This cannot end well for him, particularly doing this claiming to be a Christian. And it might not end well for the rest of us either. Barack Obama has gone to war with Christians’ consciences and he is perverting God’s word in the process to get his way on public policy. – The Perversion of the Words of Our Lord Jesus Christ by the Sinner Barack H. Obama, by Erick Erickson
Erick Erickson reveals one of the fundamental problems with Republicanism today. It’s not conservative at all anymore.
In a rambling, self-importantly arrogant post, Erickson pontificates on what he thinks he knows about being a Christian through a literal analysis of the Bible. Then he stands in judgment over Pres. Obama.
The self-righteous never see irony coming.
There is nothing Christian in Erickson’s harangue against Pres. Obama. There is also nothing conservative about it.
Conservatism has a measure of grounding when you listen to analysis of it from people who don’t wrap their religion through their conservative ideology.
A religious conservative can be against abortion. But an ideological conservative, while being against abortion and not wanting to fund it, cannot simultaneously take a person’s liberty away by forcing pregnancy on a woman when natural law protects her right to personal autonomy.
The very notion of conservatism is rooted in personal liberty. Whether religious conservatives like it or not, to be true to conservatism, they must honor that liberty. Today, they do not.
Any conservative with intellectual or political integrity would understand that conservatism of any depth must be rooted in the fundamental idea that interrupting the freedoms of any person through the intrusion of government, whether federal or state, is abridging a person’s autonomy in a manner that is the anti-thesis of conservatism.
Religious conservatism or fundamentalist-based Republicanism is actually a self-righteous marketing attempt to make people like Erickson and his ilk think they are on higher ground and have the ultimate interpretation of right and wrong. You hear it through Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham and the rest of the self-righteous radio crowd.
It’s the blatant hypocrisy to claim to be a conservative, but think religious dogma should hold more sway than an individual who’s privacy and personal freedoms are innate to being a person in the first place.
Conservatism without religion can make sense.
Add religion, however, and conservatism becomes authoritarian in nature, relegating women to non-persons, second class citizens and slaves, because the state or federal government, through religious dictates, is now in charge.
Conservatism’s very nature is about doing less, leaving the individual alone to prosper and live without interference, which certainly should include women.
However, since Ronald Reagan invited the “Moral Majority,” which was neither moral or a majority then or now as it exists in other forms, conservatism was bastardized into something that now includes a campaign to take over the domain of a woman’s very body through means of the state or federal government.
Erick Erickson sees no problem with this, because he’s a religious conservative, not a conservative.
You can be religious and you can be a conservative, but once you put the two together in an ideological philosophy you lose the moorings of anything that has integral grounding in what conservatism actually means.
Not even Ron Paul passes this test as a Libertarian. He’s said before that he’s against abortion, because it’s violent, which is perfectly acceptable, but that he’d allow the states to decide the law governing abortions. This fails the basic autonomy test and the very notion of liberty that’s in Libertarianism, which he proved in an interview with Piers Morgan.
The biggest impediment to curtailing abortions is the refusal of religious conservatives and fundamentalist Republicans to accept the primary component to being a person, which is the body that houses the soul, assuming it exists, is something over which no other, certainly no politician, clergy or the state, has control.
This is about personal autonomy and living freely without any dependencies, the first component of personhood. It’s not abortion, but includes it, because religious fundamentalists are using political means to wage a war against the very notion of women’s individual freedom.
If people believing in true liberty don’t start taking religious conservatives on, whatever party they are in, over their fundamentalism, women’s autonomy won’t be sacrosanct one day.
This includes taking on people like Pres. Obama when he decides that a safe pharmaceutical like Plan B can be used as a stick to the contraceptive carrot that came afterward, because women’s individual freedoms remain a bargaining chip for politicians and their supporters.
The ultimate example of this was seen through the Susan G. Komen fiasco this past week, when Komen decided to make ideology more important than the health of women, especially poor women, who have been a political football since the Hyde Amendment. Yes, Pres. Obama used poor women as a football too, and he did it through the religious conservative playbook that created Hyde in the first place.
This column has been updated.
The GOP has jumped ship. You watch these GOP rallies w/Mitt and you have to be concerned- 99pct anglo, no diversity etc.. Even Bush tried to incl diff groups in his GOP front face!
