I suggest that you not circulate this too widely, it might be dangerous! Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale is about such a Christian Republic although as I recall it does not have all the democratic features you mention but certainly the misogynist traits.
Blog: http://kenthink7.blogspot.com/index.html Blog: http://kencan7.blogspot.com/index.html
--- On Sat, 6/27/09, Marv Gandall <marvgandall at videotron.ca> wrote:
> From: Marv Gandall <marvgandall at videotron.ca>
> Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] Tell them we are democrats (was: freedom to swim)
> To: "LBO-Talk" <lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org>
> Date: Saturday, June 27, 2009, 6:39 PM
> Perhaps a Christian Republic of the
> United States of America presided over
> by a Supreme Council of Baptist and other fundamentalist
> clerics with the
> power to vet candidates for political office would not, as
> some argue, be
> inferior to the present system weighted in favour of the
> rich and powerful.
> The new Christian Republic would almost certainly be the
> product of a mass
> uprising, as in Iran, and we'd need to experience it in
> order to find out.
>
> For certain, we'd have misgivings about the new regime's
> attitude towards
> women, gays, trade unions, civil liberties, capital
> punishment, science and
> education, etc. and, if the Iran pattern were to repeat
> itself, the
> blood-soaked repression of the left.
>
> But then if the new regime were to, say, sanction the
> election of Mike
> Huckabee, a self-professed populist, as President, engage
> in some modest
> redistribution of income from rich to poor and from city to
> countryside, and
> announce an isolationist foreign policy predicted on the
> closure of US bases
> abroad, it's easy to suppose that, for some of us at least,
> these positive
> features would outweigh the earlier misgivings - to the
> point of defending
> the new regime against efforts by urban-based liberal youth
> to overturn it.
>
> While the Naders and the Michael Smiths and probably even
> the Obamas would
> be proscribed from running for office, some consolation
> might be gained from
> the fact that the new Christian Republic, despite it's
> backward views on
> gender relations, might allow Sarah Palin to become the
> first woman
> president of the (CR)USA.
>
>
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