Chip Berlet has an excellent piece on Talk To Action concerning the frightening direction culture war scapegoating is taking these days with the religious right. He is discussing the recent 'Value Voters Summit' orchestrated by the Family Research Council:
The Christian Right has regrouped and launched a new offensive in the ongoing Christian Right Culture War. Gay marriage and the "homosexual agenda" are the primary tactical scapegoats ...
Family Research Council President Tony Perkins suggested the nation was under attack from without and within, which was a theme throughout the conference. The domestic forces of Satan--secularists, liberals, homosexuals, feminists, abortionists, p o r nographers--are the subversives within; while the barbaric terrorist Islamic fascists are the external enemy. Godly "values voters" should remember how they felt on 9/11, and then go into the voting booth and vote to prevent the Democrats from having the opportunity to appoint more activist judges who are wittingly or unwittingly in league with the evil forces of darkness.
As I have said before on this blog, gay is the new Jew as far as the radical religious right is concerned. Gays have come to epitomize all that is evil, representing a threat to Godly sanctity that must not only be resisted, but eliminated altogether.
Time and again speakers at the conference made it clear that gay marriage was the key battle in the campaign to protect religion, (and thwart the plans of the Devil). Gay marriage, we were told, will spread like a disease across America from the source of the infection--Massachusetts and its cabal of activist judges.
But the fight against gay marriage and civil unions should be viewed for what it is: the thin end of a wedge, merely a starting point for drawing battle lines and testing the water to see what the citizenry will accept.
If the theocrats succeed in having enough 'Godly men' (i.e. fundamentalist or fundamentalist-controlled Republicans) elected to positions of power throughout the country, a Federal Marriage Amendment will be the least of our problems. The rhetoric will continue to ratchet up and the consequences will become ever more grave.
Will the true confessing church please stand up and be heard?
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