I don't understand any of this. This reminds me of the multiple "angles" that would run simultaneously in professional wrestling. You would have the evil Nazi German, the "Pearl Harbor" Japanese, the Red Terror, the Arab sheik, the Cuban assassin, the bullying cowboy, and the evil gay. Each one claimed to be "the greatest wrestler of all time." Yet they never got mad at each other. They were all on the same side because they were all heels, and each one was feuding with a different "babyface."
In American politics today we have all these simultaneous "angles." We have the Marxist angle, the secular humanist angle, the gay angle, the Black angle, the Mexican angle, and now the islamic angle. They never get mad at each other. And conservatives are supposed to be against each and every one of them. Trouble is, to do so they must twist themselves into knots.
One minute conservatives are screaming to the high heavens that this is a chr*stian nation and the libs and gays had better learn that. Then suddenly conservatives thump Tom Paine and Voltaire as they lambast islam for being mean to gays, atheists, and feminists and because their conception of god as being completely sovereign over every facet of life is alien from All American Protestantism with its separation of church and state. Then the Blacks come along and religion disappears entirely in a fratricidal war among alleged co-religionists.
G-d shouldn't tell governments what to do? But homosexuality should be against the law? But not in moslem countries? What the hey? Is anyone listening to himself?
Now before I get zotted and strung up, it isn't just us conservatives who are tying ourselves into knots. Until a couple decades ago the Arab/moslem community was a pariah that no politician would touch with a ten foot pole other than the David Dukes, the J.B. Stoners, the Pat Buchanans, and the Charley Reese's. Liberals wouldn't spit on an Arab (because Israel was so naughty and revolutionary). And now all of a sudden that is all forgotten. The KKK's former butt-boys are the new Oppressed Who Can Do No Wrong, and Israel is now Rhodesia. What did either Israel or the Arabs do to cause this reversal?
Now the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, once a mainstay of the World Anti-Communist League, is the new Cuba and Saudi princes are trying to sound like a cross between angry Sixties revolutionaries and nineteenth century anarcho-syndicalists. What is going on here?
And it turns out that liberals are actually for religious fanaticism and homophobia so long as it isn't rednecks doing it. So liberals defend gays from conservatives and conservatives defend gays from moslems.
Am I the only person on this forum whose head is spinning? (No Exorcist references, please!)
Is anyone trying to think logically about all this stuff at once instead of switching automatically from one position to the other depending on which "angle" just happens to be running at the moment?
The subject of this thread is a "former" liberal who still sounds exactly like a liberal to me. He's still for exactly the same stuff he used to be for . . . he's merely consistent. And the liberals who are attacking him are defending what they themselves attack in less politically correct populations.
Does anyone see what I'm getting at?
I don't know how else to put it, so I'll just make one more quasi-related point before posting this and resigning myself to my fate:
American conservatives are fond of attacking islam because its claims on life are total. But G-d's claims on all of life are exactly that: total. Before the novelty of "separation of church and state" this was almost universally recognized (though it had an antecedent in the chr*stian "render unto Caesar"). Do FReepers ever realize that the Jewish religion they claim to think so highly of is just as totalistic as islam? Is Judaism evil because it dictates how Jews are to tie their shoes? Or do Jews get a pass only because they are "honorary chr*stians" (an "honor" they rightly reject)?
No, I'm not apologizing for islam, a false religion. But I am suggesting that our current crisis has roots that go back much further than the Sixties and that conservatives crusading against "theocracy" makes about as much sense as liberals defending the rights of moslems to be homophobes.
Pinging a couple of friends just so someone will see this who knows me and won't misunderstand what I'm trying to say.
It is called shifting alliances, during the cold war many places did not want Communism, but we made of the mistake of assuming that meant they liked us, because we didn't want Communism either. But now that the Soviets are gone, the Saudi's et al. can return to the Anit-American Angle.
The Alliance between the U.S. and U.S.S.R during WW2 is a good example. Just because both were Anti-Nazi, doesn't mean we want the same thing. As such we ended up on opposite sides after the war.