What We Really Talk About When We Talk About Health Care "a..Bible Belt whose buckle has come undone

[Shallah Kali]

http://www.religiondispatches.org/blog/politics/1762/what_we_really_talk_about_when_we_talk_about_health_care

This is not a public discussion, certainly not civil discourse. Indeed, it resembles nothing so much as an uprising among a post-modern Bible Belt whose buckle has come undone. But an uprising against what, exactly?

As Matthew Avery Sutton’s recent post about apocalypticism and the president shows, there are plenty of reasons to think health care reform for many fundamentalist and conservative evangelicals may well be just the latest, most visible evidence that Obama is antichrist. For others, as Frank Schaeffer suggested in another recent piece, opposing health care reform participates in a generations-long effort among evangelicals to aggrandize political power to themselves by obstructing democracy.

More broadly, these examples of religious extremism exist on a continuum of disturbing responses among many evangelicals and others on the far right to Barack Obama’s election to the presidency, and of large progressive majorities in Congress.

Just this week, the Southern Poverty Law Center reported that militia and other paramilitary group formation is on the rise, eerily echoing the kind of activity that preceded the run-up to the Oklahoma City bombing. It’s a chilling report, one suggesting that – without a step away from the brink – we may well look back at incidents such as the murder of George Tiller and the shootings at the Holocaust museum and see the beginnings of a resurgent vigilantism among religious extremists during the age of Obama.

What’s this got to do with the health care debate?

For starters, there’s the guy in New Hampshire who brought a gun (and a sign about watering the tree of democracy with blood from time to time) to a protest outside a recent presidential forum on health care. Interviewing the guy later on Hardball, Chris Matthews was baffled by this, but it makes a certain, scary sense to me.

Having spent a lifetime immersed in the fundamentalist evangelical culture of rural America (first as a Southern Baptist, later as a scholar of religious culture), I’m convinced that all the sound and fury generated by the health care debate is not about health care at all, but about a segment of white, Christian America finding in the health care controversy a sufficiently capacious political occasion to give expression to an intense but incoherent feeling of being displaced from the seat of cultural dominance.

http://www.religiondispatches.org/blog/politics/1762/what_we_really_talk_about_when_we_talk_about_health_care

[stray cat]

1. The people at the town halls are paper tigers - look at the donors instead

follow the money!

[Shallah Kali]

2. This article helps explain why people are opposing something which can only help them

While they are being incited, coached, and manipulated by the moneyed special interests these are genuinely scared and ticked off people. I have been watching Maddow and others put together the money trail to the puppet masters behind this. It is obvious why the have-mores would oppose health care for all. It is obvious why the GOP is doing this - to take down the dems and Obama at any cost so they can win, or at least make a semi-convince steal, some seats in congress back in the next big election.

What is not so obvious is why so many people are motivated to come out screaming and yelling against something that would make their lives so much better. How can short of paying each one $$$ can those special intersts maniupulate the rage and fear bubbling up in these people to oppose their own best interests like leading lemmings off a cliff.