Church and State II

A current column by Pulitzer Prize winning columnist Leonard Pitts Jr. starts out:

It was about 25 years ago that a magazine article first called to my attention something called the Christian right. The story depicted a movement of religious fundamentalists who sought to radically restructure American life - mandating school prayer, creationism and censorship. I remember thinking the article was a little alarmist.

Actually, it was prescient.

That realization crept over me much as Christian fundamentalism has crept over American life: steadily. The movement - well-organized, well-funded and with true believer zeal - has made itself the primary ideological engine of the Republican Party, climbing to power from school boards to state legislatures to Congress to the White House.

And along the way, books were burned and banned. Religion masquerading as science elbowed its way into classrooms. Legislation requiring recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance became law. Pharmacists, citing religious objections, refused to fill prescriptions for birth-control pills. A lawmaker suggested unmarried pregnant women be prohibited from teaching in schools.

And that movement came to seem a scary thing, indeed.

Here's another liberal attacking the religious right. Let's take a close look at his accusations:

And along the way, books were burned and banned. People have been burning books for centuries. Has there been an increase in the last 25 years? Has there been a government-sanctioned book burning? Rush Limbaugh's books have been burned. Is that done by the Religious Right? I check the lists during Banned Books month - we're mainly talking about school libraries here. Are some books inappropriate for students in their mid-teens? Yes, of course.

Religion masquerading as science elbowed its way into classrooms. Ok, he's got me here. I've read a lot of creationist literature and it has huge holes in it's science.

Legislation requiring recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance became law. How does this apply? Since when is the Pledge of Allegiance a religious issue? When I was in school, everyone said the Pledge daily. That was stopped around 1970. During the 1980s legislators thought that it should be revived. This was a campaign issue in 1988, pretty near the beginning of his 25 years. It's inclusion here indicates that he is uncomfortable with the Pledge and expects his readership to agree.

Pharmacists, citing religious objections, refused to fill prescriptions for birth-control pills. This has happened once or twice. One incident that I remember was a violation of company policy. More important, it has nothing to do with the government. I thought that he was writing about the Religious Right's rise to power. Citing isolated incidents of actions by private citizens proves nothing.

A lawmaker suggested unmarried pregnant women be prohibited from teaching in schools. A lawmaker? Was this a Congressman? A Senator? A state legislator? A candidate who was not elected? A local school board member? How about some specifics? Pitts is talking about changes over the last 25 years. That long ago, this would have been school policy. Legislators would not need to be involved. 30 years ago, schools still provided private tutors for pregnant girls so that they would not mix with the student body. There is a convincing body of evidence that says single-parent children are bad for society. It is no wonder that there is a legislator somewhere who would like to make this public policy.

I choose to believe it means people are beginning to have their doubts about the new American theocracy. Maybe they are looking at the theocracies of the Middle East and Africa and asking if these are really models to which we should aspire. Maybe they're realizing that for all its pious moralizing, the fundamentalist movement is less about right than self-righteousness, less about faith than intrusion and less about God than power.

Here we are again - America's Religious Right is just the same as the Taliban or Saudi Arabia. At worst, the people he cites would like to roll social evolution back 40-50 years. To equate this with regimes where public whipping and mutilation is still carried out is an outrageous slander.