How the Unholy Alliance Between the Christian Right and Wall Street Is 'Crucifying America'

[xchrom]

http://www.alternet.org/belief/atheists-are-winning-wrong-war-against-christian-right


The following is an excerpt from Crucifying America: the unholy alliance between the Christian Right and Wall Street by CJ Werleman (Dangerous Little Books, 2013).

While we are busy playing the role of the nation’s police force for political correctness, they are gerrymandering voting districts to ensure they regain and maintain control of the levers of congressional and gubernatorial power. While we chant, “Keep the Bible out of the classroom”, they are helping legislate voter ID laws that disenfranchise millions of black, Hispanic, and student voters. While we demand a removal of God from the Pledge of Allegiance, they are stacking the courts with their ideological judicial wingnuts. While we are correcting Christmas carolers with, “Happy Holidays”, they are mobilizing to ensure money buys them judges, congressmen and governors, which not only protects the interests of big corporations at the expense of the little guy, but will also protect the interests of the Christian Right – namely, putting an end to the gay, secular, liberal agenda, and, in turn, setting gender and racial equality back 50 years.

Poll after poll shows that a majority of Americans favor liberal policies, but our courts and legislatures are increasingly becoming controlled and driven by the Christian Right. Their victories are having a far more reaching impact on our lives and our secular democratic values than our small-minded wins to remove the 10 Commandments from some hic town’s courthouse.

The 2012 election was a rejection of the Ayn Rand, “Fuck you, I have mine” thinking that permeates the Republican base. Recall that moment during the 2012 GOP debates when the moderator asked the following hypothetical: “What should happen if a healthy 30-year-old man who can afford insurance chooses not to buy it and then becomes catastrophically ill and needs intensive care for six months?” In unison, the predominantly Tea Party (Christian Right) audience yelled, “Let him die!” Thankfully a majority of the American public spurned that callous thinking, as the national electorate went on to demonstrate that a majority of Americans see this country as a center-left country. Simply, we don’t want to be a country that says there’s legitimate rape and there’s illegitimate rape. There’s just rape! We don’t want to be a country that rejects science and facts. We want our kids to accept what 99.9 percent of the scientific community agrees to when it comes to evolution. We want our kids to accept climate change as fact, then fight to do something about it, so as to preserve their kids’ future. We don’t want our politicians to hold prayer sessions as the main means for fighting poverty. We don’t want our political leaders to believe poverty is caused by the individual’s lack of religious faith. We don’t want a country that demonizes the less fortunate. We want a country that judges a person by the content of their character, and not by the color of their skin. We want our laws to not only favor the interests of business but equally or more so favor our communities, our skies, our water, and our food. We want a representative democracy. We want “One nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all” – not all of one kind, but all. These are the ideals that a majority of Americans want in this great nation today.

[marmar]

1. k/r

[WCGreen]

2. Hip Hip....

Love this. Keep spreading the news.....

KnR

[zeemike]

3. They are the modern day Pharisees.

And Jesus had some very harsh words for them...

Matthew 23

[14] Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye devour widows' houses, and for a pretence make long prayer: therefore ye shall receive the greater damnation.
[15] Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye compass sea and land to make one proselyte, and when he is made, ye make him twofold more the child of hell than yourselves.
[16] Woe unto you, ye blind guides, which say, Whosoever shall swear by the temple, it is nothing; but whosoever shall swear by the gold of the temple, he is a debtor!

[MisterP]

4. off-topic, but Iggy Pop Uncle Sam!

on-topic, the GOP is divided into four main constellations; the Religious Right plays nice with the invade-Israel-to-Summon-Jesus and God-and-Walmart factions, but at odds with the economistic right-libertarians and the various lines of "thought" emanating therefrom; they agree Jesus would defund Medicare and pave the Amazon, but are overall profoundly divergent from that constellation's Social Darwinist Whitey-on-the-Moon roots--barking-mad Russian antitheist spongers, offshore "seasteads" full of increasingly hungry Indian IT workers floating just outside territorial waters, designer babies in clean leafy Suburbs in the Sky, all emanating from a grinding technocratic, techno-utopian, techno-idolatrous worldview at the heart of it all