This Atlantic article (the bolding in the clip below is mine) expresses pretty well how I feel about the influence of the religious right in the U.S.
I nearly titled this post "Why I don't trust the religious right", but opted instead for a broader phrase, "religious power". While I know plenty of fine, caring believers, many of them are directly at odds with the power structures and stated policies of their religious leaders. And it's that power structure I fear. It's that authoritarian impulse, the certainty that "everything we do is ipso-facto good, because the ends are good, and thus the ends justify the means", that I fear.
We should stop believing that merely shaming conservatives, especially the religious right, for being hypocrites is effective, especially on issues of morality. They Don't Care. The end goals are all that matter to them. How they get there, doesn't matter to them.
Anyways, I thought this was a pretty decent read. And I do believe that the GOP has decided to abandon liberal democracy, or any form of democracy. Their actions are certainly saying that.
I nearly titled this post "Why I don't trust the religious right", but opted instead for a broader phrase, "religious power". While I know plenty of fine, caring believers, many of them are directly at odds with the power structures and stated policies of their religious leaders. And it's that power structure I fear. It's that authoritarian impulse, the certainty that "everything we do is ipso-facto good, because the ends are good, and thus the ends justify the means", that I fear.
We should stop believing that merely shaming conservatives, especially the religious right, for being hypocrites is effective, especially on issues of morality. They Don't Care. The end goals are all that matter to them. How they get there, doesn't matter to them.
Anyways, I thought this was a pretty decent read. And I do believe that the GOP has decided to abandon liberal democracy, or any form of democracy. Their actions are certainly saying that.
The Atlantic said:By the tail end of the Obama administration, the culture war seemed lost. The religious right sued for détente, having been swept up in one of the most rapid cultural shifts in generations. Gone were the decades of being able to count on attacking its traditional targets for political advantage. In 2013, Chuck Cooper, the attorney defending California’s ban on same-sex marriage, begged the justices to allow same-sex-marriage opponents to lose at the ballot box rather than in court. Conservatives such as George Will and Rod Dreher griped that LGBTQ activists were “sore winners,” intent on imposing their beliefs on prostrate Christians, who, after all, had already been defeated.
The rapidity of that cultural shift, though, should not obscure the contours of the society that the religious right still aspires to preserve: a world where women have no control over whether to carry a pregnancy to term, same-sex marriage is illegal, and gays and lesbians can be arrested and incarcerated for having sex in their own homes and be barred from raising children. The religious right showed no mercy and no charity toward these groups when it had the power to impose its will, but when it lost that power, it turned to invoking the importance of religious tolerance and pluralism in a democratic society.
That was then. The tide of illiberalism sweeping over Western countries and the election of Donald Trump have since renewed hope among some on the religious right that it might revive its cultural control through the power of the state. Inspired by Viktor Orbán in Hungary and Vladimir Putin in Russia, a faction of the religious right now looks to sectarian ethno-nationalism to restore its beliefs to their rightful primacy, and to rescue a degraded and degenerate culture. All that stands in their way is democracy, and the fact that most Americans reject what they have to offer.
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This understanding also helps illuminate the right’s eruption over YouTube’s decision to demonetize (but not remove) the channel of Steven Crowder, a conservative YouTuber who called the Vox reporter Carlos Maza a “lispy queer,” among other slurs. A world in which one can refer to gay people as “lispy queers” without repercussion is one in which the illiberal right is winning the culture war, so it matters little that YouTube is no less a private business than Masterpiece Cakeshop, and has a right to define the rules for using its platform. The same sort of protests that the right decries as illiberal when deployed against right-wing speakers on college campuses are suddenly a legitimate tactic when used against Drag Queen Story Hour. The objective here, in Ahmari’s words, is to defeat “the enemy,” not adhere to principle, and that requires destigmatizing anew the kind of bigotry that was once powerful enough to sway elections.
Indeed, the illiberal faction in this debate retains Trump as its champion precisely because the president is willing to use the power of the state for sectarian ends, despite being an exemplar of the libertinism to which it is supposedly implacably opposed, a man whose major legislative accomplishment is slashing taxes on the wealthy, and whose most significant contribution to the institution of the family is destroying thousands of them on purpose. It is power that is the motivator here, and the best that could be said for these American Orbánists is that they believe that asserting an iron grip on American politics and culture would offer the greatest good for the greatest number of people. Every authoritarian movement has felt the same way.
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