You sound so anti – theocracy. That’s too bad, since there are so many ignorant American voters who apparently can’t wait for one. To think we did all that fighting and dying against something that we wanted all along. As you say, these people are not conservatives, they are religious fundamentalists who were given a unique opportunity by Reagan and Bush to achieve something that had eluded them for decades; the slow and methodical dismantling of the separation of church and state. It is also important to realize that it is not just abortion that they hate, but sex, for any reason other than procreation. This is why they fight against anything that prevents pregnancy. I’ve always been amused at how they rail against abortion in this country yet at the same time wear clothes, buy household items, machinery and give their money to a country that probably has more abortions than every other country combined. As you know, there was a reason for separating religion from the secular government; the two are simply incompatible. Religion will always try to take more as they burrow their way into every corner of society. Thanks to Reagan and Bush, they are in the government, schools, universities and civil service. Most frightening, they are in the military, especially the air force. Extracting them now will be a long and ugly fight fore they are tenacious and will not give up easily; they have the lord on their side.
FIRE WORKS!!!!! BELLS GONGING!!!!!!
Ms. Marsh, I lovez ya…ya KNOWS I duz……. yet even if I didn’t I would after this posting!!!!
“Any conservative with intellectual or political integrity would understand that conservatism of any depth must be rooted in the fundamental idea that interrupting the freedoms of any person through the intrusion of government, whether federal or state, is abridging a person’s autonomy in a manner that is the anti-thesis of conservatism.”
That’s the money shot…there IS no intellectual honesty or integrity in the conSERvative uberchristofacist mob that has a strangle hold on the Republican Party. In fact the Republican Party is dead. It was murdered by Nizion and every repugnantklaner and now teabagger since tricky dick started the ball rolling with his southern strategy and culminated with Ronnie ReagunZAP selling what was left of the republican party to the professional beggers of the uberchristofacist right.
This from a died in the wool nonbeliver…BLESS YOU SISTER!!!!!!!!! You have stripped the layers from the onion to expose the rot within!!!!
You know, it’s mystifying at this point & at the 2nd decade of the 21st century that anyone of the left tries to join in on this, but they have for decades.
As I’ve written many times, including in my book, I’m an Episcopalian by faith, a daily meditation practitionary in spiritual philosophy. However, neither root my ideological liberalism, unless it is the experiences of knowing suffering of others, the golden rule, as well as the importance of what the founders did by breaking with England.
Religious conservatives or social conservatives and fundamentalist Republicans are not actually conservative at all.
Very good. The Moral Majority was quickly followed by the politically active and savvy Christian Coalition. They built from the local level up, very successfully pushing the Republican, and indirectly the Democratic, Parties to the Right. By now, I’m not sure if anyone is really in control — the Republican Party Insiders played, and played to, the CC and later incarnations of this very active and powerful segment of their base, and successfully won many elections. But as they did, they found it more difficult to keep things from spinning too far Right, and too far for more and more voters
to go.
There have been people and organizations — People for the American Way, for the most obvious example — working all along to stop, at least slow down, this shift. Naturally they’ve received little attention. But as the practical consequences of such shifting are becoming more obvious — women, “the homosexuals,” “illegals,” unemployed, those living in poverty, for easy examples — PFAW and other such organizations are finding more people are sharing their concerns.
It took at least a couple of decades to get to this point, and I doubt things will turn around quickly. But maybe 2012 will at least help slow things down, with both Republican and Democratic parties. Not because of what party Insiders are doing, but because of what “engaged citizens,” or at least aware citizens, are doing.
It is nonsense that conservatism is or ever has been about safeguarding personal freedom.
Freedom from want, for example, is about as personal as it can get.
That was never one they much cared about, at all, as far back as Marie Antoinette.
For the main thread of European and American conservatism, politics is now and has always been about defending the interests, real or imagined, of the haves against the have-nots, the powerful against the powerless.
First it was throne and altar, then it was throne and altar and grand bourgeoisie, and then in the end it was mostly just grand bourgeoisie.
All that liberty stuff is just eyewash peculiar to the blather peddled by the advertising men of the modern, capitalist plutocracy.
Capitalist ideologues and libertarians are either the most horrifically stupid people on the face of the earth or the most horrific hypocrites.
The chief and most effective enemy of personal liberty in the world today is the employer, plutocrat class.
