"Confession to liberals"

[Emit]

I've posted before about the fundamentalist religious right wing and posed the question of "why" as far trying to discuss what drives these people. And I see related post frequently here at DU that do the same. Having never really been that much into religion, it does interest me to find out the "why" and "what" that drives the conservative fundamentalists.

Here's a post from another board I frequent, a discussion board that involves conservatives and liberals, in all their extreme and not-so-extreme forms. (Most of the far right supporters on that board are there because they are against the PBS NOW --Bill Moyers-- program and think they are fighting it.) It has been very enlightening to have discussions with the people on that board who are solid Bush & Co. supporters and, often, fanatical fundamentalists. It has taught me a lot about what drives and motivates them (which, IMHO, always reverts back to include the pro life/pro-choice issue--we should never underestimate how much of a driving force that is to these groups).

I thought this post insightful because, one, it offers a perspective from the fundamentalist point of view; and, two, it confirms a lot of what we do know about this group: that they perceive themselves almost as at war against liberalism or secularism.

My guess is that this person who posted this represents those 33% die-hards who still support Bush & Co. no matter what, because they are of the mind that the end justifies the means.

Some of you think we are trying to take America back to an earlier time.

In terms of civil rights - true civil rights, on the basis of race, creed, color, national origin - we don't want to turn those things back.

But to return to a time when social censure was enough to cause men and women to wash their faces and comb their hair, to cause young women and men to abstain from sexual relations before marriage, to a time when having a baby out of wedlock was a stigma, to a time when suits to prevent saying the pledge (or for a team to say a prayer before a game) were laughed out of court, and to a time when the killing of unborn children was considered murder - yes. Those ARE our goals, and we will fight ceaselessly, relentlessly, to meet them.

We have abandoned the defensive mode. We are on offense now. Yes, the left will resist. yes, they will fight wickedly. But we will never surrender the initiative again. We will act, and the left will react. Their actions will be governed by what we, the conservatives, are doing.

Even George W. Bush found that out. He forgot whose votes put him in office. And if we didn't hesitate to remind him, how much less will we hesitate to remind the Ted Kennedys, the Michael Lidlows, the Hillary Clintons, and the George Soroses?

The crusade is on many fronts - at home, in our neighborhoods, in careful monitoring of the schools our children attend, in our letters and alls to elected officials.

And these efforts are bearing fruit. Even in places like Charlotte, North Carolina, where the city government had most recently tried to govern the city as if it were someplace in east Massachusetts. There is a motion before the county commissioners right now to deny Charlotte-Mecklenburg services to people who are here illegally. And though the Democrats don't like it, they KNOW: people are watching, people who ARE here legally, who DO vote. The city will pass that motion. Businesses that refuse to document their employees citizenship will loss contracts. Illegals won't find their garbage being picked up. Their faucets will bleed out only air. Social services will be deaf to their entreaties. And taxpaying North Carolinians will soon stop seeing their hard-earned tax dollars going to provide services to people with no right to be here.

Of course, liberals will use that one available avenue - the federal courts. But be advised, federal judges: mess with us, and you'll get a trip back to Poli Sci 101, and the meaning of federalism.

We cannot be stopped by this party, or that party. We are determined to see that anyone in government, in any part of government, knows the real source from whom power flows in a republic like the United States.

http://discussions.pbs.org/viewtopic.pbs?t=42734&start=0

[marbuc]

1. what specifically about NOW do those folks object to?

nt

[Emit]

18. Trying to find specific examples

Essentially, they view PBS as being a mouth piece for liberals, and they are constantly making remarks about it being funded by government monies. They really bash Moyers. One guy who was eventually banned for spamming the 'Humanist Manifesto' constantly (His claim was that those who do not believe as he does are all supporting the 'evil' Secular Humanist 'religion' whether we know it or not--and he went to great effort to prove that leftist liberalism is a 'religion' that they have been forced to live under for the past 30 years and now it's their turn to be 'on top'), blatantly said that it was his solemn duty to get onto the PBS discussion boards and expose PBS (NOW, Moyers) for their liberal, 'religious left' propaganda, and that he would remain there until PBS changed its way, or something crazy like that.

