Nutjobs on the Right

From Tamara:

I have no real love for the peccadilloes and strange beliefs of the Right. From politicians with a tenuous grasp of the Constitution to preachers sticking their noses where they don't belong, I get a twinge of annoyance at least once a day. It remains largely an annoyance, however, as so much of what they hold dear has very little impact on me in my daily life

She continues a little later with:

The Left has had less influence at the national level for the last decade than an outboard motor would have on the course of a supertanker, but with the convulsion of November '06, that has all changed, and suddenly they're out to really get me good and surly, because they're not after my Good Times, they're after my money.

The sophisticated Blue State city-dwelling agnostic may mock the tent-revival evangelical's belief that "With God, everything is possible", yet he somehow leaves unexamined the fact that he believes the same thing, except that "God" is replaced by "legislative fiat".

Yeah. At least some people on the right, including Christian Nutjobs like me, are for smaller government. Which means I have no desire to spend your money to support my nutjob programs. I'm pretty confident we can fund our nutjob programs ourselves if the government would just get off of our back. At least we can if they're worth doing. And since we want them off our back, we're probably going to try to get them off yours as well just to be fair.

While that belief unfortunately isn't universal even among the Rightwing Christian Nutjobs, it is still fairly widespread. Even more unfortunately the nutjobs on the left have no such sense of propriety. They all want the government to do everything and therefore they want you to support and defend their nutjobbery by proxy.

As Hube has noticed, there are those who disagree with my assessment. But frankly I don't think those heralds of future Christian Fascism really get right-wing Christian Nutjobs like me. They fail to realize that we only have consensus across a some broad moral principles like abortion, homosexuality, and sex before marriage. You know, things most of the country had consensus on before the 1960s and 1970s stirred everything up. But on any kind of religious specifics, we'd rip each others throats out long before we could impose some sort of rules on the rest of the country. I don't mind praying with Catholics and Pentecostals, but I definitely don't want to give them the ability to legislate how I pray. I don't want to have to learn Latin for the Catholics or, uhh, pig latin (Esperanto? Hebrew?) for the Pentecostals.

Look, Wikipedia has a list of over 60 Baptist groups in the US. That means there are over 60 groups of Baptists that can't reach consensus on their church government. And thats just one denomination. If the Baptists are incapable of getting our differences worked out among ourselves, how the heck are we going to impose them on other people?

Hube once told me that he isn't a fan of organized religion. I told him I wasn't either, that's why I'm a Baptist.