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9-04-05, 9:35 am
The eminent biologisgt J.B.S. Haldane once said, famously, that "the Universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose."
Mahajan's addendum: The right wing is not only crazier than we suppose, but crazier than we can suppose.
Via Americablog, this just in from Agape Press, organ of the American Families Association:
Rev. Bill Shanks, pastor of New Covenant Fellowship of New Orleans, also sees God's mercy in the aftermath of Katrina -- but in a different way. Shanks says the hurricane has wiped out much of the rampant sin common to the city.
The pastor explains that for years he has warned people that unless Christians in New Orleans took a strong stand against such things as local abortion clinics, the yearly Mardi Gras celebrations, and the annual event known as "Southern Decadence" -- an annual six-day "gay pride" event scheduled to be hosted by the city this week -- God's judgment would be felt.
“New Orleans now is abortion free. New Orleans now is Mardi Gras free. New Orleans now is free of Southern Decadence and the sodomites, the witchcraft workers, false religion -- it's free of all of those things now," Shanks says. "God simply, I believe, in His mercy purged all of that stuff out of there -- and now we're going to start over again."
Another case in point: Fred Phelps and the mouth-breathers of godhatesfags.com picketing the funerals of soldiers killed in Iraq and saying that these deaths are God's punishment to the United States for tolerating homosexuals.
These are, of course, extreme elements of the right wing, but they are also not aberrations but epitomes of its exclusionary logic.
Patriotism, jingoism, and old-time religion are the horses the right wing rode in on; they all derive their true force not from great respect for our political system or for personal virtue, but rather from pure tribalism, the division of humanity based on a simple binary exclusion.
But if you start by privileging the nation and the Volk above all, next you exclude those members of the nation who don't do the same. Sometimes, they become greater enemies than the various foreign terrorists and subhumans of the rest of the world.
The Revs. Shanks and Phelps carry that so far that they have turned that exclusionary logic on the right wing -- especially Phelps, who is now deriding a war that only the right wing really supports.
Counterproductive from the point of view of taking power, but, as we Texans know, you dance with the one what brung ya, even if it happens to be mindless prejudice and unreason.
From Empire Notes
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