Now They Get It

The Christianist enablers are finally catching on. Andrew Sullivan provides an intelligent and sometimes passionate post:

The theocon consensus that front-runners Romney and Huckabee both reflect is that religion is intrinsic to public life and public debate, that it is a necessary component of any political discussion - and that this does not merely mean rote invocations of Nature's God or Providence or the kind of inclusive, vague language that the Founders believed in. It means a very thick, constant and inviolable recourse to religious argument in secular politics. If you haven't noticed this development in the past decade, you have had blinders on.

This is nothing more than what many of us have been saying for a while. In my own words, private motivations for supporting a particular public policy may very well spring from religious belief. The policy itself, however, must be formulated in rational, nonsectarian, secular terms. Sullivan's ongoing example is torture, which I also find morally repellant. My arguments against it are similar to his, with the basic one being that it simply doesn't work. My real motivation for supporting a ban on torture is that it more or less reflects the only real definition I have of evil: the abuse of power. (If that sounds somewhat simple, I suggest you reflect on it for a while, and consider what the exercise of power without restraint actually means.)

This is why I consider someone like Mike Huckabee not only an unsuitable candidate for public office, but a very dangerous man.

Here's Charles Krauthammer, from the OpEd that Sullivan cites:

This campaign is knee-deep in religion, and it's only going to get worse. I'd thought that the limits of professed public piety had already been achieved during the Republican CNN-YouTube debate when some squirrelly looking guy held up a Bible and asked, "Do you believe every word of this book?" -- and not one candidate dared reply: None of your damn business.

Instead, Giuliani, Romney and Huckabee bent a knee and tried appeasement with various interpretations of scriptural literalism. The right answer, the only answer, is that the very question is offensive. The Constitution prohibits any religious test for office. And while that proscribes only government action, the law is also meant to be a teacher. In the same way that civil rights laws established not just the legal but also the moral norm that one simply does not discriminate on the basis of race -- changing the practice of one generation and the consciousness of the next -- so the constitutional injunction against religious tests is meant to make citizens understand that such tests are profoundly un-American.

This is no more than I've been saying for a looong time. It's ironic to see Krauthammer, who has been one of the most vocal enablers of the Christianist wing of the Republican party, suddenly freaking out. It's fairly entertaining to see him finally take his head out of the sand and realize just what he's been touting.

Barbara O'Brien at Mahablog also has some comments on the phenomenon:

But this is a monster of the Right’s own creation. They’ve spent years cultivating the Christian Right as a political force, and now it’s a political force. What did they expect?


Footnote on Pundits:

They really are out of touch. It seems that everyone else has already caught on to the fact that the Christianist Republicans are out of control -- even clergy.