Theocracy, Socialism, and Rationalizations Thereof

In the latest counterpoint in a recent blog-fight, Gene Vilensky has written a rejoinder to my response to his response to me (clear?). When last we spoke of this, I charged him with trying to bait me into taking a position I disavow, and with asserting a false equivalence between People for the American Way (PFAW from here on out) and like-minded groups on the one hand and politicized Evangelicalism on the other.

Gene responds to that charge by revising his initial claim: It's not that PFAW is as bad as the Family Research Council and the James Dobson coterie; it's that they're worse! He first acquits Dobson and his comrades of advocating theocracy and then lets us know that the real threat to Constitutional liberty comes from left-wing ideology and liberal special interest lobbies.

I wish to revise my earlier charge as well. It's not that Gene made an incorrect equivalence claim; it's that he's doing everything he can rhetorically to avoid serious consideration of what the religious right is, what it stands for, or the scope of its influence. What else but intentionally question-begging frivolity could explain the preposterous standard of proof he asks me to meet before he will acknowledge that the goal of the Christian right, as I put it originally, is "reciprocal religious control of government and government control of religion":

Well, color me stupid, but I have not heard a single statement from Dobson, Weyrich, et al. advocating theocracy, just as PFAW doesn't explicitly advocate socialism. That was the entire point of my post: the same hyperbolic hysteria Dan espouses about Wyrich/Dobson could as easily be used against PFAW. If Dan can provide me a quote where Weyrich, Dobson, et al. in fact said, that there should either be "a law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof," I would reconsider my position.

I'm not going to "color" him stupid, because this has nothing to do with intelligence. On the contrary, this has everything to do with having sufficient intellectual courage to criticize one's own side publicly and unreservedly when it is clearly in the wrong (and incidentally, in case it's thought that I'm the slightest bit reluctant to criticize the left, just peruse the archives of this blog a bit).

I'll bite the bullet and answer an unserious question seriously. Let P = the establishment clause of the First Amendment. Dobson, I'm almost supremely confident, has never said "~P," at least not in a public forum. On the other hand, I've heard more than one prominent evangelical, including the good Revs. Falwell and Robertson, if you want names, stating straightforwardly that they don't think the Constitution creates a separation of church and state (that's almost verbatim and I invite you to lexis and google me if you're skeptical). Now that that's out of the way, can we please rejoin the reality-based community? I hope that we can, because Dobson's discipline to this point, as far as I know, in not uttering a direct repudation of the First Amendment that could only serve to discredit him and his movement is neither impressive nor important. Whereas it's exceedingly important that on the obvious counsel of you-know-who, or perhaps on the understanding that Dobson doesn't actually need to be asked what he wants, only given it, the government has been spending federal tax revenue on abstinence-only sex ed programs.

"What's so bad about that?" asks Gene in keeping with his apology for public school prayer. (A: If you can't figure that out, I'm not sure there's a point in trying to explain.) Aside from being foundationally premised on sectarian Christian dogma (sorry, that's what's so bad about public school prayer), and aside from having had zero verifiable positive impact on public health (though that doesn't change anything from a libertarian standpoint), these programs impart to public school students such valuable lessons as that "half the gay male teenagers in the United States have tested positive for the AIDS virus," that "touching a person's genitals 'can result in pregnancy,'" that "[a] 43-day-old fetus is a 'thinking person,'" and in a move that might be actionable for the condom industry, that "condoms fail to prevent HIV transmission as often as 31 percent of the time in heterosexual intercourse." This isn't even close to an exhaustive list, and one would have to have a pretty strong imaginative organ indeed to come up with a pro-abstinence (or anti-gay) lie that these characters would feel is beneath their standards for admission into scientific discourse. My favorite little pornographic detail is the pathetic excuse-making on the part of the professional abstinence-only propagandist whom the Washington Post interviewed:

McIlhaney acknowledged that his group, which publishes "Sexual Health Today" instruction manuals, made a mistake in describing the relationship between a rare type of infection caused by chlamydia bacteria and heart failure.

It was an innocent mistake that could have happened to anyone, I'm sure.

Shall we go further? How about one more example? Consider the story of Alabama Congressman Gerald Allen, no doubt a man of "deep religious convictions," as our intrepid Bush-hating media like to euphemize. Congressman Allen might have spent his time in the legislature doing important things like thwarting Osama bin Laden's murderous designs on Tuscaloosa, or introducing an anti-Confederate-flag-burning amendment into the state constitution, but his priorities are a bit different, as his hometown newspaper reports:

A bill by Rep. Gerald Allen, R-Cottondale, would prohibit the use of public funds for "the purchase of textbooks or library materials that recognize or promote homosexuality as an acceptable lifestyle." Allen said he filed the bill to protect children from the "homosexual agenda."

"Our culture, how we know it today, is under attack from every angle," Allen said in a press conference Tuesday.

Allen said that if his bill passes, novels with gay protagonists and college textbooks that suggest homosexuality is natural would have to be removed from library shelves and destroyed.

"I guess we dig a big hole and dump them in and bury them," he said.

I guess there's a kerosene shortage in Alabama or something. Among the works to be buried are Cat On A Hot Tin Roof, The Color Purple, The Picture of Dorian Gray, and Brideshead Revisted. That's just the short abridged list-for-explanatory-purposes of Kim Chandler of the Birmingham News. If the criterion is applied consistently, I don't see how more than half the dialogues of Plato could be spared, and it's a national disgrace that that should even be a plausible thing to say (don't worry, it is a plausible thing to say).

