Ugh

Well, the latest in bashing the Christian Right is here -- we're all "Dominionists" apparently. According to this theory, we're secretly trying to bring back the death penalty for witchcraft, fornication, heresy, and other offenses, real and imagined. Additionally, we want to bring back slavery and degrade women to the status of property (first of their fathers, then of their husbands). We want to establish a real theocracy in America.

Needless to say, this is all completely bogus. I certainly don't favor any of those proposals and you'd be hard-pressed to find any American who did (oh, I'm sure there are a few crazy people out there like that, and the "dominionists" are apparently a real group which believes in several of those things (though apparently not all), but that's far from being anything approaching a sizeable portion of the population, especially one that would have any kind of political power to enact such a thing. Of course, the theory says I would deny that. I'd want to cover up my own dominionist beliefs and may not even be aware of all of them myself. All the typical, run-of-the-mill, conspiracy stuff.

Normally, I wouldn't even bother bringing this up, but apparently, at least some of this is gaining credibility on the Left (portions of the Left, I should say). Recently, Harper's Magazine ran a cover story on the matter, and it's a "respectable" semi-mainstream media magazine (that is, of course, mainstream as far as the media goes, not as far as America goes). Additionally, there was a conference recently, "Examining the Real Agenda of the Religious Far Right" which brought up this theory. Now, I'm sure the title of the conference alone would make most of you roll your eyes, dismiss it out of hand as a bigoted offering of the Left, or some such reaction. However, sponsors included the National Council of Churches, People for the American Way, The Nation, The Village Voice, and United Americans for Separation of Church and State; these all, while being on the Left of the political spectrum, are frequently used by the media (or are leftist media outlets themselves). I must concede that the first two did a good job of naming themselves, making them seem more mainstream, or even right of center.

Stanley Kurtz wrote up a couple of articles on the matter for National Review, here and here.

Now, the Democrats made a lot of noise about "reaching out" to Christians after the last election. As far as I can tell, they're failing miserably at it. The scare tactics that they're using aren't exactly endearing them to any Christian I've come across. Perhaps they're just grasping for scare tactics now that their Social Security ones are failing so miserably. Environmental ones, too. To be sure, each of those have some of their kool-aid drinkers riled up, but as they become further divorced from fact, the democrats seem to be losing hold. But back to my point, in addition to these scare tactics, they've attacked the new Pope, and have just had a generally nasty approach to all things Christian. In addition to, if anything, alienating more Christians, is this really going to help them with non-Christians? Somehow, I doubt it. The whole thing seems very much like a net-loss issue for them.