For Chip.
Dog sucks Chuck, hmm. Are you implying I have sex with animals? I won't deny it if you are. I agree we need to move beyond mere tolerance for such diversity to the more pro-active stand of advocating these liberties.
In any event, thanks for the links. How do I put this? I think of the Christian Right in different terms. For me, when I am not swearing at them or wishing them dead, they represent an historical theme that has never been fully resolved in US intellectual life or the public mind.
It is as if the US founding fathers never grasp the full scope of the radical enlightenment that Jonathan Israel is writing about. They were removed from the intensity of these controversies in their European context and never had to seriously grabble with them. Remember the First Amendment is an amendment, in effect an after thought, something left out that needed to be put in. And then too, I am not sure that their generation understood they were exactly the kind of political-philosophical mind that Spinoza to Diderot were attempting to inculcate: a well off secular elite who would use reason to order the affairs of human society. They embraced this generalized state of mind of course, but I am not so sure they understood that they embodied it as well as believed it---that is that they were also a product of this conception of society. I suppose they did in a vague way, that is to say, they believed themselves to be enlightened and modern. But that is hardly what I would call self-aware in the philosophical or political sense. And that lack of awareness, I think has had serious consequences.
The subsequent history of religion in this country seems to me to follow a trajectory similar to that of slavery. Slavery was so outrageously vile and irrational that it could not be justified or brought into any concordance with the basic tenets of the enlightenment, modernity, or representative democracy---a course also followed by the subjection of women. Since the founding fathers were neither slaves nor women, of course they could tolerate their own hypocrisy on these matters.
None of these themes in US history were ever resolved, since they are still with us. We are not a fully secular society, just as we are not free of the endless legalisms or excuses for racism and sexism. (Of course we get back to Capital too, which is just as insidious a violation of universal human rights and equality---since it fundamentally depends on exploiting and or manufacturing any minute material difference between people, and finally succeeds in direct proportion to the extent that Capital can magnify those differences into a class war to its own advantage.)
Before you go off on me again, let me be clear so you have the right target. I think there is a deep link between the religious belief system that characterizes the US Christian Right, racism, and sexism. I see the same link working its way through both fundamentalist Jews and Muslims. And that's why I am at war with all of them and their gods.
They all share a political-theological belief system that views women, other races, and non-believers as a form of human corruption---much like their view of homosexuality. At their best and most liberal, the material reality of the human condition is cleaned up, mediated through forgiveness in their minds to meet some standard of tolerance that they, meaning the believers, gracious grant the rest of us, some what in the manner of a polite favor. Carl's faux-reasonable Episcopalians, are an example. This in turn is very much like the pose of neoconservatives when they discuss the free market, natural rights and the common good and claim these constitute liberal democracy.
Now this will sound exceptionally harsh on the liberal minded believer, Christian, Muslim or Jew, but that is because they don't see the rest of us in quite the same light as they see themselves---and that is the precisely the point.
CG