across the country, then picked up by the conservative punditocracy on the cable news channels, then by the "liberal" mass media as a whole. Sometimes, the lie ends up being proclaimed as truth on the floor of congress. It is the strategy of the big lie: repeat a deliberate untruth as often as you can, and eventually, it will become a fact in the public consciousness. One of the biggest lies of the right, the one lie that serves all others, is the endlessly repeated assertion that the conservative mass media are liberal. In response to that charge, the mass media go to great lengths to include far-right viewpoints in their coverage, making the Garry Falwells and the Jerry Bauers regular guests on their political shows, while truly liberal viewpoints are always absent. When was the last time you saw Gore Vidal as a guest commentator on The Capital Gang? Or Noan Chomsky?
Christian political extremists have many different organizations, but only one agenda. That agenda is to establish a christian fundamentalist theocracy in the United States. But you will not hear Gary Bauer or Pat Robertson admit to that on CNN. When they are on national television, Religious Right leaders exercise moderation and restraint. They pledge their "love" for the people they hate (=everyone who doesn't share their views), and their deep concern for this nation, and, invariably, "our" children (as if liberals did not have children). They monopolize the word "family", acting as if only extreme-right, fundamentalist christians can be good parents. They have the impudence to claim that they represent "Judeo-Christian" values, but they do not even represent mainstream christianity. They claim the exclusive monopoly on morality - their own very special brand of "morality". They glorify the "golden 50's", a time when the US were supposedly a "moral" nation.
But the truth is that the 1950s were a deeply immoral time. Institutionalized racism, discrimination of women and gays, rampant abuse of wiretapping powers by the FBI and witchhunts against political dissidents were only some of the hallmarks of that "moral" time. Those social ills were finally adressed in the 1960s. But for those who define morality not by "justice and equality for all", but by what is going on in our bedrooms, the 60's mark the begining of the "moral decay" of our nation. According to Pat Robertson, the Kennedy assassination, the Vietnam War, inflation, the oil crisis, Watergate, the Iran hostage crisis, the attempted Reagan assassination, the national debt, drug use and the high divorce rates are directly related to the 60's decisions of the Supreme Court to end religious coercion in public schools.
These are the kinds message they have hammered into the minds of the people for two decades, and it is working. An increasing segment of the population is buying into the "moral decay" lie and supports legislation and constitutional amendments that would forever take away the civil liberties that we take for granted. Never mind that many of the social problems that fuel such sentiments, such as youth violence and crime, are exacerbated or even created by right-wing obstructionist policies, designed by Religious Right leaders and their political minions to make sure their own predictions of gloom and doom come true. First block any meaningful reform in the legislatures, than blame the resulting problems on "lack of moral values". The Religious Right's campaign against public education is just one example of that destructive, cynical strategy. In implementing that strategy, christian extremists know no shame. They aggressively blamed liberal values (= lack of values) for the Columbine massacre, as if Littleton, CO wasn't an affluent, conservative community with a disproportionately high number of evangelical christians! It happened right in James Dobson's back yard, but they have the impudence to blame liberals for it.
Religious Right leaders make no secret of their utter contempt for the constitution and the freedoms it represents. When Phyllis Schlafly makes her hysterical pleas for "no more Clinton judges", what else is she but saying that the US constitution (which gives the president the right to appoint judges) has no meaning to her? What else is Pat Robertson but an enemy of the constitution when he calls for the impeachment of every judge who disagree with his agenda? What could be more unconstitutional than Gary Bauer's presidential campaign promise to permit state facilities to post the ten commandments?
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