Veep Debate Exposes Religion's Role in War on Women

MSNBC'S LAWRENCE O'DONNELL and the many others who condemn Vice Presidential Debate Moderator Martha Raddatz for daring ask the candidates how their religious beliefs shape their views on abortion are clearly loathe to acknowledge the depth to which the United States has already been thrust into zero-tolerance Christian theocracy.

 

That such acknowledgement has become one of the paramount taboos of U.S. politics makes the critics' objections – whether spawned by pathological denial or deliberate deception – all the more indefensible. Three unimpeachably credible books on the subject, their revealing subtitles shown here in parentheses, have documented in terrifying detail this unprecedented threat to U.S. liberty. Chris Hedges' American Fascists (The Christian Right and the War on America) and Kevin Phillips' American Theocracy (The Peril and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil and Borrowed Money in the 21st Century) were released in 2006, while Jeff Sharlet's The Family (The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power) appeared in 2008, each the product of a major publisher. A 2005 Rasmussen poll  had already revealed 63 percent of the U.S. population believes the Bible is literally true – the core litmus test for whether one is a fundamentalist and thus presumably favorable to overthrowing constitutional governance and replacing it with biblical law, the Christian version of Sharia. And no one can deny the Republican Party has become the scimitar with which Christian fanatics are hacking away women's rights, their success measured by the fact women in 87 percent of the nation's counties now lack access to abortion. 

 

In this ever-more-reactionary context, the answers to Raddatz's question undoubtedly produced the most revealing moment of the entire presidential campaign, its relevance reaching far beyond the debate between Vice-President Joe Biden and Vice-Presidential Candidate Paul Ryan.

 

The candidates' views on women's rights – Obama/Biden generally supportive, Romney/Ryan fanatically opposed – have thereby emerged as the one defining issue in an election that, beneath its rhetorical histrionics, is otherwise scarcely more than a clash over the tactics and strategies of how capitalism is to complete its (inevitable) transition to fascism. The Democrats reflexively conceal their tyrannical agenda behind lip service to once-genuinely progressive values; the Republicans make no secret of their bigoted intent to abolish the rights of women and minorities and their genocidal plan to immediately destroy all remaining socioeconomic safety nets, thereby revealing themselves to be the modern-day equivalent of the Nazis. And like the Nazi Ruling Class, the Republican One Percent regards Christianity as a primary mechanism of social control. Meanwhile – their cooperation deftly concealed by corporate-controlled mass media – both parties quietly collaborate to end forever the American experiment in constitutional democracy: note the near-unanimous Congressional votes to abolish constitutional rights and grant the president the unlimited powers of a führer or a tsar.

 

Thus Biden's performance against Ryan – no question it was superb – does not diminish my deeper, more cynical suspicion President Barack Obama has been ordered to lose the election. With terminal climate change accelerating beyond all projections, the One Percent is racing to protect itself by converting the United States into the de facto Fourth Reich: absolute power and unlimited profit for the Ruling Class, total subjugation and genocidal poverty (including mass poisoning by genetically modified foods) for all the rest of us, the entire system increasingly sustained by Ayn Rand indoctrination, Christian prosperity gospel and the Big Business variant of rule by divine right.

 

Though it is a bit of an aside, I cannot but wonder how long it will take the Ruling Class to expunge Rand's atheism from her (numbingly tedious) writing as it is elevated into the U.S. equivalent of Mein Kampf.

 

In any case Obama's behavior in the next two debates will demonstrate whether his abysmal showing in the first bout was accidental or deliberate. If the latter, and if Romney therefore wins, those of us who are elderly, disabled and/or chronically impoverished – I am all three – have nothing to look forward to save the various forms of misery and death inflicted by deliberate abandonment. And those of us who are critics of capitalism will no doubt end our lives in prison or concentration camp.

 

Hence, given our only electoral choice is between the more gradual boiled-frog fascism of the Democrats and the blitzkrieg JesuNazism of the Republicans, I'm obviously voting for Obama/Biden.

*****

Elsewhere: Reflections on Capitalism, Theocracy and the Imbecility of Hope

 

When Reader Supported News ran a detailed indictment of Wall Street thievery (“...the same austerity philosophy that has been forced on Greece and Spain - and the same that is prompting President Obama and Mitt Romney to urge scaling back Social Security and Medicare”), I responded accordingly. As the negative numbers show – at least once going as high as -9 – many RSN readers were infuriated by my condemnation of the anti-intellectuality that renders the U.S. Left powerless in the face of capitalist savagery, a classic example of the proudly ignorant closed-mindedness that too often characterizes today's USians regardless of their ideology.

As I have said more times than I can count, such is capitalist governance: absolute power and unlimited profit for the Ruling Class, total subjugation and genocidal poverty for all the rest of us.

 

The questions – the only questions really – are (1) how to fight back and (2) whether the U.S. population has enough residual courage to mount an effective resistance.

Unfortunately, answering the first question requires the very intellectual processes the self-proclaimed Left despises and rejects: note for example the hateful anti-intellectuality characteristic of the Occupy Movement.

 

As to the second question, the answer is self-evident. Just as the Anti-Vietnam War Movement collapsed in the wake of the Kent State Massacre, so has Occupy – denied ideological solidarity by its frenzied anti-intellectuality – collapsed in the face of police brutality.

Thus – unless we are saved at the last minute by some miraculous awakening – have we doomed ourselves to inescapable slavery.

 

***

A former Arkansas Department of Human Services lawyer, an avowed Christian theocrat running as a Republican for a seat in the state's Legislature, is urging the death penalty for rebellious children, calling it “a tremendous incentive for children to give proper respect to their parents.” 

Alas, far too many of those who commented on this terrifying report obviously dismiss its significance as a harbinger of horrors to come:

We jeer this JesuNazi at our own peril.

He is the quintessence of Republicanism, the ultimate, Ruling-Class-financed purpose of which is imposing zero-tolerance Christian theocracy on the United States.

Charlie Fuqua makes no secret of this intent because he lives in the South, which is already a de facto theocracy.

 

Yes, murdering children for disobedience is in fact part of the Biblical Law the corporate-funded theocrats intend to impose. So is stripping women of all rights (including the right to vote). Likewise the public burning of unbelievers.

 

But surely, you say, the people who run corporations can't be that savage.

 

Guess again: consider Bhopal, Exxon Valdez, Deepwater Horizon. Remember Karen Silkwood.

 

Never forget the core truth of capitalism: infinite greed elevated to maximum virtue.

 

Then recognize that under theocracy, CEO's rule by divine right. Work orders are holy writ. As in the Parable of the Talents, the person who has least is punished with the most harshness. 

 

Unless we awaken, such is the future that awaits us. 

 

***

Meanwhile, in a detailed report on the surveillance devices by which the nation's school children are increasingly monitored, we learn the technology to enforce zero-tolerance theocracy is already being installed.

 

Which leaves me profoundly grateful I was born 72 years ago and lived the first decades of my life in a United States that truly was – at least for most Caucasians – a “sweet land of liberty.” But that realm no longer exists, nor – thanks to (self-inflicted) terminal climate change – will our species ever again know anything so wondrously comfortable and comforting:

 

When I view the future imposed on us by Ruling Class technology – a slave world overseen by zero-tolerance electronics – I am glad I am old. Surely I will be dead before consciousness becomes naught but horror.

 

LB/13 October 2012

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