It is not our federal government that never has and never will, unless at conservative behest, do much of anything to limit your freedom of speech, of assembly, of the press, or even of religion.
The reality is that if the government does not insist on setting wages and hours and decent working conditions and consumer and debtor protections and otherwise defending ordinary folk against the rich and the corporations and the employer class the plutocracy will be set free to beat the living shit out of us all.
Remember that it is the libertarians and capitalism lovers who openly oppose democracy for imposing constraints on the free market – that is, constraints on the power and freedom of the plutocracy to do their worst - and for supporting redistribution to achieve even some minor measure of economic justice.
Some libertarians have even openly joined with George Will and Pat Buchanan in demanding the senate again be appointed by state legislatures and not be elected and that the poor, at the least, be literally disenfranchised.
How free will you be when they not only leave you totally at the mercy of the plutocracy with no defense by the regulatory government but leave you with much less political power, too?
How much of an idiot do you have to be to believe that their program seeks to protect and advance personal freedom?
Second, Paul is not so much a libertarian as a states’ rights conservative, like Goldwater and many others before and since his time.
That kind of conservatism, often nowadays called “neo-Confederate” conservatism, is not and never was about personal liberty, either.
The powers denied the federal government in the constitution are reserved to the states, these conservatives insist.
And the liberties we are guaranteed in the constitution against federal encroachment did not originally limit the states’ powers and would not now, they say, were it not for the frauds perpetrated by activist liberal judges, mostly in the 20th Century.
The First Amendment (disestablishment, free exercise), for example, does not limit state power and the right to privacy (there goes Roe!) is a liberal fiction, anyway.
On the other hand, among the few things the US Constitution, in their view, guarantees even against the states are freedoms for the plutocracy flimsily disguised as freedoms for you: freedom of contract, the right to work, and the open shop.
Freedom from unions for employers, that means.
Freedom for employers from government defense of workers and consumers through regulation of wages, hours, working conditions, product safety, or anything else to do with the workplace and the employer/employee/consumer relationships.
But, hey.
Hasn’t Newt recently insisted to the joy of his supporters that child labor laws are stupid and poor black kids should be denied food stamps and put to work cleaning their school bathrooms, putting some adult (and presumably better paid and maybe even unionized) janitors out of work?
If you aren’t rich you are to be delivered up, bound hand and foot and completely defenseless, to the rich.
Sound like freedom to you?
And the other two kinds of contemporary conservatives aren’t about liberty, either, and never have been.
Christianists are about undoing the sexual revolution and restoring American clerical power as it existed in the early 1950’s.
For that they have sacrificed their progressivism of the early 20th Century, joining the Republicans in pillaging America for the plutocracy.
Christian Zionists and neocons are about subordinating American foreign policy to the one mission of being Israel’s bodyguard.
Personal freedom?
If you care about your personal freedom you had damned well better side with the liberals.
And the tea-baggers?
Confused stooges of the Koch brothers who pull their strings.
A person who truly cared about personal freedom would not align with any group at all. Both liberals and conservatives seek to restrain individual freedom through gvoernment to their own ends. In other words, both sides suck. A third party would such just as much but in a different way.
Po widdle troll…why don’t you start the totally troll party?
Please, secularh, take on the argument instead of crying “troll,” which is unhelpful & a very weak response.
TM.com welcomes so-called “trolls” and anyone else who wants to comment. Surely people can dismantle the arguments or if not, have it out with unlike thinkers instead of labeling people something that means nothing in the scheme of debating ideas such as the notion that there is no such thing as conservatism today, which is not completely colored by religious doctrine, which has no place in policy discussions, but should be relegated to the private sector.
“A third party would such just as much but in a different way.”
I am assuming he/she/it meant suck. That is an argument?! I suppose po is advocating anarchy then.If that is the “idea” po is putting forth fine. I suppose he wants a Somalia like situation?
If someone actually puts forth an idea or argument I’ll be happy to debate it. But so far I haven’t seen that happen from this particular trol….OOOPS poster.
Troll Party, Toatal Respect Of Life, Liberty! or,
Total Repeal of Lame Legislation!
I like it.
Go for it. I’m sure some of the anti-reproductive rights crowd will join.
And your point PWT?
