Cross Posted from Street Prophets
Tehran's streets filled again yesterday in anticipation of support for reformists from the second most powerful Ayatollah in Iran, former president Ali Rafsanjani, in conflict with the regimes Supreme Leader and, for all intents and purposes, the current acting dictator, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Both men have been guiding the theocratic government they'd helped to design thirty years ago as revolutionaries opposing another oppressive regime under the American supported Shah. Their replacement government is splintering now into two major factions while the people may want something completely different: freedom.
Then things got predictably ugly again. More people were murdered by Iran's paramilitary groups who support their President, this time photographed using handguns along with tear gas and clubs to bludgeon whoever was unlucky enough to cross their path.
Meanwhile back in the states, we have our own cadre of Republican Christian mullahswho have been attempting to create the very same kind of reality for Americans.
The line between right wing extremist politics and religious extremism has vanished in Iran to create a composite which is now the most inhumane and tyrannical regime in the world. Only China executed more people last year and they have a population of a billion compared to only 72 million in Iran.
Huffington Post ran an article recently by Frank Schaeffer, a former member of America's Religious Right's leadership that goes into some disturbing details about this groups efforts and objectives.
[I]f the Republican/Religious Right/Neoconservative agenda had come to full fruition over the last 35 years the Republicans would have plunged America into our own version of the misbegotten theocracy destroying Iran today.
Had they succeeded over the same thirty year period beginning with their accent into American political power with the election of Reagan in 1980, Schaeffer describes what their agenda would mean if translated into reality.
Instead of people like James Dobson and Pat Robertson having become marginalized they'd be sitting in Washington advising whomever was the next Republican president...
[T]here would be a constitutional amendment and/or laws forcing prayer in schools, disenfranchising gay men and women, banning all abortions under penalty of death, banning gay men and women from serving in the military, launching a neoconservative led and religious right backed holy war against Islam, fixing Israel's borders permanently to incorporate all the land taken in 1967 forever into a "Greater Israel" based on the "fact" that "God gave the Jews" the land "forever," capital punishment would be used routinely to punish a variety of crimes including being gay, civil rights for blacks, women, gays, unions would be in retreat, and -- other than enforcing "morality" - George W. Bush's style of "free market" non-governance would be permanent.
Schaeffer goes into some detail about leaders of the movement like Pat Robertson, Dr. Kennedy and the late Reverend Rushdoony, the father of "Christian Reconstructionism" and the modern Christian home school movement which depicts their overt racism and their entitled sense of privilege.
Picture the harshest Old Testament laws applied at home and the harshest neoconservative military policy abroad and that would be America if the Republicans had everything they wanted. We'd be in three wars now instead of two - Iraq, Afghanistan and Iran. It would be open season on domestic surveillance. Torture would be legal. Habeas Corpus would be a thing of the past. Women would be in prison for having had abortions. Gay men and women would be hounded and if they were murdered there would be leaders saying they had it coming. The CIA and FBI would be operating inside the USA to crush dissent. Blackwater (and other companies like it) would be taking over more and more military duties and operating internationally as a mercenary death squad.
Let us take pause to be grateful that we do not have to risk our lives rioting in the streets of Washington hoping to overturn this type of fanaticism that is too much a reality even here, half a world away. We have our own insane religious haters and it's time to enforce our laws governing the separation of church and state and prosecute those who are plotting the overthrow of American secular government.
The battle between oppressive religion and freedom is not over yet-- not in Iran, nor here in America.