The Evangelical Rebellion

Having used Christian fundamentalists for years to ensure that their corporate interests were maintained, the Republican party now see the fundamentalists rising up against them and demanding that their world view be promoted.

Chris Hedges has a wonderful article over at Truthdig about the way the Republicans are panicking over the campaign of Mike Huckabee:

The rise of Mike Huckabee as a presidential candidate represents a seismic shift in the tactics, ideology and direction of the radical Christian right. Huckabee may stumble and falter in later primaries, but his right-wing Christian populism is here to stay. Huckabee represents a new and potent force in American politics, and the neocons and corporate elite, who once viewed the yahoos of the Christian right as the useful idiots, are now confronted with the fact that they themselves are the ones who have been taken for a ride. Members of the Christian right, recruited into the Republican Party and manipulated to vote against their own interests around the issues of abortion and family values, are in rebellion. They are taking the party into new, uncharted territory. And they presage, especially with looming economic turmoil, the rise of a mass movement that could demolish what is left of American democracy and set the stage for a Christian fascism.

The corporate establishment, whose plundering of the country created fertile ground for a radical, right-wing backlash, is sounding the alarm bells. It is scrambling to bolster Mitt Romney, who, like Rudy Giuliani or Hillary Clinton, will continue to slash and burn on behalf of corporate profits. Columnist George Will called Huckabee’s populism “a comprehensive apostasy against core Republican beliefs.” He wrote that Huckabee’s candidacy “broadly repudiates core Republican policies such as free trade, low taxes, the essential legitimacy of America’s corporate entities and the market system allocating wealth and opportunity.” National Review’s Rich Lowry wrote that “like [Howard] Dean, his nomination would represent an act of suicide by his party.”

Huckabee spoke of this revolt on the “Today” show. “There’s a sense in which all these years the evangelicals have been treated very kindly by the Republican Party,” he said. “They wanted us to be a part of it. And then one day one of us actually runs and they say, ‘Oh, my gosh, now they’re serious.’ They [evangelicals] don’t want to just show up and vote, they actually would want to be a part of the discussion.”

The Republicans have used these people for decades and have now created a rod for their own back. They deserve everything that befalls them.

The rest of us, however, do not.

Huckabee has ties to the Dominionist branch of the Christian right which believes that "society should be governed exclusively by the law of God as codified in the Bible, to the exclusion of secular law".

A decades-long refusal by most American fundamentalists to engage in politics at all following the Scopes trial has been replaced by a call for Christian “dominion” over the nation and, eventually, over the Earth itself.

So the Republicans, who have long denounced Islamics and their fearful wish to have the world live under Sharia law, now have a man running for their top job who would like to impose a Christian version of this on the entire planet.

I can think of no better reason as to why religion should be kept out of politics than the mutterings of these nutcases.

Click title to read Hedges full article.