RELIGIOUS RIGHT FREAK OUT

This is absolutely amazing. From the Daily Kos courtesy of This is not a compliment:

Dems "Excommunicated" From Church

For those that thought that there has not been a full scale war lanched against liberals; for those who didn't take the radical right's promise to "eradicate liberals" seriously, I present to you, Exhibit A: East Waynesville Baptist Church has just kicked out all its Democratic members.

Yes. You read that right. If you didn't vote for Bush, you had to "repent your sin". And finally, they figured why deal with the liberal sinners at all.

And

"One of the local women who got excommunicated said on TV that it was like a cult. Another man who got excommunicated said that the rest of the congregation stood up and applauded as the Democrats were told to leave."

Click here for the rest.

Last Tuesday morning, we did a performance of the play I'm currently doing for some local high schools. One high school, a private "Bible" (i.e. fundamentalist) school, decided to leave before even a single line was uttered because of a cartoon like caricature of a Picassoesque nude (if not actually by Picasso--I'm not really sure) that's part of the set. Of course this was ridiculous: the picture is utterly unrealistic; it's cubist for god's sake! I feel certain that this painting made no teen hormones spike wildly. But "whatever," I thought. I had encountered insane, paranoid, anti-sex religious freaks numerous times when I was working in the public schools myself. This seems pretty standard. "There they go again," I thought.

However, one of the professional actors in the show was absolutely outraged. She's been working in London for some years and is simply not used to this sort of thing and I think it hit her right in the gut. Thinking about the whole thing later that afternoon, I wondered why she and I had such different reactions--we've talked politics on several occasions, and we both seem to be on the same page ideologically. It quickly became very clear that she had the right emotional reaction, and I didn't. While completely within their rights, this school's departure was deeply insulting to everybody involved with the show (an utterly inoffensive play written in 1936, I might add): whether intended or not, this religious exodus made a loud public statement of condemnation toward our theater company to which we had absolutely no way of responding.

My lack of emotional response is indicitave of how accustomed I and numerous other Americans have become to such religious insanity. It seems like we allow outrage after outrage with only a whisper of objection. This excommunication of Democrats in North Carolina is yet another outrage, and, once again, I find myself strangely unmoved by it--of course, intellectually I object, but where is my righteous indignation? Why aren't I really pissed off by this? I fear that if sane Americans don't find some hardcore anger soon, we could all be in really big trouble.

Consider this interview excerpt from Democracy Now:

The Christian Right and the Rising Power
of the Evangelical Political Movement

If you look at the ideology that pervades this movement, and the term we use for it is dominionism, it comes from Genesis, where the sort of founders of this movement, Rousas Rushdoony and others, talk about how God gave man -- this is a very patriarchal movement -- dominion over the land. And dominionists believe that they have been tasked by God to create the Christian society through violence, I would add. Violence, the aesthetic of violence is a very powerful component within this movement. The ideology, when you parse it down and look what it's made up of, is essentially an ideology of exclusion and of hatred. It is a totalitarian ideology. It is not religious in any way. These people quote, as they did at this convention, selectively and with gross distortions from the Gospels. You cannot read the four Gospels and walk away and tell me that Jesus was not a pacifist. I'm not a pacifist, but Jesus clearly was. They draw from the Book of Revelations the only time in the Bible, and that's a very questionable book, as Biblical scholars have pointed out for centuries, the only time when you can argue that Jesus endorsed violence and the apocalyptic visions of Paul. And they do this to create an avenging Christ.

They have built a vision of America that is radically -- and a vision of this -- and latched onto a religious movement or awakening that is radically different from previous awakenings, and there have been several throughout American history. In all religious revivals, Christian religious revivals in American history, the pull was to get believers to remove themselves from the contaminants of secular society. This one is very, very different. It is about taking control of secular society.

Click here to read, listen to, or watch the rest.

Apparently, we're at war with these people, whether we want to believe it or not. I don't think I'm being alarmist to say that we all may wake up one morning and find ourselves living in a very different country than the one in which we grew up. This is frightening; these people have enormous influence over all three branches of the federal government. I can't possibly see how things can't get worse.

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