What hath God wrought?
For years, the conservative movement in this country has increasingly used religion as a weapon, sometimes with extreme Machiavellian motives. Now, of course, it’s impossible for anyone to get elected to any position of authority – Repub or Dem – without declaring themselves not just as religious, but as a certain type of religion. If you’re not Judeo-Christian, you might as well give up now.
This is coming back to haunt them.
Right now, John McCain is dealing with backlash from being endorsed by John Hagee, an extremely venomous far-right snake. Hagee is many things: a bigot, a misogynist, a war-monger, and a plain old creepy guy who wants us to attack Iran to bring on the Biblical end times.
I think it’s not only OK to jump on McCain for accepting such an endorsement, it’s required. Worse – far worse – is that McCain actively sought Hagee’s endorsement for months. McCain wanted this.
But it gets more interesting. Hagee, who claims his church is non-denominational, is not so enamored of Catholicism. To say the least.
Enter Bill Donohue, a guy who is the president of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights and himself a bigot and something of a nutbag. He has been railing against Hagee and McCain, saying that McCain should reject the endorsement of Hagee. Mind you, Donohue has been clear that it’s only Hagee’s hatred of the Catholic church that he finds so offensive. Apparently, all the other horrid things Hagee has said are fine with Donohue.
I forget. In which part of the New Testament does Jesus preach unbridled hatred?
I would find this situation funny if it weren’t so deadly important. The far-right religious groups have slowly and very successfully grown to be a huge influence over the political landscape in the past 20 years or so. To become a leader in this country it’s simply accepted that you have to brownnose them.
But look what that cozying up to these fundamentalist hate-mongers has done. They are feeding on their own now. And it gets crazier: there have been numerous attacks by the far right on Obama, intimating he’s a Muslim, but Obama is himself Christian. Self-proclaimed moral arbiters have no issues slinging as much mud as they can, hoping it sticks, despite the Bible having some pretty clear things to say about such issues.
There is a clear lesson here: when you beg for the hand of fundamentalist hate-mongers, you will suffer the slings and arrows of the other fundamentalist hate-mongers. Perhaps, then, it’s best to reject them all.
McCain did reject them, back in 2000. But now he is actively and quite hypocritically courting them. He brought this on himself, the end-product of kowtowing to fundamentalism. They have been actively engendering such a disaster for years, so they too have brought this on themselves.
The vast majority of religious people are good, decent folks – we may disagree on some of the basics of their religion, but I know these people want to do good, and that hypocrites like Hagee and Donohue don’t speak for them. But as I have pointed out time and again, if you don’t speak up, then these people speak for you. It’s very hard to find moderate religious people in the media, but they exist. Support them.
And finally, I would suggest the hate-mongers among the fundamentalists actually sit down and read Galatians VI. Because even after supposedly reading the Bible their whole lives, and supposedly basing their lives on it, they still haven’t quite figured out that as ye sow, so shall ye reap.
