Bush : No theocracy in Iraq! (but theocracy in America is a-okay)

As you've all probably heard by now, Paul Bremer is threatening to ban the imposition of Islamic law in Iraq. Postmodern protestations about the imposition of Eurocentric values aside, it is a good thing. Unfortunately, good old fashioned Enlightenment values apparently apply only to foreign policy, and not to Americans in our own country. Even as Bush seeks to prohibit sharia law in Iraq, he is aggressively seeking to undermine the rights of women, gay men and lesbians, and others in this country, imposing the values of America's own fundamentalist minority upon all of us. From signing into law a ban on late-term abortions (even when the woman is a victim of rape, incest, molestation, or whose life is threatened by the pregnancy), to Ashcroft's new campaign of intimidation against women who have received late-term abortions in New York and Chicago and the doctors who performed them, to his mostly successful effort to stack the courts with judicial nominees that would make Cotton Mather proud, to his soon-to-be announced effort to amend the constitution to permanently ban same-sex marriage, Bush has made it clear that even as other countries will be forced by the barrel of a gun to enter the 21st century, America will be dragged kicking and screaming back sometime into the 19th. This has got to be the most glaring and odious hypocrisy of the Bush administration (which is quite an accomplishment in and of itself), yet it goes wholly unacknowledged by the SCLM.