Andrew Sullivan, who confesses to having once "read these kinds of stories and dismiss[ed] them," asks a perfectly appropriate question: [I]n Karl Rove's Republican party, how is this in any way out of place? Before Gene non-answers by linking to a story about petty corruption at a Democratic fundraiser, I'll admit that I didn't cite the question merely for rhetorical purposes, and that I already know the fact of that matter. It's not out of place. At all. If it were out of place, Congressman Allen wouldn't have been invited to dinner at the White House (with the president) only a few days after his offering his proposal for removing literary sodomy from Alabama schools.

Lastly, and I hope this doesn't count as offering one datum more than I confined myself to, there's the story of another effort at inserting creationism into biology classes underlying the media criticism of the previous post, which is a token of an increasingly and therefore depressingly common type.

The agenda of the religious right isn't a mystery. Gene's efforts at making it seem mysterious amount to "shameless cocooning bullshit" (now I owe a royalty to Mickey Kaus). More salient, perhaps, is what follows from a point I made in my original YDN piece on this issue: President Bush is a member of his own religious base. I know that Gene was a Bush supporter, and that he also doesn't believe in Evangelical dogma. Now, democratic citizens have a civic obligation to accept the consequences of getting their way in an election. Doing whatever first-order logic will allow in order to avoid brushing up against the reality of the consequences of one's vote is neither an effective nor an original way of shirking that responsibility, but shirking that responsibility is precisely what it is.

Enough about the religious right. A little part of me dies every time I write about them. I want to get back to Gene's comparison of PFAW and, let's say, FRC, which was fallacious before and is morally repugnant now. The errors he makes in that comparison---and I call them "errors" in order to maintain a semantic neutrality, not to suggest they have anything in common with what goes on when one misspells a word---come in two basic varieties: scope errors and substantive errors. I didn't give nearly enough attention to the former in my previous reply to Gene, so I'll try to do so now. One of the reasons that Gene's one-for-one substitution of terms produces a disanalogy is that Ralph Neas could not possibly remove a Democrat he didn't like from a committee appointment (or, as the case of Specter turned out, force his moral castration). Another is that it's just laughable to suggest that senators' and congressmen's knees buckle in fear of the wrath of Neas. Whereas the Republican presidential campaign, and virtually the whole of its domestic policy, is crafted to appease the Christian right faction in general, and one man, Dobson, in particular. That's part one of Gene's scope error, the notion that an insidery pressure group like PFAW wields influence over the Democrats that's even remotely comparable to FRC's influence over the Republicans.

Part two of the scope error follows from part one: The power of the PFAW to implement actual policy or even advocate for implementable policy (as opposed to influencing policy positions) is a microfraction of the equivalent power of the FRC. With no legislation coming before the House of Representatives that doesn't have the support of the majority of Republicans, Ralph Neas's influence over policy is quite a bit closer to my influence over policy than James Dobson's. By contrast, it would be difficult to imagine any lunatic proposal of the Christian right not getting a hearing at least before the House. Furthermore, by what mechanism, exactly, did a proposed Constitutional Amendment to make gays into permanent second-class citizens end up on the floor of the Senate? Who phoned that one in? That disgrace should have been the Kronstadt moment for a morally conscientious Republican. I'm sad to say that it wasn't in Gene's case. I hope he can at least recognize that "theocracy," if it means anything at all, refers to an effort to insert a sectarian religious doctrine into the Constitution. (And do spare me a tortured defense of the FMA as secular policy---it would have 1% of the support it enjoys if not for its religious component, and it would be even more vile, if that's possible, since it would be an argument for arbitrary discrimination for the sake of arbitrary discrimination.)

As for the substantive errors of Gene's comparison, one of them belongs largely to the time-wasting subgroup of the category of unseriousness about real advocacy of theocratic governance. Why, he asks, wouldn't socialism be a violation of the Ninth Amendment provision which states:

The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.(?)

Because socialism doesn't have the slightest thing to do with construing one Constitutional right so as to "deny or disparage" another. I don't really know what else to say except that this objection isn't even close to germane.

Gene might have an inkling that socialism is a red herring, since he adds the disclaimer, "suppose even that socialism is a bad example." He then runs to a fairly predictable fallback position, namely leftist views on gun rights. He's on stronger ground here legally and constitutionally, but is only exacerbating the problem, and I wouldn't keep using this term if there were a more appropriate one, of moral unseriousness. I'm for gun rights on libertarian grounds; I got there all by my lonesome and I don't need the ultra-liberal, wait, scratch that, liberal, hold on, better yet, somewhat liberal Lawrence Tribe to enunciate that position for me. I also think that barring the sale of weapons to convicted violent felons is roughly analagous to the exceptions on free speech for direct incitement to violence: both make me uncomfortable as a libertarian, but I'm not sure how to accept the jurisprudence on one but not both. That said, if PFAW is in fact in favor of overturning private gun ownership rights, and not just in favor of a gun control regime, then they certainly are in favor of overturning a Constitutional right. It just so happens that this particular right is as relevant for assessing the health of Constitutional freedom and liberal government as a Constitutional right to sugar cones with all purchases of ice cream. In other words, not bloody important. Build a duplicate America in which everything stays constant but there are no guns and no right to own guns, and the relative freedom of the society moves maybe one iota. Build a duplicate America in which gays have been legislated out of civic life, in which the content of public school curricula is a function of commensurability with biblical literalism, in which private sexual conduct is subject to criminal sanction, in which...I could go on and on, but Gene knows all the examples already, and if he's being honest with himself, he'll acknowledge that they are part of the religious right's vision of our country's future. The point is that in the second case, the circumstances are utterly different.

I don't really know what else to say. It could be that Gene and I inhabit different epistemic universes, but I'd like to think that's not the case. My only request of his response, if he responds, is that he give some, any indication that he that he's willing to call theocracy theocracy, and that he understands why theocracy's a bad thing in the first place.