Fetus Wars

An ugly intramural skirmish has broken out amongst the professional haters of the extremist ‘Christian’ right. The reactionary elements that have held sway over the blistering agenda of bigotry and hatred through the manipulation of phony moral issues like gay marriage and abortion are apoplectic that they are losing members of the flock to those who preach more rational, more traditional Christian values rather than the apostasy of the generations of strip mall and mega church fundies weaned on the ultra-violent Left Behind pulp fiction novels of Timothy LaHaye and their apocalyptic dementia that has transformed Jesus Christ into some sort of malevolent avenger intent at returning to earth to murder millions for the glory of the Rapture pimps.

Now for the first time being challenged in the ideological arena by Christians with true humanitarian values more in line with the prince of peace rather than the god of war the hucksters, hate mongers and goats among sheep are striking out. The usual fifth columnist, anti-American activist suspects including James Dobson, Gary Bauer, Tony Perkins, Donald Wildmon and Paul Weyrich recenty blasted National Association of Evangelicals director Rev. Richard Cizik in a letter reeking of brimstone for daring to suggest that taking a stand against global warming as a moral issue that –GASP – was destroying God’s earth.

The American mullahs called for Cizik’s head on a platter for daring to deviate from the more politically successful homosexual witch hunts and that wonderful 3 card monte scam that is the Orwellian named pro-life movement. God forbid that the hidden agenda of the well connected right-wing lynch mob’s true agenda is exposed which is evident by Tony Perkins’ comments: We’re saying what is being done here,” Mr. Perkins said, “is a concerted effort to shift the focus of evangelical Christians to these issues that draw warm and fuzzies from liberal crusaders.” Hitler hated liberals too, and in taking a look back at history homosexuals were only an appetizer for the Third Reich’s voracious appetite for human suffering…but I’m getting ahead of myself here.

The entire abortion farce is as essential a lure to victims as is candy to a schoolyard pedophile when it comes to the snake oil salesmen of the Religious Right. The animosity that fuels the movement is largely fueled by a highly organized, well-funded activist machine that uses the power of the so-called pro life crusade to tap into the inner anger of the economically disenfranchised who have been victimized by the ravages of years of Reaganaut greedheads conducting a take no prisoners looting spree and a savage war on the middle and lower classes.

This raw anger is then harnessed by opportunistic, power mad televangelists and assorted other shamans and is channeled into a vicious backlash against the perceived evils of liberalism and world that they blame for all of their misfortune and the demonizing of women’s rights that is represented by Roe V. Wade is an opportune and fat target. For abortion is a super charged emotional issue that can be cloaked in Manichean terms by propagandists and right-wing wordsmiths and it is especially successful in pandering to those who are the most ignorant and has spread like mutant kudzu through the red states in peckerwood nation.

Thomas Frank’s excellent book What’s The Matter With Kansas takes a hard look at the 1990’s rise of religious extremism on the basis of using abortion as a war cry against modern progressive society. Frank analyzes the nation’s hard rightward lurch by looking at that most mythical bastion of Americana that is the state of Kansas. Hell, what could be more reminiscent of the baseball, hotdogs, mom and apple pie version of that great white picket fence land of yore, Oz and Bob Dole than the crappy Midwestern state that has long been the most agonizing place that motorists have had to drive through to get to someplace else. Militant anti-reproductive rights vampire Randall Terry and Operation Rescue had made similar connections between Kansas and the American psyche and descended like a plague of locusts on Wichita for massive rallies and civil disobedience during the so-called ‘Summer of Mercy’ back in 1991 that was Mecca for the rubber fetus crowd – Pat Robertson, James Dobson and others gave fire and brimstone speechs at a Nuremberg style rally in Cessna Stadium (home of the Wichita State Shockers) to a fired up mob of culture warriors. Any resemblance between the huge rally and footage from Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph Of The Will is purely coincidental.

As is evident from Newton McPherson Gingrich’s latching onto the Religous Right's agenda like a barnacle on the bottom of a garbage scow it is a must for every neo-fascist political prick with a disdain for constitutional democracy and delusions of grandeur to curry favor with the American Taliban. Aspiring nominee and shameless phony Mitt Romney has been spending a fortune sucking up to the anti-democratic tendencies of the Religious Right extremists and Jerry Falwell is going to have to undergo surgery to remove Manchurian McCain’s nose from where it has been permanently imbedded between the fleshy cheeks of his big fat ass.

