What This Sister Said

From Shakespeare's Sister:

Paul Krugman has an excellent column in the NY Times today about the dangers of letting the religious right continue to strengthen their stranglehold on the government unfettered. Connecting the dots between Congress’ intervention in the Schaivo case, “conscience legislation” (i.e. pharmacists legally able to refuse to fill prescriptions based on their religious beliefs), and the encroachment of religion into the public educational system, he isn’t really saying anything that one hasn’t been able to find on blogs such as this one for quite some time, but it’s a good sign (I think, I hope) that we’re starting to see from people in positions like Krugman’s a determination to quash this radical uprising before it gets completely out of control.

The notion Krugman poses, that we’re collectively wary to address the threat to our nation’s future posed by the extremists within our own borders, goes back to what I wrote earlier in the month about the need for selective intolerance. Cloaked in the protective chain mail of their religion, Christian fundamentalists, and more importantly their political ideas and objectives, have become unassailable.

Any criticism of the increasingly voracious appetite of the religious right for power within and over the government is denounced as religious intolerance, irrespective of the source of the criticism; even other Christians, moderates and liberals alike, are held in contempt by their conservative counterparts, dismissed and vilified as “false” Christians—a denouncement the media is strangely willing to embrace as it fans the flames of this culture war, conjuring elaborate stories of Christmas-haters out of the thinnest of air, and inevitably juxtaposing the godly conservative Christians and the heartless, bah humbug secularists. If one only existed in the false reality of television news, one would never know there were plenty of Christians who respect the public sphere, and the non-Christians with whom they share it. So it becomes a Christian versus non-Christian (or, if you’re watching Fox, anti-Christian) argument, a specious and likely deliberate misconstruing of reality; two sides indeed exist, but they are comprised of those who have respect for the public sphere and everyone who travels in it, and those who have no respect for anything but satiating their ravenous hunger for control.

No Legitimacy No Surrender indeed.