Doctor Frist, The Religious Right And The Treatment For What Ails America

DistressedAmerican

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Sat Aug-06-05 09:56 AM
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Doctor Frist, The Religious Right And The Treatment For What Ails America

Edited on Sat Aug-06-05 10:28 AM by DistressedAmerican

The ever growing influence of the religious right in this country over the past several decades has been staggering. When I think back on how we got here, I have to admit, they kind of snuck up on me. I always considered that element to be a radical fringe of sorts, consigned to as much obscurity as me and my extreme left views.

HOLY COW! WAS I WRONG!

Their infiltration of all three branches of the federal government has been almost glacial. It moved so slowly that many Americans did not fully recognize the long term threat it posed to "our way of life".

Even after the 2000 election I really did not get it. I knew that fundies made up a good sized chunk of the Bush base. But, (According to Rove estimates) 4 million of them did not come out. Many say that last minute news of Bush's drunk driving record suppressed turnout. Who knows?

As much As I hate Karl Rove, he definitely understood something I did not fully realize, that in an evenly divided America a subculture of 4 million voters can mean the difference between political life and death.

It became more clear as we headed into 2004 that despite their relatively marginal numbers, these folks were a force to be reckoned with. Incidents like the Judge Roy Moore Ten Commandments standoff and the growing talk of hate filled wedge issues like banning gay marriage made me see what we were facing. I hoped we would beat them down with our sheer numbers. Did not happen. Whatever your take on election fraud, the fundies did turn out in impressive numbers.

So after all these decades of glacial progress and infiltration, the fundies now hold disproportional power in America. They had set the stage for years of lasting changes in American law and lifestyle. In 2004 the MASSIVE iceberg broke off of that fundie glacier, possible due to global warming. Hard to say.

If I may belabor the metaphor one step further, the resulting changes have done to our political landscape what the melting of the icecaps is expected to do to our physical geography.

With Bush beholden, Frist, Delay, Santorum and others milking, Scalia (and soon Roberts) fondling, and the Democrats cowering, we have a shift in the balance of power that none of our much lauded "Founding Fathers" would have liked. This massive imbalance has allowed a numerically small population to make substantial political change in a very short period of time.

We now face a situation where there are a variety of social ills that we all recognize. Those are shall we say the symptoms. The right and the left value these ills differently. For example there is the abortion debate. I do not love abortion. Despite the claims of the right, none of us like it. It is a well known social ill.

Our treatments for these social ills differ radically. I prefer a scientific approach. They want to build morals and "practice abstinence". The right want to ban abortion. Make it a crime. I would prescribe that more emphasis be placed on the availability of birth control and well informed sex education to prevent as many unwanted pregnancies as possible. Instead of the "just say no" approach that the right also applied without any success to the drug problem (another social ill for another day's discussion).

I happen to believe that many of these ills are more of a nuisance than a fatal disease, a headache if you will. Unfortunately, with the likes of,the repug "Scientist" and "Doctor" Bill Frist trying to find A BRAND NEW legislative balance between as Bush calls it "Science and Ethics", I fear they are prescribing unnecessarily radical treatments for what ails America. Amputations, bleeding and other methods of excersizing demons and balancing the humors.

The speed with which they are implementing these changes requires us to CONSTANTLY push forward at restoring the balance of power in Washington. We can not let folks that believe that parents that let their child die waiting for divine intervention are not criminals have this much undeserved and disproportionate legislative power.

Hats off to them for making politics work for them. They played the game well. But it it time that we redouble our efforts and shove these folks back into the relative obscurity that their numbers suggest they deserve.

What are you thinking? Talk to me people!

A thousand words and now a picture...