I’m not even going to try to unravel the false equivalency between Conservative and Liberal “constraints” on “liberty” Liberal tend to “restrict” the “liberty” and “freedom” of people to act like assholes; to be racist, homophobic, misogynistic, patriarchal butt-wipes. Liberals tend to believe that humans do have unalienable rights that must be protected against the tyranny of the majority and the tyranny of the state. Liberals tend to believe in the commons, the joining together of people to achieve a public good.
Conservatives, or more to the point reactionaries, have no problem with tyranny, as long as they are the tyrants. To not understand the reactionary will to power and domination is to be politically neutered. It is to surrender the personal agency that is your supposed Raison d’etre.
But I expect no less from the thumb-sucking juveniles that wrap their tiny little hands and even tinier little minds around Libertarianism. Libertarianism is not a political ideology; it’s a five year old’s temper tantrum placed on pseudo-intellectual steroids. When push comes to shove, even Ayn Rands opts out for the protection and benefits of the commons. The fiction of Galt cannot compete with the reality of the Welfare State. Libertarianism is nothing more than an attempt by poorly socialized intellectuals to give their crass selfishness a positive moral gloss. It’s freeloading made heroic by fallacious arguments.
It is only a false equivalency to someone invested heavily in one side or the other.
It is only a false equivalency if someone isn’t interested in facts or reality.
Ha! spincity , I am going to try and memorize that rant.
Well Gaius,
You’re looking rather fit and trim for a guy who fell on his sword in 122 BCE. Still an opponent of the Senatorial class after all these years I see
Excellent post Taylor. Thanks for writing it.
It’s truly amazing that Republicans are getting away with this nonsense. NO ONE and I mean NO ONE is calling them on it anywhere that garners the requisite attention this deserves.
“NO ONE … that garners the requisite attention it deserves” — a very important point.
It’s getting that deserved attention that has been so very difficult, as the many organizations working in this area know from years of uphill experience, like People for the American Way, Interfaith Alliance, Faith in America, HRC’s Religion and Faith, The Task Force’s National Religious Leadership Roundtable, Americans United for the Separation of Church and State, and more.
The “Religious Right” has so successfully made their interpretations and beliefs the presumed definition of Christianity, and made Christianity the presumed state religion (though of course they won’t use that term) that the organizations and faith communities and individuals who do not agree with the “Religious Right” way of thinking are generally ignored.
The big picture I’m getting from Erickson’s post is that it proves what I have been saying for years and that is you can find justification for anything in the bible. Erickson is making a great argument here against fundamentalism and the in-errancy of the bible. I mean how can Obama be wrong if he is quoting an inerrant document? And how can Erickson be right if he’s saying that verses can be taken out of context. Well, NSS, Mr. Erickson, the fact of the matter is his two first bible verses you could say were taken out of context. Growing up I was told that religion and politics don’t mix and guess what? Erickson proves that exact same thing with his post.
The evangelical Cristians even fail the test of literal interpretration of the Bible, after all, it was Jesus who threw the money lenders out of the temple. Now they are aligning themselves for political expediency with the corporate Republican, the money lenders.
There are Democratic politicians with a liberal voting record who are pro-life. Sen. Bob Casey of Pennsylvania is pro-life. His father was also a pro-life Senator from Pennsylvania who was not allowed to speak at a Democratic National convention that selected Bill Clinton because of his pro-life beliefs. Sen. Harry Reid is a Mormon and is also pro-life.
http://www.politicsdaily.com/2011/02/25/majority-leader-harry-reid-among-most-liberal-senators/
http://senator-liberal-ratings.findthebest.com/d/d/Pennsylvania
I realize that these two Liberal Senators are viewed by the Progressive extermists as Conservative Lite because of their pro life beliefs and they do not pass the 100% litmus test required for the entire Progressive agenda.
“His father was also a pro-life Senator from Pennsylvania who was not allowed to speak at a Democratic National convention that selected Bill Clinton because of his pro-life beliefs. ”
That is a flat out lie. He wasn’t allowed to speak when HE wanted to. Boo-freakin-Hoo. And frankly, I don’t see how someone who is anti full rights for women can be called a “liberal” or even a “moderate” So actually thinking the Constitutional Rights of people mean something is being an extremist….who’d a thunk it.
Nothing wrong with being pro life if you don’t try to impose your moral system on others through codification in law.
