Why
Do Conservative Christians Hate The Constitution?
by
Allen Snyder
OpEdNews.Com
A
few weeks ago, on CNN’s ‘Crossfire’, James Carville, Tucker
Carlson and their guests howled about the giant Ten Commandments rock
recently uprooted from the lobby of the Alabama State Supreme Court
building. Chief Justice ‘Crazy’
Roy Moore, responsible for the rock’s placement, had garnered so much
support against its removal, believers were flocking to Montgomery as
though someone discovered a Jesus-shaped squash at the Piggly Wiggly.
Loudly
condemning the removal was The Christian Defense Fund.
When asked specifically what the genuflectors were protesting,
the CDF attorney gushed that the monument’s removal was a travesty,
representing nothing less than the moral decline of Western
civilization. Further
compelling evidence, he said, of the Devil’s handiwork and America’s
destructive prejudice against Christianity.
Peppered
throughout his tirade were comments emphasizing the monument’s removal
as the constitutionally questionable act.
Astonishingly, neither host mentioned the obvious - that the
display’s initial placement, not its removal, was the problem.
The CDF attorney acted like Ten Commandment displays are de
facto constitutional and opponents must prove removing the
display doesn’t violate the law.
Amazing
how Fundies always shortcut through the facts.
Supreme Court precedent prohibits obviously religious displays on
public or government property (although they incorrectly allow for
so-called ‘contextual’ or ‘historical’ displays).
Displaying the Ten Commandments in such locations is
unconstitutional. Period.
The burden of proof is on display supporters to show that displaying
the monument is constitutional.
Allowing
the Christian Right to dictate this debate’s discourse plays right
into their hands. They just
love to play the part of tortured victim, sacrificial martyr, and
oppressed minority - makes ‘em feel all pious, righteous, and
Christ-like. Their ‘everybody-is-against-us’
paranoia tugs at the heart-strings of the hopelessly misinformed and
terminally brainwashed. Next
thing you know, 75% of people believe Christianity is an endangered
religion,
America
is a ‘Christian nation’, and the Commandments are the basis for
American law. All false, of
course.
Christianity
in
America
, particularly in the South, is so ubiquitously in-your-face and
shamelessly political, nonbelievers like me either regularly convulse
with monster cases of dry heaves or chuckle to ourselves at the vacuous
platitudes posted on church marquees.
The governmental largesse heaped on Christian institutions is
disgustingly transparent (not to mention illegal).
BushCo’s recent Christmas-in-September gift to ‘faith-based’
(read: religious) organizations reeks of both favoritism and political
pandering.
And
when intelligent people like Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick imagine
whether the Founders ‘would object to the ways in which religion has
been chased out of the public square’ (posted 8/21/03), it’s clear
the Christian Right’s propaganda campaign is working beautifully.
Such alarmist bullshit, when repeated continually in church
pulpits or on The 700 Club, begins to sound truthful to
lobotomized Christian apologists. Then
again, it’s not hard to manipulate the thoughtless.
Consider:
imagine you’re a fundamentalist Christian (it’s OK, the
headache is temporary) who absolutely needs to be praying to God
constantly. Now go through
your daily routine, praying wherever possible.
There’s scarcely a second where you can’t pray,
praise, or worship.
Start
praying the minute you wake, shower and sing hymns, jam to gospel in the
car, hum ‘God Bless America’ in the elevator, read inspirational
poetry, say grace at lunch, Bible-read on your break, jam more on the
way home, play Bible Baseball while making dinner, say grace again,
watch hours of Christian TV, bless everyone before bed, and make the
kids say ‘now I lay me down to sleep’ (a sick children’s prayer if
ever there was one).
Sounds
to me like personal religious expression is just fine.
It’s when they can’t make everyone else, like graduating
seniors or governmental institutions, go blindly along that they get
pissed off. It’s not
about ‘expression’, it’s about coerced conformity to their twisted
right-wing Christian mentality.
So
much for the ‘chased out of the public square’ nonsense.
Ms.
Lithwick also writes that ‘one possible view [on church/state
separation] is that the Establishment Clause was intended only to ensure
that there was no official adoption of a state religion’.
In a diverse nation like the
United States
, it’s not a state-adopted religion that non-Christians have to worry
about. Far more dangerous are the gross stenches of impropriety
emanating from the lucrative favoritism Christian institutions routinely
blackmail from a born-again and constitutionally illiterate Federal
government.
So
why does the Christian Right’s really
hate the Constitution?
Is
it that they’re unwilling or incapable of making even the simplest
conceptual and intellectual distinctions?
That they can’t see the world without Christian blinders?
Can’t they separate their private religion from their public
politics? Is their
ignorance so bottomless, they can’t distinguish the Founder’s faith
(they weren’t ‘deeply religious men’, as Lithwick claims) from
their revolutionary goals?
Well,
it’s all that, but underlying everything is a broad-spectrum fear and
loathing.
You
see, the Constitution provides prohibitions against and remedies for
what the Christian Right really wants - a Christian-dominated theocracy
which imposes its dogmatic will, and worse, its vague, infantile, and
useless Ten Commandments-like morality on all Americans whether they
like it or not.