{"id":1318,"date":"2012-03-26T22:35:09","date_gmt":"2012-03-27T02:35:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/apagansblog\/?p=1318"},"modified":"2012-03-27T21:20:34","modified_gmt":"2012-03-28T01:20:34","slug":"further-thoughts-on-our-rapidly-heating-up-culture-war","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/apagansblog\/2012\/03\/further-thoughts-on-our-rapidly-heating-up-culture-war.html","title":{"rendered":"Further thoughts on our rapidly heating up culture war"},"content":{"rendered":"

UPDATES below<\/strong><\/p>\n

<\/strong>For years the culture warriors have waged a slowly rising campaign against the women and the feminine in all forms other than the pregnant submissive housewife or cold-hearted ideological warriors such as Coulter, Palin, and Bachmann.\u00a0 One of the few authoritarian right wingers with solid academic credentials, Harvey Mansfield, wrote a book, Manliness<\/em><\/a> that argued if women were properly subordinate \u201cmanly\u201d men would behave themselves.\u00a0 Mostly it proved the Harvard Political Science Department has very low standards. Mansfield\u2019s argument was then elaborated in various ways by other right wing \u2018intellectuals,\u2019 but these efforts were wisely ignored by most people other than beltway pundits. (I read Manliness<\/em> so you don\u2019t have to.\u00a0 I assure you there is nothing manly about it.)<\/p>\n

At a more popular level, ignorant or cynical preachers and people who read Ayn Rand and never grew up attacked the feminine and all women who questioned the right of some to dominate others, the rich to dominate the poor, the strong to dominate the weak.\u00a0 The \u2018religious\u2019 ones seized the title \u201cpro-life\u201d because of their love of zygotes.\u00a0 Real human beings never were able to rank highly enough in their eyes for their lives to be valued, as could be seen by their support for the death penalty, torture, and war.\u00a0 But their flattering label stuck, accepted by the dim or the corrupt.<\/p>\n

They have had a long and poisonous run, but it may be finally coming to a blessed end, destroyed by its own excesses.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The moral bankruptcy of the culture warrior right is rapidly rising to the surface for all to see as enough Americans finally pushed back, having had enough of their self-righteous hatred for anyone different from themselves.\u00a0 It is appropriate that the hardest push back is from the women they\u00a0 denigrate and seek to completely subordinate.\u00a0 Now Black Americans are joining in, and many of even us old white guys who still have an ability to care about others are giving support.<\/p>\n

As I mentioned in an earlier post, their decline started with their attack on women and contraception.\u00a0 At this point they went beyond their false label of being \u201cpro-life\u201d to show to all that there was no stopping point in their attacks until women everywhere were subordinated to an American Taliban. When they provoked a huge push-back after their Koman adventure, one that is continuing,<\/a> they redoubled their efforts. But when their attempts to require doctors to lie to their female patients about abortion and its nonexistent relationship to breast cancer as well as allowing doctors to lie about diagnoses when telling the truth might cause a woman top choose an abortion, they provoked even harder push backs.<\/p>\n

At this point they seem to have cracked.\u00a0 With real opposition their veneer of humanity completely cracked, exposing the fear, anger and sometimes even hatred underneath.<\/p>\n

Never in my wildest dreams would I have imagined Bill O\u2019Reilly and Geraldo Rivera use wearing a hoodie as equal in responsibility for murder to the person pulling the trigger. Never would I have imagined Rush Limbaugh spending three days calling a private citizens a slut and asking to see her sex tapes because she testified to a congressional committee.\u00a0 These buffoons are coming unhinged.\u00a0 The anger that motivated them all along had been kept more or less under wraps so long as they were not widely challenged.\u00a0 But ever since the hit job on Planned Parenthood backfired they have gradually lost it. Here for example is a compilation of comments<\/a> by Fox News commentors on Trayvon Martin’s murder. This comes only days after they commented on the murder <\/a>of Afghan men, women, and children by an American soldier or soldiers. (These comments are difficult to read but they indicate the moral and spiritual lebvel of many on the hard core right. Now they are showing what they used to keep hidden.<\/p>\n

Everyone with a soul and the ability to read or watch TV knows Trayvon Martin was murdered.\u00a0 Even so, the past few days have seen a concerted effort to smear Trayvon Martin by right wingers nationally.\u00a0 Their effort is mostly based on complete lies <\/a>and the Sanford police department is assisting by providing irrelevant details of a minor nature in an effort to make the murdered kid look bad.\u00a0 Such as he apparently used marijuana<\/a>.\u00a0 All this does is convince me of the complete venality and worse of the men in the police department.\u00a0 Not just the chief needs firing. Inspired by the Sanford cops, other racist bigoted police officers in other cities are now showing their true colors as well<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The popular campaign against Limbaugh\u2019s advertisers succeeded beyond almost anyone\u2019s expectations. Perhaps buoyed by that success, some have taken aim at the<\/p>\n

National Organization for Marriage\u2019s attempted boycott of Starbucks for supporting marriage equality.\u00a0\u00a0 NOM has so far obtained under 20,000 supporting signatures, maybe way under.\u00a0 A counter petition in support of Starbucks\u2019 stand in favor of gay marriage netted over 250,000, and rapidly rising, despite having been started only a few days ago. It has swamped the bigots on the right<\/a>.<\/p>\n

You can sign the petition yourself<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile their War on Women is being exposed as even worse than I imagined.\u00a0 And I for one imagined it as very bad.\u00a0 It turns out that contraceptives are a major reason women\u2019s wages have increased as much as they did<\/a> during the 1990s.\u00a0 By eliminating contraceptives the right will not only dis-empower women\u2019s control over their futures, they will strike a hard blow against the rise in wages they have experienced over the past few decades.<\/p>\n

We need to immediately and always deny the right wing any legitimacy in their attempt to describe themselves as moral, pro-life, or motivated by \u201cvalues.\u201d\u00a0 They aren\u2019t.\u00a0 They have in many cases been exposed as the moral nihilists and sociopaths they are, and we need to push this line at every opportunity.\u00a0 Pagans and those other spiritual traditions that are opening themselves to the sacredness of the earth and physical embodiment need to push hard now to reclaim the moral high ground and identify the religious among the culture warriors as essentially demon-worshippers and the secular among them as nihilists.<\/p>\n

Coming next, (when I can get a good short account written rather than a book) the deeper levels of what we are witnessing.<\/p>\n

UPDATE<\/strong><\/p>\n

<\/strong>The National Organization for Marriage was just\u00a0 exposed through the leakage of secret documents as seeking to win by turning Blacks and white gays against one another<\/a>.\u00a0 I think it falls short of seeking “race war” as America Blog describes it, but the leaked documents demonstrate that the right wing achieves power only through creating hostility and division between people who absent their work would not have such problems.\u00a0 This, of course, was long the tactic of Southern elites to pit poor whites against Blacks.\u00a0 As enemies of our country they put the old Communist Party to shame.<\/p>\n

UPDATE 2<\/strong><\/p>\n

More right wing racism exposed<\/a> concerning Martin and lies they are telling about him.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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