For an example my moral belief is that it is irresponsible to bring more that two children into the world but I am not for imposing birth control on everyone. Another belief is that it is immoral to bring a child into the world that you have no intention of caring for or nurturing into adulthood but I would not impose abortions on people who have proven themselves to be irresponsible with other children.
What makes the wing nuts able to make the moral decisions for others? I really don’t think it is about morality for many of them it is about control.. The awesome power of women. It scares the daylights out of some of these moral midget men who hang out at PP and scream obscenities at women walking into the building.
Does “troll” just mean “Hey, that post was too long for my little attention span”?
Or just “I didn’t understand one thing you wrote, man”?
Considering the post that was being responded to it is more like “Hey man……there wasn’t one thing you wrote that was logical.” Unless you think false equivalencies or anarchy are logical that is.
Point to Gaius. heh-heh…
TM.com welcomes so-called “trolls” and anyone else who wants to comment.
That’s certainly one of the things I like about you, Marsh.
However, I am having a hard time liking your article, solely because it conglomerates a bunch of topically-related items, but none presented individually as a linearly flowing argument from premise to conclusion. More like you picked and chose from a couple of different arguments and voila, here is my conclusion because I am running out of space.
You have made your race to conclusion much easier by failing to acknowledge the conservative belief that “life” begins at conception. You, yourself, can say I Taylor Marsh believe life begins at birth…..and even cite a bunch of other people who side with you, but that doesn’t prove the socons belief invalid to them. If they believe abortion is terminating a human life, why on earth should they capitulate to your view? Does a mother get to terminate the life of a toddler because it indisputably eminated from the women’s own body? It is the word “life” that drives the belief that abortion is wrong, not the distinction between fetus and toddler. You don’t give anyone else grief for thinking taking another life is wrong, do you? You can beat the drum until you die, but until you can change the belief, you will never change the behavior. And as long as you are out to change religious beliefs, there is this notion about an unleavened wafer becoming a portion of a dead guy’s body all of a sudden…:)
There are a couple of other points I would enjoy also debating, but my time is limited.
Cutting to the chase for all of them, however, is the fact that proselytizing is a low-yield strategy here. A bunch of modern day liberals won’t be a match against tens of centuries of institutionalized dogma….at least for another ten centuries or so. If you truly want to see less overall resistance to abortion availability, yield to the notion of federalism and move to a blue state. Divide first, then conquer. Secondly, unhitch your desire to have me pay for abortions from your desire to access abortion. A truly superb divide and conquer that would eliminate at least 80% of the resistance you presently have. You insist on keeping me as a formidable enemy when you could easily turn me into an ally.
Granting from the outset that infanticide is and ought to be a crime I can agree with criminalizing abortion rather late in the pregnancy, once the claim that the fetus is actually an unborn child has become credible, exceptions allowed for in case of risk to the mother’s life or serious risk to her health, or in any case in which euthanasia of a child would make sense.
But zygotes and embryos, though living, are far from being unborn children and I agree abortion at will should be allowed in the first weeks of pregnancy.
Belief to the contrary is, I think, pretty clearly just a matter of religion and, as a secularist and separationist, I think such beliefs cannot be allowed to influence law.
Ms. Marsh, I meant to ask.
Are you actually a conservative at heart, but supportive of liberals only because of abortion and other feminist issues?
And is/was your support for Hillary based solely on feminism, too?
I think casualobserver has hit on the nugget no one seems to want to grapple with if you take it along with TM’s point about a woman’s sovereignty over her body. If a human life begins at conception what happens when the interests of that human conflict with the human whose body is occupied, if you will by that new life? If we really endow human rights at conception then how do we avoid trading one set of rights–the right to life– with the other–the right to determine whether or not to be occupied by another life? This is the question that I never hear anyone ask.
” If we really endow human rights at conception then how do we avoid trading one set of rights–the right to life– with the other–the right to determine whether or not to be occupied by another life?”
Ummm, contraception kind of does this eh? But the anti-abortionists don’t seem to like the idea of birth control either. I refuse to call them “pro life” since nearly all of them seem to be perfectly happy with wars and the death penalty, which I bet take a lot more lives than abortion does.
Well, the Gutmacher Institute claims that there are about 1.3MM abortions performed in the US each year. That dwarfs the number of deaths from war and the death penalty combined.
It is the height of hypocracy to claim to be ‘pro-life’ and to support the death penalty.