Here's an example, another of this guy's posts:

http://discussions.pbs.org/viewtopic.pbs?t=28642&highlight=bill+moyers

With those goals in mind, in mid-May, the radicals held a confab called the "National Conference for Media Reform" in St. Louis. Many of the speakers at this hard-left hootenanny had trouble containing their extreme disdain for America.

~snip~

Ironically, the keynote speaker for the anti-capitalist confab was PBS omnipresence Bill Moyers, who squeezed a personal fortune out of PBS Home Video and expensive book spinoffs of his pompous TV work. Moyers devoted his Castro-length address to attacking the threatening presence of Ken Tomlinson, who has done the dastardly deed of documenting the dramatic liberal biases of the old Moyers show "Now."


Earth to PBS: when you are under attack for being a nest of left-wingers, it might not be the best strategy to let your most identifiable left-wing stars go to radical-left conferences and attack conservatives as evil. That tends to exacerbate your image problem, see.


Moyers announced that the definition of objectivity should be turned upside down for PBS: "Objectivity was not satisfied by two opposing people offering competing opinions, leaving the viewer to split the difference. I came to believe that objective journalism means describing the object being reported on, including the little fibs and fantasies, as well as the big lie of people in power."


You can practically smell the gunpowder in that loaded statement. But to Moyers – it’s objectivity.


Then Moyers grew sillier. He said that under the Bush administration and the corporate media, Americans were growing into "an unconscious people, an indoctrinated people, a people fed only partisan information and opinion that confirm their own bias, a people made morbidly obese in mind and spirit by the junk food of propaganda." Let the giggles flow as we ponder how Moyers ever meant to fix this spirit by making shows like "Now," where the vast majority of his segments offered no troublesome disagreements with his personal orthodoxy. Or consider his PBS documentary "Trade Secrets" bashing the chemical industry, which included only one solitary point of view: that of Moyers, the media monopoly unto himself.

[Tierra_y_Libertad]

2. I like the part where God makes people comb their hair.

And, of course, Christians never, ever, screw out of wedlock.

The poor sod should read his beloved bible..especially the dirty parts.

[buddysmellgood]

37. Don't you know? Jesus will come again...just to make sure we groom.

[sinkingfeeling]

3. His first statement on civil rights does not compute with the rest of

his bulls**t. So he's a liar just like all the rest of them.

[triguy46]

16. civil rights meaning "do what I demand you do...

think as I demand you think"

[rucky]

29. anti-gay, anti-woman, agenda is anti Civil Rights. period.

add anti-muslim, anti-left (obviously), and plenty of anti- type policies that just happen to affect minorities.

[Schmajo]

4. Note the word "crusade"

in the post. Just like a thousand years ago, these Crusaders would not hesitate to use the sword to conquor anyone that believes differently. And, just like a thousand years ago, most of them are duped by leaders who only are interested in their own accumulation of wealth and power.

[triguy46]

15. "Repent or die" is another way of putting it...

the jihad is at hand.

[Emit]

24. Agreed.

And I think this guy truly believes that his 'brand' of religion is going to solve some of the ills of the nation. They are being lead in that Machiavellian way where the powers that be use religion to control the masses. The timing was ripe, and Bush & Co. knew this, with a great deal of these fanatics ready and waiting for 'their' turn to be in control. They have been made to believe this, IMHO, because their brand of religion is more like a brainwashing cult than true Christianity. Scary, indeed.

[Sandpiper]

5. Nothing I didn't already know

The far right's political goals are:

1) Move the country backward

2) Force everyone to bow down to their religious tribal taboos


Coming from a predominantly right wing religious family, I've known this for a long time.

[Tamyrlin79]

21. Me, too.

My whole family is wingnuts. My brother "loves" O'Reilly, brought up the "war on christmas" at Thanksgiving, and when I said that he was wrong and stores should say whatever they feel is appropriate, my mom accused me of being "brainwashed". And I told her that, no, I think for myself, and that the difference between her view and mine is that I believe in freedom of religion and she does not. As she put it "all those other people are going to Hell". So, of course, they don't count.