Then there is the savage anti-gay onslaught that is encouraged at every step by demagogues who won’t be happy until they incite pogroms and the streets are running red with blood. This has proven to be a big winner as a red meat issue to the pathetic losers looking for scapegoats for their own failed lives and has irresistible allure to the Republican party apratchik as well as their God squad Gauleiters. Even nice guy NFL Indianapolis Colts coach Tony Dungy’s luminous halo is being drawn over to the dark side and coming to resemble the light of the fires of hatred and intolerance rather than the beacon of Christlike compassion that the media would have you believe. The first black coach to win a Super Bowl is essentially spitting on the hard fought sacrifices by Civil Rights activists who rebelled against bigotry and won by making an appearance in front of a militant anti-gay group with an affiliation to Christian jihadist James Dobson’s Focus On Family. Maybe he and Ann Coulter can lead the choir in an inspiring rendition of Burn the Faggots at The Stake!

When defending Dungy’s visit to the temple of hate with a lame press release "Coach Dungy's feelings on the importance of marriage and family are well known" the Colts themselves are as guilty of hypocrisy and endorsing these theocratic fascist groups through their lack of action. If there is a time when the NFL could and should make a serious example that they condemn discrimination of all sort then Dungy and the Colts should be slapped with a serious penalty – imagine the uproar if a white coach made a guest appearance at a Ku Klux Klan or similar white supremacist gathering.

I never did get a good handle on all of this cloaking of raw bigotry, vicious scapegoating and dehumanization in the language of “pro-family” and “pro-marriage”. If the Religious Right really gave a rat’s ass about family they would not be serving as brownshirts for a rapacious monopoly capitalist system that leaves families in disarray and children hungry, uninsured and entrapped in a desperation that will last a lifetime. Increasing poverty and hopelessness it seems is the desired result of the theocratic fascist movement which as Chris Hedges put it in his great American Fascists: The Christian Right And The War On America is necessary to create a “culture of despair” that makes recruitment to this most anti-democratic of movements much easier for the reptillian Elmer Gantry style preachers looking to build the strength of their local bunds.

The pro-marriage angle is just more of the same horseshit, economic problems are among the top contributors to stress on relationships and the Calvinistic attitude towards piling up Earthly rewards as a show of God’s favoritism is anathema to Christ’s work to minister to the poor, the sick and the downtrodden. When was the last time that Jerry Falwell or any of the maggots in the mix ever even pretended to give a tin shit about the plight of America’s homeless?

There is also nothing about divorce in the gospels of the hate mongers, it would seem to me that any movement that is truly interested in propping up the institution of marriage would look into strengthening the bonds of matrimony by offering financial counseling, community outreach and sermons and lessons accentuating the positive virtues of building a strong family structure by emphasizing the sacred vows. Of course such a focus would strongly condemn adultery, the practice of which the last time that I looked was actually one of the motherfucking Ten Commandments! This would of course be inconvenient for the serial philanderers amongst the flock including the politicians and the mega-church ringmasters. Hell, maybe a bit more focus on propping up the family rather than knee jerk phantom issues could even prevented a fine Christian man like Pastor Ted Haggard from wandering northward in search of anal sex and crystal meth.

The ugly truth is that the entire pro-family/marriage movement is as big a fraud as the culture of life that cares so much for it that it condones and does so with smugness and self-righteous glee at the wanton slaughter of brown skinned, Muslim children on the front lines of the battle of Armageddon. Save the fetus, slay the child – double bonus points said child happens to be incinerated in a blaze of napalm or white phosphorous.

It’s all nothing more of the same standard slick marketing, chicanery and fraud that has been so perfected by McCarthyist Republican trolls over the past half-century or so. It is all about power, and it is all about hate and anybody who dares to tell you anything else is pissing on your leg and telling you that it’s raining. In American Fascists Hedges often refers to his mentor Dr. James Luther Adams who had witnessed first hand the rise of the Nazis while in Germany in the 1930’s:

Adams, finally, told us to watch closely what the Christian Right did to homosexuals. The Nazis had used “values” to launch state repression of opponents. Hitler, days after he took power in 1933, imposed a ban on all homosexual and lesbian organizations. He ordered raids on places where homosexuals gathered, culminating in the ransacking of the Institute for Sexual Science in Berlin and the permanent exile of its director, Magnus Hirschfield. Thousands of volumes from the institute’s library were tossed into a bonfire. The stripping of gay and lesbian Germans of their civil rights was largely cheered by the German churches. But this campaign legitimized tactics, outside the law that would soon be employed against others. Adams said that homosexuals would be the first “social deviants” singled out and disempowered by the Christian Right. We would be the next.

 I have always strongly suspected that George W. Bush was not really the one to be afraid of, that he was only a willing dupe who would allow the constitution to be gutted, torture to be codified, a police state infrastructure put into place and the ground sown for a true tyranny as vile and destructive as any since Hitler’s Reich.

This much has happened already and the kingmakers are still conducting auditions for the chosen one who will be the future Führer of the Fetus Wars and finish the job of swapping out the Constitution for the Malleus Maleficarum.

