Perspective from a young religious progressive on gay rights, God, and the religious right.
The American right-wing has been cultivating a fear and hatred of government since its beginnings. The complaints about "big government" taking away our rights stretch back long before what we now know as "liberalism" and "conservatism" – their descendants can be glimpsed in the Dred Scott decision, in which the institution of slavery was upheld in the name of the right to "private property"; the cry of "states’ rights!" can be found in the respondents to the indictments of Southern society by the abolitionists – as the South closed ranks to protect their "peculiar institution" as it came to be known, and the North rallied against it.
The arguments against gay rights touted so boldly by today’s Jerry Falwell and other bigots are echoes of his father’s rage against the Civil Rights movement. Yesterday’s "activist courts" were the Warren and Burger courts; the people "redefining marriage" from a man and a woman of the same race to two people who loved each other were on the same "liberal Jew courts".
Today, many former conservatives have recognized the bigoted attitudes latent in so much of the rhetoric of the Republican Party. Increasingly, instead, they have moved towards an ideology which asserts that it is different in kind – libertarianism. Claiming their heritage in Mill, they proclaim, "In the part, which merely concerns himself, his independence is, of right, absolute," – presuming economics to involve no more than one; ignoring the next sentence of Mill himself, "over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign"; pretending Mill’s objections applied to government alone, when in fact they extended far beyond to encompass society as well.Read more at thepoliticizer.com...