re: #152 Charles

I get your point, and I agree that there’s nothing conservative about creationism, but unfortunately the fact is that this madness comes almost exclusively from the right wing.

The Right has given such groups aid and comfort for a long time, and the Fundies have responded by attempting to take over the Conservative movement and twist it for their own purposes. What began as an overlap in outlook - in particular, the notion that government ought to stay out of people’s personal lives, an idea that played well with the Fundie’s belief that Liberalism was actively trying to snuff out religion - was perverted into a Fundamentalist Christian Jihadist movement, bent on imposing their will on everyone. As I’ve said before, the difference between these Fundamentalist groups and the Taliban is vanishingly small - they both want the same thing, and are willing to use the same means to achieve their goals, at everyone else’s expense.

The Right acquiesced to this view, partly because they felt that the gain in votes was worth the descent into stupidity and totalitarianism the Fundies represent; partly because they mistakenly felt that such putrid notions would never make it out of the closet; and partly because, increasingly, the Fundies were bending Conservatism and warping it beyond all recognition, filling the ranks with row after row of slack-jawed, drooling knuckle-draggers ready to cheer on anyone with a Bible to thump, and just as ready to condemn non-believers to what they are certain is the fiery pits of perpetual damnation.

The Founding Fathers kept religion out of politics for good reason. For one thing, they had seen first hand the wretched misery imposed by the wedding of church and state in England, and the horrendous suffering it caused. Second, they were smart enough to realize that those insistent on imposing their own beliefs on all others were, at core, fundamentally stupid, and the vision of a nation carpeted with double-wides stuffed full of these retards was enough to ensure the explicit ban on the merging of political and religious power.

Time to get back to those basics.