Tags
abortion rights, Conservatives, Dean Heller, gay marriage, Iowa, Republicans, Rick Perry, S.1931, tax breaks, The Family Leader, wealthy
First Conservative Church of America?
In the past two weeks Conservatives dropped any pretense about their goal of creating new laws that will be used as weapons anyone who violates their version of religion. At the same time Conservatives in Congress also continued to elevate the millionaires and billionaires to demigod status.
Few would deny that Evangelical Christians control most if not all religious conversations among Conservatives, but that was even more apparent on the Saturday before Thanksgiving when the Iowa-based, ultra-Conservative religious group, The Family Leader, hosted a round-table discussion with six of the most prominent Republican Presidential candidates. Prior to the start of the two-hour event, organizers spent 45 minutes outlining their plan for national domination by controlling who will be elected to a political office.
Groups like The Family Leader, Focus on the Family, and The Truth Project hope to create a “worldview” in the United States that uses local, state, and federal laws as their weapons to enforce their mythological beliefs on all citizens. It was hard to argue with their ability to control Conservative politics with six Republican candidates at their beck and call.
Paul Kiser
Conservatives have worked to pass laws that denied equal rights to Gay Americans, created impossible building codes for women’s health clinics that honored a woman’s freewill, and define birth control as murder. The Iowa event made it clear that Republican Presidential candidates have nothing but praise and support to groups who seek to replace fair government with interpretive mythology.
After the event, Conservative Presidential candidate Rick Perry joined Michele Bachmann and Rick Santorum in signing The Family Leader’s Pledge to Marriage. The vow that implies that being Gay is a learned behavior (presumably that can be deprogrammed,) that African-Americans were better parents when they were slaves, and demands the candidate commit to 14 points, including an Amendment to the United States Constitution that forbids legal Gay marriage, and a rejection of Sharia Islam law.
Conservative's Deity: Wealth
In the same week Conservatives offered the economy of the United States as a sacrifice to the richest Americans by rejecting any plan to secure America’s future that would include a restoration of tax revenue from those who owe the most to this country for their wealth. Despite Conservative attempts to spin it as the fault of the Democrats, the simple fact is that there was only one issue that kept Congress from creating a solution to America’s current and future debt issue and that is imposing fair taxes on those with incomes over $1 million a year.
This week appointed Senator Dean Heller from Nevada joined in the worship of the rich by authoring Senate Bill 1931 (S.1931) which proposes legislation to temporarily extend tax cuts for middle and lower incomes by taking jobs and money from some of the very people the temporary tax cuts are supposed to benefit. Heller, a former Bank of America consultant and stockbroker who, according to the Las Vegas Sun, is worth between $2.5 and $11 million, offered the new law in order to shelter the wealthy, including himself, from the Democrats proposal that would re-establish some of the tax revenue that was cut during the Bush administration.
As an apparent joke to the wealthy and an insult to those who are not, Heller included provisions in the bill that millionaires; 1) could, if they felt like it, donate money to the United States Treasury to lower America’s debt, 2) would not be able to collect unemployment nor food stamps (we allow millionaires to collect unemployment and food stamps now?), and 3) make them pay more for Medicare, assuming they can’t afford private health insurance. All three provisions are symbolic gestures that pale in comparison to the jobs and wages lost by the rest of Senate Bill 1931.
Conservatives point to the Bible as their rationale for everything they do. The Bible says,
“Again I say to you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.”
Matthew 19:24
It seems Conservatives like Senator Dean Heller, who scored a perfect 100% favorable rating from the Christian Coalition of America, are unconcerned about what the Bible says.
A version of this article first published as
Conservatives Weaponize Religion, Worship Wealthyon Technorati.com
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“Interpretive Mythology” is a very nice way to sum up this pile of right wing “enthusiasms.” We need a Vicar of what the Founding Fathers called the “Civic Virtues”, to throw the book, make that, the “New Testament” at ’em.
These apostates of “promote the general welfare”,these celebrants of Neo-Social Darwinism are happy to shock the rock of our nation’s foundation and then claim that their the victims of each subsequent avalanche. Been doing it for decades.
Nice post. Sorry I went on.
Regards,
Doug
Doug:
Thanks for reading and commenting. You can go on all you want because the digital space is free, just like our speech. The term ‘Interpretive Mythology’ was a rare Shakespearean moment.
Have a great weekend.
Paul
I applaud your incisive commentary for which there is a lot of evidence. The question is ‘why’ do so many regular people buy into these noxious ‘Conservative’ messages. I think it is because very core of what many ‘Conservative’ followers want is noble – 1. they want to be a good person, 2. they want financial security. Supporting religion is an obvious means for people to pursue their aspirations for the former. Supporting policies that claim to take less money out of their pocket is obvious for the latter. I think that to be fair ‘Conservatives want to be good and be secure.’ I think that ‘Conversative Leadership exploits these aspirations for their warped policies. If one was truly paranoid, one my say that Conservative Leadership exploits both with emotive issues as a distraction so that they can pick the pockets of both their followers and anyone else they can get political power over.
I agree. Most Conservatives are good people, but it seems that many of them live their life in fear and have an Eeyore view of the world. I have a six year-old boy who at times can be completely oblivious of the facts of a situation because he wants to believe what he wants to believe. I run into the same denial of facts in many Conservatives. They truly believe that the Bible is okay with them passing judgement on others by passing laws that are blatantly anti-Christian in nature. They also truly believe that wealthy people will be their savior, when the past decade has shown us that the wealthy are stockpiling money, not creating jobs. Senator Heller refers to rich people as ‘job creators’ which is simply not true.
Fortunately, I believe in JFK’s speech, “you can’t fool all of the people all of the time.” As Herman Cain knows…or at least should know by now, facts eventually catch up with you. (I actually won’t be surprised if he announces that he is continuing his campaign today.) Cain is a classic example of a Conservative that denies facts in order to believe what he wants to believe.