Theirs is the Lord our God, we are to worship no other gods before theirs

Delaware Republican Senatorial candidate and master of her domain Christine O’Donnell used a debate yesterday to work on her GED by getting a lesson in high school civics from her opponent Chris Coons.

From the Washington Post by way of Frank James at NPR.

The exchange came in a debate before an audience of legal scholars and law students at Widener University Law School, as O'Donnell criticized Democratic nominee Chris Coons' position that teaching creationism in public school would violate the First Amendment by promoting religious doctrine.

Coons said private and parochial schools are free to teach creationism but that "religious doctrine doesn't belong in our public schools."

"Where in the Constitution is the separation of church and state?" O'Donnell asked him.

When Coons responded that the First Amendment bars Congress from making laws respecting the establishment of religion, O'Donnell asked: "You're telling me that's in the First Amendment?"

Right Wingers don’t have to read the Constitution to know what’s in it, just as they don’t have to read the Bible to know what’s in that, or watch a TV show to know it’s smut, or read a newspaper to know it’s full of lies, or listen to liberals’ to know we’re hippies, communists, atheists and traitors.  They know what they know.  And what they know is that everything confirms their prejudices, one way or another.

The surprising thing about O’Donnell’s reaction to the news that the principle of a separation of church and state is inherent in the Constitution was that for a brief second she seemed to be taking it in.  She seemed on the verge of accepting this fact as a fact.  Your average Right Winger doesn’t even hear a fact that contradicts what he “knows”, let alone think seriously, even for a second, that he might have to revise his previous opinion.

Of course, she recovered her grip on her ignorance in a hurry and her media defenders on the Right came rushing to her rescue by pointing out that the exact phrase “separation of church and state” isn’t literally stated in the Amendment, and 220 years of judicial precedent doesn’t count.

My bet would be that by this morning O’Donnell had patched up the cracks in her prejudices and if you showed her the original copy of the Bill of Rights her eyes would reflexively skip right down to the Second Amendment as if the First wasn’t even there.

Apparently, though, there was shock in the hall, audibly expressed, that a grown person running for one of the highest offices in the land does not know what’s in the Constitution of the United States.

Kevin Drum shakes his head, bemused that anyone could be shocked at what he calls the same old, same old.

..isn't it common knowledge that social conservatives have questioned the modern doctrine of separation of church and state for decades? They write books about it, they give talks about it, they write law review articles about it, they blog about it, and they denounce it from the pulpit. The fact that it's news in any way is less a reflection on O'Donnell than it is on the fact that the mainstream media still doesn't do much serious reporting about social conservatives. If they did, this wouldn't have been even remotely newsworthy.

I have a slightly different take.  I agree that the MSM hasn’t done the kind of reporting on Right Wing Christians and their fellow travelling social reactionaries that ought to have been done.  But the MSM does report on them seriously.  That it, it takes them seriously but not for what they really are.

For thirty years and more, they’ve reported on Right Wing Christians as if they represent all Christians and on social reactionaries as if they represent all Americans, at least all the Americans that count, the Real Americans.

Coverage of these extremists has been based on a syllogism that derives from a lazy prejudice that there are such creatures as Real Americans.

Real Americans are white, Christian, conservative, and live in the South and the Midwest, particularly those parts of the South and the Midwest where there are more churches than skyscrapers and more cows and pigs than rats and cockroaches, more guns than iPhones, more fans of college football and NASCAR than baseball and pro basketball fans, and, it almost goes without saying, far more Republicans than Democrats.

So it works like this.

Real Americans are white, Christian, conservatives living in the less urbanized parts of the South and Midwest.

Right Wing Christians are white, Christian, conservatives most of whom seem as far as we care to find out to live in the less urbanized parts of the South and Midwest.

Therefore, Right Wing Christians are Real Americans.

And Real Americans are exempt from criticism.

Real Americans must be respected in way that seems an awful lot like patronizing.  They must be flattered for their decency, common sense, hardworking ways, and otherwise virtuous habits of thought and act.  Their pieties, prejudices, and received opinions based on and backed up by nothing but their stubborn conviction that the way they do things is the right way to do them and the way everybody else does them is the wrong way aren’t to be challenged or even gently and tactfully questioned.

In fact, they’re to be treated as a form of folk gospel, the kind of sensible, practical, down to earth wisdom that jess folks are bound to come up with while they’re bouncing down dusty backroads in their pickups with their dogs, singing along to country western songs on their way home from the church social or a high school football game.

