This essay in Alternet highlights the "synergy", as it were, between Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ and Bush's pandering to the religious right — they both have everything to do with the way extreme right-wing religion seems to be sweeping the country.
And there's definitely an attack on somebody's way of life going on. Mine. Yours. Anybody who isn't "born again", who maybe doesn't make religion the center of their life, who still has values and ethics, but just doesn't look to the Bible for them. People who are gay. People who are Jewish. People who, horror of horrors, have sex before marriage, who have no intention of getting married or at least refuse to make it their number-one priority in life. People who read books that get banned in some small-town schools. People who laugh at "South Park". People who doubt and question and are unwilling to swallow all the bull that this administration and their fundie supporters want to shove down our throats. If it's a war, somebody has to win and somebody has to lose. The thing is, if we win, they get to keep on living their lives (or lack thereof) the way they like. Wanna watch nothing but PAX TV and read nothing but the "Left Behind" series and home-school your kids? Go ahead. Knock yourselves out. (At least you'll shut up for a bit.) If they win, though, they'll certainly going to tell us how we can live our lives. They may want to start with banning gay marriage in the Constitution, but I find it hard to imagine that they'll stop there.
Simplistic? Alarmist? Yes, maybe so. But the crap that's going on now makes all the crap under Reagan seem like nothing (though in retrospect, it probably paved the way for what we have now.)
So the essay I mentioned above concludes with this:
"'Passion' and the forces behind it need to be fought with passion and intelligence. I see a lot of intelligence among those opposed to the evangelical right, but not the passion that changes destinies."
You just wait...
