The war against American freedom

A DailyKos diarist explicates why the religious fundamentalists who want to rewrite American history are liars, and how the Bush Administration has deliberately sought to undermine American freedom by infiltrating would-be theocrats into governmental posts and funnelling public money to sectarian proseletyzing and propaganda projects.

Certain right-wing relatives of mine perpetually forward e'mail propaganda promoting theocracy and bemoaning the "traitorous" libruls who prevent this "Christian nation" from fulfilling its supposed mission to persecute gays, persecute Muslims, force schoolchildren to proclaim their belief in God under threat of punishment, and so forth.

I wonder. How happy would they be to see their own children required, under threat of punishment or expulsion from the tax-supported public schools, to proclaim the divinity of Joseph Smith, to proclaim the Mormon Church to be the sole valid representative of God's Kingdom on Earth and all other churches to be Satan's tools to deceive humanity? To be taught that "when the leaders of the [Mormon] Church speak, all the thinking has been done?" If they happen to live anywhere in the vast swathes of the American West that are dominated by the Mormon church, that's a very real possibility should the separation of church and state be abolished.

What about schoolchildren, or prospective public officials and employees, being required to proclaim the infallibility of the Catholic Church, if the local Catholics were energetic and numerous enough to seize control of the local government?

There are areas in Michigan where Muslims are the local majority. How about public schools teaching a curriculum based on the Koran? What about science classes teaching that Jews are descended from pigs, social studies classes teaching that it is a law of nature that women must cover themselves from head to toe and that men, like wild animals, cannot or should not control their sexual urges when presented with the awful temptation of an uncovered ankle? Or that it is the duty of all true servants of God to pursue the establishment of a worldwide Islamic empire?

It never seems to occur to them that all these would likely result, on a local level, from the abolishment of the separation of church and state that they so loudly clamor for. Having lived practically all their lives in sections of the American Midwest where their own particular denomination of Protestant Christianity has a comfortable majority, they are apparently unable to comprehend that there are any places in which turning over the government to sectarian control would result in the persecution of people like themselves. Having never lived in an area where any other religion is dominant, they blithely assume that on that Great Day In The Mornin' when the trumpet of theocracy sounds, they will be in the catbird seat, righteously dictating terms of submission to everybody else.

And, like George W. Bush launching what he thought would be a Splendid Little War in Iraq, they imagine that if they were to successfully impose a single majority faith on the country, people of all other persuasions would welcome their domination and happily allow their children to be indoctrinated to hate their parents' faith, their status in the eyes of the law to be determined by their religion, their tax money to be used to subsidize churches that relentlessly campaign against them.