But most thoughtful and intelligent people don’t conform to type let alone stereotype.  The only person in my personal circle of acquaintance who bounces along in his pickup truck with his dog singing along with country western songs is a gay guy from Boston who I’m pretty sure has never been to a high school football game in his life.  Even among jess folks there are folks who don’t go to high school football games or church socials, who don’t believe in God and think NASCAR is a noisy bore, who’ve actually read the Constitution and more of the Bible than John 3:16, who are pro-choice and pro-union, who vote Democratic, who aren’t white and aren’t male.

But if you set out to cover Real Americans with the idea that real Americans are best represented by your stereotyped view of them then the people you’re going to put on the air and into your articles and op-eds are going to be the people most determined to be stereotypes.

You go looking for Real Americans expecting that Real Americans are gun-toters, flag-wavers, and Bible-thumpers and you’re not going to turn up just gun-toters, flag-wavers, and Bible-thumpers---there are, and I know this is hard for Media types and conservatives to believe, liberals who wave flags, tote guns, and thump their Bibles---you’re going to turn up the people who are the noisiest about toting their guns, waving their flags, and thumping their Bibles, the people who have made fetishes and personal religions out of gun-toting, flag-waving, and Bible-thumping.

People who have built their sense of self and based their self-worth on their gun-toting, flag-waving, and Bible-thumping.

And surprise, surprise, these people turn out not to be conservative but Right Wing reactionary extremists, because they have built their politics on their sense of self and self-worth too.  Naturally theirs is a politics of I’m right and you’re wrong and I don’t need any damn facts or any damn experts to tell me different, because I’ve got my gun, my flag, and my God on my side.

When you put these Right Wingers on the air and in your article treating them as jess folks, as representative of Real Americans, when, for instance, you cover a mob shutting down a town hall meeting with their screaming rage as a grass roots movement of Real Americans expressing their understandable frustration with the way things are---without bothering to figure out how they would like things to be---you not only encourage them in their self-satisfied ignorance and bigotry, you tell other people that this is what they should believe and how they should behave if they want to be to Real Americans too.

Like I said, the MSM has been putting these Real Americans on the air and in their articles and op-eds without criticism and without bothering to take a serious look at what they really want for thirty years and more.  They’ve been welcoming their political and religious leaders onto their talk shows and their editorial pages and allowing them to whip up bigotries, fears, and hatreds without challenge because they’re speaking to and for the Real Americans and you don’t challenge the beliefs of Real Americans.

As Kevin Drum points out, these Right Wingers passing as Real Americans aren’t shy about stating what they want.  But for some reason the producers and the editors, reporters and pundits who put them on the air and into their articles and publish their op-eds don’t seem to believe they’re stating what they’re stating.

I don’t know if it’s the case that the Media types don’t believe the preachers and politicians don’t believe the appalling nonsense they’re spouting, if they think the preachers and politicians are just flattering their flocks and their voters to keep them happy and docile and content to sit quiet in the pews, or if they are as blind and deaf to what’s really being preached and pushed as Christine O’Donnell is to what’s really in the First Amendment.

Kevin Drum’s right that in and of herself Christine O’Donnell doesn’t merit the attention she’s been getting.  She’s a clown and she stands no chance of becoming a United States Senator.  But again I have a different take.

I think she’s been getting the wrong kind of attention.  She’s been covered as a clown and not as someone who believes the same things and who would vote in the Senate the same way as candidates who do stand a chance of becoming Senators, Sharron Angle, Joe Miller, Ken Buck, Pat Toomey, and Marco Rubio, not to mention dozens of candidates who stand a good chance of becoming members of the House of Representatives and a bunch of Right Wingers who are already members of Congress.

O’Donnell believes what they believe, she’s just been silly and clumsy in expressing those beliefs and she boasts a resume that makes her more obviously unqualified for any job above clerk at a convenience store let alone United States Senator, although Joe Miller is looking to be just as big a liar and fraud and con artist only with a security detail with orders to protect him from anyone who tries to ask him about his lies and his frauds and cons.

Let’s be clear.  The Right Wing preachers and politicians mean what they say.  They want what their Right Wing reactionary flocks and voters want, and what they want, generally, is a nation in which it is universally acknowledged that they’re right and the rest of us are wrong and we adjust our lives and our behavior and our thinking accordingly.

And what they want, specifically in the case of the separation of church and state is a complete and permanent refudiation of the practice and the idea.

They don’t simply want to live in a Christian nation.  They want to live in a nation that is thoroughly Christianized according to their definition of Christianity, which is a religion of self-aggrandizement.  They want a nation run by preachers and politicians who are driven by the same God-sanctioned fears and hatreds as they are and who worship a God who rewards them for acting on those fears and hatreds.

They don’t want to live in a nation where people always say Merry Christmas instead of Happy Holidays.  They want to live in a nation where people are required to say Merry Christmas instead of Happy Holidays.