By Ed Encho

6/6/06 - A Day From Hell?

 
NOW AVAILABLE

6/6/06

Not one to allow her ideological cronies to cash in on the big trifecta that is 6/6/6, a marketing bonanza for every business entity from the radical clerics who control the GOP to the woeful Tampa Bay Devil Rays who are playing the Los Angeles Angels (the Colorado Rockies whose proclamation that they were God's Team came too late for the MLB schedule makers to capitalize on that titanic clash) to the yet another inevitably shitty Hollywood remake of a classic in the 2006 version of The Omen to the ruling dominatrix of irrational hostility and demonic Succubus Ann Coulter's release of her latest dark grimore of anti- American psychotic rantings (DSM-IV certifiable...just check it out yourself) subtly and modestly entitled Godless: The Church of Liberalism and should be entitled Brainless: I Am Getting Rich off of Stupidity. The queen of mean is definitely not above pandering to the masses with today's exploitative release of this tome of dementia and I am sure that somewhere on the internet some right-wing website is selling autographed and laminated copies....what's the sense in plunking down 25 bucks for something that you can only use once guys? If Coulter really wanted to walk the walk as a paragon of 'moral virtue' for the 'protecting the sanctity of marriage crowd' she could get hitched herself.....to a member of the opposite sex. Thank God that she's an arch-conservative, were she a 'godless liberal' she would be inundated with innuendo that being 40 something and single may make her......GASP....gay!

Anyway, today is the big day, 6/6/6 and the snake handlers in the GOP base of fundamentalist, gay-bashing red state regressives will no doubt be breaking out the Tim LaHaye books as well as their other talismans and screeching like demented banshees over the signs of the coming Rapture. I happened to drop by one of my local convenience stores over the weekend and my purchase of a six pack of Bud Ice Light and a bag of peanut M & M’s just happened to come to a total of GASP….6.66! The funny thing is that the clerk on duty, a mousy blonde girl in her mid-twenties with a look of about four kids in the past and a lifetime of we in the future suddenly froze and stared at the register muttering something unintelligible although I think that I could vaguely make out the word Jesus but then again I am not much of a lip reader. After ten or so seconds that seemed like a hell of a lot longer she shoved my stuff at me and backed away as if I somehow had caused her machine to product that dreaded combination of numbers. Knowing all to well the irrational tendencies of the local members of the God Squad I grabbed my shit and got the hell out of the place very quickly before she was able to reach under the counter for a gun seeing that in Florida it is now legal to kill people if you feel threatened (praise be upon the lord and Governor Jeb Bush) and I wasn’t about to stick around to see if that little trailer park hoochie mama was going for the gun loaded with silver bullets to dispatch a damned secular earthly agent of Lucifer himself.

As the masses of the mythical Antichrist in the south (he was known as the great deceiver after all but you NEVER hear this angle from the turn the other cheek pansies on the so-called religious left) gather in anticipation of the coming assault on Christo-American values that has once again been juiced by a renewed crusade against honest, taxpaying loyal American gay people Karl Rove and the other maestros of manipulation are rubbing their little cloven hooves together and cackling with demonic glee at yet another clever distortion that will keep the morons focused on winning the Civil War through a theocratic takeover and the subsequent inquisition where the elimination of torture protections and the prurient desires of the flock will allow them to bend us all over backwoods logs like poor Ned Beatty in the classic Deliverance. The GOP has hit the big trifecta by exploiting greed (the repeal of the estate tax), fear and loathing (the gay marriage amendment) and racism (the anti-Mexican crackdown disguised as a crusade against illegal immigration) and succeeded in changing the subject from Iraq, Iran, the schizophrenic stock market, government corruption, global warming and the myriad of other crimes of the Bushists including covert efforts to modify the military manual to downplay the importance of Geneva Convention as well as the discussion for mandatory conscription to provide more cannon fodder for the wet dreams of the PNAC boys.

I happen to listen to C-SPAN and Washington Journal in the mornings, you know the show where no matter the issue the hosts have split the callers into two camps which depending on which day that it is are broken down as Democrats vs Republicans or callers For or Against George W. Bush. Nice little gig but it is alas a rigged game as well. The ‘Republicans for The President’ line is often stacked with very articulate, on message callers armed with the daily talking points and a mandate to hog as much airtime as possible while the ‘Democrat line’ seems to be carefully screened to allow only the true dunces to get through on most occasions and when there is a well spoken caller armed with the facts they are either dumped due to the always suspicious ‘cell phone interference’ or given as little airtime as possible.

