In thinking about this whole idea of the "religious right", I begin to wonder what really defines that, and in turn what that means to the people living this "religious right" as it pertains to conservative politics.
In the South and in the Mid-West, populations are spread out, and outside of the bubbles of the cities here, it is basically a monoculture. You can’t have a real sense of how spread out it can be unless you’ve driven across it. There are fewer sources of information, fewer messages to listen to. You have home life, school life, and church life. The schools in large measure reflect the churches. Everything is conservative politics.
There are many good people here. I know so many people that I would consider good people, who will help you when you need help, they are hospitable,- generally good people. But these same people, when you get into the realm of civil liberties, which is what really defines conservative politics, baffle me with their narrow-minded viewpoints and their paranoia and their intolerance. They march to the steady drumbeat of the conservative message. They don’t ask questions, they don’t reassess in the face of evidence or information. They’ve got the message, and they are in the majority here; being the majority means the message is right.
One of the conservative messages, especially of the religious right, is to abstain from sex until marriage. Sex-ed is not taught in schools. Sex outside of marriage makes you a bad person; marriage is a sacred institution between a man and a woman. But many kids being asked to abstain in the name of the beliefs presented to them witness the hypocrisies of infidelities, scandalous behavior, divorces of parents, and the occasional peer forced into a premature marriage because of a pregnancy, because we know this is not absent from the South.
In the much of the great expanse of the South and Midwest, with little exposure to messages from other than a few sources, and with the therefore increased influence of those few sources, you develop a monoculture. In this conservative monoculture, there is suspicion of anything not familiar. "Others" are not to be trusted. Having access to the internet, to things other than the public channels, is relatively new if available at all. The huge trust in channels like FOX bred from years of familiarity and lack of choice. Perspectives are narrow, and therefore tolerances low. Human behavior, though, remains. Denying your true nature does not change it.
Conflicting messages create conflicted souls. My dad was brought up in the Church of Christ, and taught he would go to hell for his natural, biological sexual responses that he can’t possibly NOT have as a human male. If you are so wrong as to be a homosexual, if you don’t hide it you must leave; you are told that because of who you are, are cast out. You are taught the hard lesson that you must hide who you are, decry it even,- loathe it,- to belong. There is a relatively narrow definition of what you can and can’t be, which certainly can’t accommodate all the variety of self we are born with.
We should explore our full potentials, though, and embrace our selves, and not reject our selves simply to belong to an arbitrary and judgmental majority. We should be the creatures we were meant to be, and only by doing so can you pay true homage to any "maker". Denying the existence of something does not erase its existence. To live a life of the religious right, then, means not just being oppressed and accepting the oppression and denying your true self, but also propagating that same loathing and intolerance and inflicting it on your fellow man.