[Loonman]

6. east Massachusetts?

:wtf:

[patrice]

7. Valid words of warning . . .

"But we will never surrender the initiative again. We will act, and the left will react. Their actions will be governed by what we, the conservatives, are doing."

[Milo_Bloom]

8. This is the problem....

"But to return to a time when social censure was enough to cause men and women to wash their faces and comb their hair, to cause young women and men to abstain from sexual relations before marriage, to a time when having a baby out of wedlock was a stigma, to a time when suits to prevent saying the pledge (or for a team to say a prayer before a game) were laughed out of court, and to a time when the killing of unborn children was considered murder - yes. Those ARE our goals, and we will fight ceaselessly, relentlessly, to meet them. "


Some of this only existed in people's minds, not in reality. There was never a time where people "abstained from sexual relations", they just didn't speak of it. But, do you believe for a second they weren't doing it?? Did people get pregnant out of wedlock? Sure. The "stigma" part of it and the laws against safe legal abortion led to more backroom abortions, deaths of young women and baby's left in dumpsters, but it was all in the great unseen, so they will never admit it. It is because of the things that were happening that the laws and attitudes were ultimately adjusted. Kinda like getting rid of prohibition because it didn't solve the problem.

Just like passing laws against using undocumented workers won't stop people from using undocumented workers... it will just change the method they use... so in the end those taxpaying north carolinians won't see any more tax dollars in their pocket, but instead they will be spent to try and enforce the rules that won't be effective anyway.

Luckily, their numbers are shrinking, as the people who fool themselves about what the past really was shrink as well.

[Laelth]

11. Amen.

Prior to the invention of the birth control pill, most marriages happened because somebody got pregnant. There's nothing new about sex, and there's nothing new about premarital sex. It wasn't invented in the 1960s.

And social censure didn't cause people to stay clean, either. Look at some pictures of Chicago's citizenry around the turn of the century. We are much cleaner now, in general, than we were then.

These people want to take us back to a time that never existed. The want to force us all into their fantasy. They are welcome to their fantasies, but I won't sit by idly while they try to force their fantasies on me.

:mad:

-Laelth

[Sandpiper]

12. These Books should be required reading for all Righties

http://images.amazon.com/images/P/0465090974.01._BO2,204,203,200_PIsitb-dp-500-arrow,TopRight,45,-64_AA240_SH20_SCLZZZZZZZ_.jpg

http://images.amazon.com/images/P/0465090923.01._BO2,204,203,200_PIsitb-dp-500-arrow,TopRight,45,-64_AA240_SH20_SCLZZZZZZZ_.jpg



http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0465090974/002-3390282-6035236?v=glance&n=283155

[TahitiNut]

26. Yep. They're victims of Hays Code history, thinking, and revisionism.

Their entire sense of 'reality' has been scrubbed and filtered by their dogmatic mental Hays Code, creating a mythological childhood world of dancing elephants and benign fathers prtecting them from all the nasties "out there."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hays_code

[Emit]

32. Wow. Thanks for those suggestions

I just read an excerpt from the first one. Boy, did that hit the nail on the head with what this guy is saying. I'm gonna take your advice, whether you were serious or not, and pass it on to old TonyWalk:

The Way We Never Were:

The Way We Wish We Were

"When I begin teaching a course on family history, I often ask my students to write down ideas that spring to mind when they think of the 'traditional family.' Their lists always include several images...

...Such visions of past family life exert a powerful emotional pull on most Americans, and with good reason, given the fragility of many modern commitments. The problem is not only that these visions bear a suspicious resemblance to reruns of old television series, but also that the scripts of different shows have been mixed up: June Cleaver suddenly has a Grandpa Walton dispensing advice in her kitchen; Donna Stone, vacuuming the living room in her inevitable pearls and high heels, is no loner married to a busy modern pediatrician bu tot a small-town sheriff who, like Andy Taylor of "The Andy Griffith Show" solves community problems through informal, old-fashioned common sense.

Like most visions of a 'golden age,' the 'traditional family' my students describe evaporates on closer examination. It is an ahistorical amalgam of structures, values, and behaviors that never co-existed in the same time and place..."