They don’t want to live in a nation where schools teach the controversy when the lesson plan turns to the subject of evolution.  They want to live in a nation where the teaching of evolution as a fact is banned and the teaching of it as the Devil’s doctrine, with Darwin as the Devil’s disciple, is required.

They don’t want to  live in a nation where gays keep it to themselves and don’t get married or adopt kids but are otherwise free to wait tables and open antique shops.  They want to live in a nation where gay people are reviled and driven from their jobs and their neighborhoods, from their sight and from their thoughts.

They don’t want to live in a nation where abortions are illegal.  They want to live in a nation where women are forced to think of themselves a baby-makers first, before they are people, to the point that they will cheerfully bear their rapists’ babies, if God has decided to let them get raped.  They want to live in a nation where women make no decisions for themselves and are forced to accept whatever their husbands, fathers, and brothers decide to dish out to them.

They don’t want to live in a nation where the First Amendment is more flexible on the question of the establishment of religion.  They want to live in a nation where it is understood that the clause about the government not prohibiting the free exercise of religion means that they should not be prohibited from forcing their religion on everyone else or even made to feel bad about it when they try.

They believe that it is an infringement on their freedom of religion that the rest of us aren’t required to believe what they believe.

They don’t want to live in a nation where the First Amendment doesn’t build a wall between church and state.  They want to live in a nation where the church and the state are inseparable.

Their church and their state, the one that’s put in place by their votes because they are the Real Americans and the votes of Real Americans are the only votes that should count.

Comments

[redactor]

This is what Kos is talking about when he talks about the American Taliban. It isn't that the Christianists dream of beheading their enemies and wandering into Unitarian churches with suicide vests; it's that their theocratic goals concerning human behavior, politics, and government are very much in tune with those of the Taliban. I know this is nothing new in American life, but it seems much scarier and more threatening today.

[Sherri]

By birth, I am a Real American - Southern, white, Christian, conservative. As soon as I was able to choose, I did choose to change those things I could. I knew there were people who really believed the stuff Real Americans believed, but I didn't really fully get it until a few years ago. I was talking with a friend of mine from high school, a Real American who is very intelligent, and I began to realize that he hadn't just been saying all those things just to be provocative all those years, that he really believed them. I mean, it's not like I thought he was a liberal, but I didn't think he could possibly believe nonsense like the constitution doesn't support separation of church and state. He does believe it. He believes all of it.

He's not stupid, he's not uneducated, and he's not a clown. I've known him for over 30 years. And yet I don't know him at all. That's when I began to seriously worry; when I realized that the people who believed this stuff weren't just charlatans, clowns, or ignorant. (Maybe that sounds harsh, but ignorant is the kindest response I've been able to come up with to the casual racism I grew up around.)

[PurpleGirl]

Brooklyn was known as the "The City of Churches." And now, a century after its incorporation into New York City, it can still be called The Borough of Churches. Of course, I think, any of the boroughs comprising NYC can be called that. Between large stone edifices, smaller clap-board buildings, and store front using congregations, I think this city is awash with special, spirit filled spaces: Christian of all stripes, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist and everything in between. Take a walk in any neighborhood and you find these spirit homes. This place compares very well to any little Southern berg for its spirit-filled people. (This comment got longer as I wrote.)

[PurpleGirl]

I understand your larger point. (I wrote the above comment before reading the whole post.) I get mad that places like NYC get portrayed as being not religious or not sufficiently religious compared to other areas, and this includes most of the Northeast and other so-called liberal areas. People are religious, period, in their own ways. It annoys me to no end that so many RTCs (as Fred Clark calls them) believe they have a lock on spirituality or religiousity.

[Doug K]

To expand on the point about O'Donnell being covered as a clown, though her beliefs are just the same as a lot of Republicans who may be elected: here in CO we have Ken Buck for Senator and Dan Maes for Governor: they are both tea-party supporters and have indistinguishable policy positions: Dan Maes says that bicycles are a UN threat to our freedoms, Ken Buck says homosexuality is just like alcoholism: Dan Maes was dismissed from the police (in Liberal, Kansas) for ethics violations, Ken Buck was dismissed from the Justice Department for ethics violations: Dan Maes is polling below 15% but Ken Buck is at 50% or better. I can't pretend to understand it.

My Real American friend from Wyoming has a bumper sticker on his pickup truck (with gun rack) that says "Tea Parties are for little girls with imaginary friends". As a Navy veteran he can get away with this, as an effete suburban pseudointellectual I haven't dared put mine on the minivan..

[Nate1481]

The state 'Real Americans' want sounds more and more like Iran, with a different religious trimmings.

[Lance Mannion]

Nate, I think what they long for is more like Puritan Boston in 1640. It's like they read The Scarlet Letter and took Chillingworth's side.