Folks,
The secret weapon of the neo-conservative movement is self-righteousness.
Pick a /behavioral/ minority, label them immoral, and whip up the "moral majority" with Bible verses that seem to justify their marginalization.
It fueled the extraordinarily high number of voters citing "Moral Values" as the top issue informing their election choices, especially where referenda to ban gay marriage passed. "We're RIGHT, dad-gummit, and don't you liberals give us any lip, either!"
The Republican party has long brilliantly played on the all-too-human desire to think ourselves better than others. They pick issues that justify pitting a self-righteous majority against a minority that is labeled "morally corrupt," so that the rest can cluck their tongues and wag their heads and feel superior.
In the Reagan era, it was "single mothers" and "welfare queens." I well remember my mother-in-law proudly trumpeting the fact that they had eight children, but *they* never had to ask anyone for a hand-out. You could practically smell the self-satisfaction.
Next, it was abortion, an easy segue from single moms and welfare queens. Again, as most women have not had an abortion, they counted on and found a self-righteous majority who could be easily manipulated into thinking themselves superior to women they portrayed as shiftless, selfish baby-killers. And the beauty part for them was that they could wrap it in carefully-selected (generally misleading) Bible verses, to make anyone with a different opinion into a sinner.
Now we have bans on gay marriage. With unambiguous-sounding anti-homosexual "proof texts" in both the Old and New Testaments, and with an easily-marginalized target group, it's a slam-dunk. Because homosexuality is biologically determined, it is practically impossible for straights to imagine wanting have homosexual relations. It is literally unnatural for the straight majority, which makes it that much easier for them to dismiss homosexuals as morally corrupt. Easy to feel superior to what must be a bunch of hedonistic perverts.
So what now for Democrats? Maybe play the game. Point to Luke 18:15 ("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.") and any of thousands of other verses that call for economic justice. Spin them as just judgments of the all-powerful God demanding justice for His children. Find verses used against homosexuals and women who have had abortions and show how they really refer to the way the rich steal life from the poor. Use them to pit the majority who don't consider themselves rich against the very few who have redistributed everyone else's wealth to themselves. Have our proof-texts ready to hammer on anyone who flaunts the clear Biblical mandate to give to the poor. Replace the gay-basher's Sodom and Gomorrah (Gen 9:1-29) with the story of Ananias and Sapphira (Acts 5:1-10).
Dave
--
"This country is going so far to the right you are not even going to recognize it."
-- Attorney General John Mitchell, 1970
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