[TahitiNut]

25. In other words, "everyone back into their closets!!"

It's their version of Krystallnacht. Fascism reigns.

[buddysmellgood]

38. They want to return to a time where we ignored all of the ills of society.

It's much easier to be a Christian if you don't know anything is wrong.

[Sapphocrat]

9. "Crusade."

I'd like to say it's enlightening, but it merely confirms the Wrong Wing's deep-seated, McCarthyist paranoia.

If you reply to this wingnut, remind him/her that it's the other way around: The Left is on the offense now, and the Right is playing defense. And badly, at that.

[GreenPartyVoter]

17. Ayuh

[Der Blaue Engel]

10. That last bit about illegal immigrants

made my blood run cold. What a hateful, hateful human being. I used to be a fundamentalist, and to this day, I cannot understand where they got the idea that Jesus would spit on people. These people would make Jesus weep.

[Bunny]

19. Isn't that the most hateful thing?

Their faucets will bleed air? My my my. How very compassionate. And who is Michael Lidlow?

[Emit]

20. He probably meant Michael Moore n/t

[Tamyrlin79]

23. Lidlow=Newdow

I think he was attempting to refer to Michael Newdow, the atheist who challenged "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance.

[LSK]

27. Jesus would not accept descrimination based on a countries borders

How deranged and sick these people are. If a person was born in Mexico/China/whatever comes here for a better life, he must file the proper paperwork in order to be treated like a human being?

[OnionPatch]

13. I think her problem is

going to be that she doesn't realize she's waging war on the vast majority of the country. The fundies were able to scheme and maneuver some of their agenda into place while we were all sleeping, but guess what; People are waking up. If there's one thing about Americans, they are independent-spirited. They aren't going to take kindly to theocracy.

[indigo32]

39. Exactly

They ARE a minority, and they are GOING to go too far.

[triguy46]

14. I fully support their intent to comb their mullets.

"Someplace in east Massachusetts" = the outskirts of hell to these dorks.

This is nothing moer than their periodic call to the town square to burn witches, in this case kennedy, hillary, et al. It takes periodic witch burning to keep the fundies focused and happy.

Their last sentence is their dedication and threat for a fundie jihad. I hear hate, I sense pending violence from these. "Repent or Die" is their mantra, the clarion call of their self described "crusade."

[EC]

22. I am really sick and tired of these people thinking they

can control what goes on in peoples homes, minds and lives...They are intruders and will be treated as such by me...


As the song goes ...It's my life and I'll do what I want
It's my mind and I'll think what I want

[Emit]

34. It's really twisted

that, on the one hand, these religious fundamentalists call for less government intrusion into our lives, and, on the other hand, they try to regulate everything from the crotch up.

Unfortunately, what has resulted is less intrusion and regulation only as it applies to corporations, and more intrusion and regulation as it applies to people.

[depakid]

28. This is why I hate going to North Carolina

because every time I go back there, I hear some ignorant southerner mouthing off like this. It never fails.

And every time, I can't wait to get back on the plane to the West Coast- where I take a long hot shower- just to make sure that all of the dirt's washed off.

I'm sure we have plenty crap like this out here- but there's just something about certain types of people in that neck of the woods that really rubs me wrong.

[EstimatedProphet]

30. So this guy's point is:

"We don't want to discriminate against blacks or women, but we want to humiliate people that have children before marriage, force everyone to pray to Christ, and stone homosexuals"...

Wow. He really IS enlightened!

[Emit]

31. Reads more like a 'Shame-based initiative' n/t

[Arkana]

33. Fuck off, fundies.

You'll take this country back to the 1950s over my dead, decaying body, you Bible sucking sacks of crap.

Signed, a proud Massachusetts resident.

EDIT: One to add and one to clear up an embarrassing error.

[SPKrazy]

35. This guy watched too much Leave It To Beaver

And thinks that is how the world really was.

What a loser.

He's going on the offense?

Well I guess he better guard his flank.

[buddysmellgood]

36. Now THAT is the America that Jesus would build. Doncha think?