Wednesday, May 16, 2007

America can?t afford another ?faith-based? president


By PAT MURPHY

Pat Murphy

Pay attention. America's future is up for grabs.

A group of fewer than 100 people is plotting to elect an even more messianic, born-again president to impose a more rigid moral and religious order on the country.

They're not the Council on Foreign Relations or Bilderberg Society or Tri-lateral Commission, those international cabals that Republicans suspect darkly of running the world.

Instead, they're members of the super-secret, ultra-conservative, militantly religious Council for National Policy, an enclave of top-tier, self-appointed evangelical moralizers meeting to anoint a Republican presidential nominee and then give marching orders to the religious right on Election Day in 2008.

Their power is proven: President Bush has given them extraordinary influence on national policies and appointments of key government officials.

These worthies want to establish a defacto theocracy, driven by an ecclesiastical agenda that bans abortion, rejects science (stem cell research, evolution and global warming remedies), isolates gays in society and requires Christian doctrine in public education and textbooks.

Their theme is "dignity of life," although their concern doesn't extend to denouncing the indignity of widespread death in the chaotic Iraq war.

By now, most Americans have had enough of overbearing religious influence on Washington. Remember the humiliating spectacle of President Bush rushing back to Washington in the middle of the night from his Texas ranch to sign a bill keeping the dying Terri Schiavo plugged into life support? And disclosures that many contractors for Iraq jobs costing hundreds of millions of dollars had to pass questions about their ideology on Roe v. Wade? And revelations that young, inexperienced graduates of law schools known for their religious curricula have run the Justice Department?

Enough.

The nation desperately needs a president loyal to constitutional law, not an evangelical agenda. Under Bush & Co., the public purse has been plundered. Citizens' civil rights have been trampled. Foreign policy is in shatters. The military establishment is broken and demoralized. A new generation of workers entering the marketplace is educationally deficient. Industry's ruinous environmental abuses have been encouraged. Corruption in government and commerce has metastasized throughout the U.S. culture.

George W. Bush is a mockery of what the nation deserves. Where finesse and intelligence are required, Bush uses swagger. Where courage and reason are needed, Bush substitutes bluster and bluff. Where humility is needed, Bush employs arrogance.

Pay attention. The Republican candidate tapped by the religious right will simply be another ethically, intellectually weak version of George W. Bush who'll be less devoted to the principles of the presidency than to the tyranny of religious demagogues.




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