Okay, so how is the Christian Right in this country
different than Iran and the forthcoming Islamic Republic of Iraq?
Nearly every Monday for six months, as many as a dozen congressional aides -- many of them aspiring politicians -- have gathered over takeout dinners to mine the Bible for ancient wisdom on modern policy debates about tax rates, foreign aid, education, cloning and the Central American Free Trade Agreement.
Through seminars taught by conservative college professors and devout members of Congress, the students learn that serving country means first and always serving Christ.
They learn to view every vote as a religious duty, and to consider compromise a sin [...]
The philosophy animating Cameron's lecture -- that federal law should be based on biblical precepts -- troubles the Rev. Barry W. Lynn, executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State.
"This nation was founded specifically to avoid the government making religious and theological decisions," Lynn said. "We are not to turn the Holy Scriptures of any group into public policy."
Kennedy counters that evangelicals have every right to put up candidates who vote what they believe to be God's will -- and let voters judge them.
To which Lynn responds, with exasperation: "He says that because he knows in a majority Christian country, the Christian view is going to be expressed by more voters. They have no problem imposing their biblical worldview on every American."
Evangelical conservatives acknowledge that's their goal.
And they now have a systematic plan for achieving it.
Is there any doubt that the American Taliban has more in common with our Islamic fundamentalist enemies? They're cut from the same cloth -- the belief that a system of secular rules and laws must be replaced with "God's laws".
And while the religions may be different, the core of them is not -- opposition to rival faiths, hostility to science, interference in people's private lives, control over women's bodies, an irrational belief in the supremacy of the male over female, militancy, anti-intellectualism and a rejection of logic, an unassailable belief in their own righrousness, and the deifying of certain unelectable, unaccountable individuals as "spokesmen for god", be it Pat Robertson or the Ayatollahs.
The American Taliban wants for the U.S. no less than what Iran has, and Iraq will soon have.