Anyhow I digress…

This morning the featured guest was none other than Senator Wayne Allard, he of the insidious anti-gay amendment that the GOP has chosen as the most important crisis in America this week (and the elimination of the estate tax on the unearned incomes of the wealthiest of the rentier class misleadingly named ‘the death tax’ by Republican think tank propagandists) rather than acknowledge the mounting body count in Iraq or….you get the picture, basically anything that really matters. Allard did his duty carrying the water for Karl Rove and Bill Frist by using his airtime to filibuster and regurgitate the standard RNC talking points repeatedly invoking terms like “the people’s will”, “activist courts” and the always successful when used in reference to racism and discrimination “state’s rights” ..here is a wonderful quote from a column by the great Bob Herbert of the New York Times (sorry, the link is unavailable unless you plunk the money to subscribe to Times Select) called Impossible, Ridiculous, Repugnant that pegs it dead on in the words of the late GOP strategist and Rove mentor Lee Atwater the man who was behind the infamous Willie Lee Horton racist ads that attacked Daddy Bush’s 1988 opponent Michael Dukakis:

“You start out in 1954 by saying ‘Nigger,nigger,nigger.’ But by 1968 you can’t say ‘nigger’ – that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights and all that stuff. You’re getting so abstract now [that] you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites.

“And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I’m not saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me – because obviously sitting around saying ‘we want to cut this’ is much more abstract than the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than ‘Nigger, nigger.”

There you have the states rights thing and the coded racism and if you extrapolate it forward to include the wide net cast for the fundamentalist red state rabble by the substitution of gays for blacks although the war against civil rights and entitlements is still on you have the current GOP strategy of demonizing a convenient scapegoat for all societal ills while the right-wingers and their fascist lackeys pick the public pocket and manipulate those who are the most ignorant into making the worst choices possible in supporting policies that ultimately destroy their own living standards. Allard was right on in pontificating from the electronic pulpit this morning in getting the message out, ‘Dullard’ as he is nicknamed according to a Time Magazine story was the perfect pitchman for this message of hate, Adolf Eichmann was also a nondescript, ordinary type of guy but always a loyal servant to an evil system as is ‘Dullard’. He and his ilk love to invoke the constitution and the intent of the founders and always find the First Amendment a useful shield whenever they are cowering behind it in order to tear down the rights that are guaranteed to all and not only those with their particular ideology and fealty to the elitists who run the system. He actually came across as a sort of a more refined version of former White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan, a much smoother dissembler but the key job requirement of a Senator is exactly to be a highly polished liar and in this Allard fit the bill and was a perfect representative of a Republican Congress that is such an unrepentant mass of crooks and cheats gathered together in a house of ill repute that it is only a matter of time until a constitutional amendment is introduced to ban the display of Flying Spaghetti Monsters to appease the bible thumping yokels who may as well be screaming “RAPE ME” to their elected representatives as “PRAISE JESUS”! Personally I would love to see these rebel flag waving Neanderthals just secede from the union or even make a mass exodus to Texas where they can install George W. Bush as their Moses and Earthly king in two and a half years after he finally leaves the White House but it isn't that simple, unfortunately we have to live with these idiots for better or worse, like a really bad marriage.

Maybe we have finally found something for which we can all pray together for: separation!

Anyway, enough of that tangent for the time being. Tonight is the big night…6/6/6 and I would strongly advise any and all free thinkers, liberals and most especially gays to lock yourselves inside safely and barricade the doors….the vampires and werewolves will be out in force tonight along with the freaks. They will gather together in their megachurches and board buses to the pastures where they can watch for the sky turning red and parting for the return of Jesus Christ and the opening kickoff of the Rapture. They will dance and cavort while smearing themselves in goats blood and feces while singing in strange tongues, thumping their dog-eared copies of Glorious Appearing and braying psychotically at the full moon in anticipation that the long-awaited end times will begin and their pathetic, wretched little lives on Earth will end and they will all be summoned up (minus the XXL Dale Earnhardt T-shirts) to sit at the right hand of God and watch their bosses, the liberals, the gays and the Clintons forced to endure plague after plague and unspeakable violence during the tribulation.

All of this is highly unlikely and pure hokum to any with a smidgen of intelligence, but wouldn't it be extremely amusing (at least to me) to actually see following two things:

1: Jesus Christ actually returning to Earth and the subsequent horror of the red staters in realizing that he is actually a LIBERAL who is disdainful toward the corrupting influence of wealth, decries the indiscriminate bombing and execution of children of a darker complection than our lilly white asses, preaches tolerance towards your fellow man, disdains those who turn worshipping into a spectacle in garish and gauch mega-churches and their accompanying pomp and circumstance and loathes hypocrisy.

2: Seeing the ignorant peckerwood worshippers of the pulp fiction gospel of Tim LaHaye run as fast as they possibly can to their pickup trucks in order to scrounge up enough wood and a big assed nail gun to have another crucifixion.