CLARIFICATION

A reader asks:

Do you mean to say that the war is being used as political cover to push a theocratic agenda (sounds about right), or that the reason we undertook the war was as cover for a theocratic agenda (sounds cynical and hysterical)?

I mean the former. I’m sorry if I confused anyone. Or more simply: many people voted for Bush on national security grounds, a position with which I have much sympathy, and decided that fretting about the religious right was overblown. My position was that the national security differences between Bush and Kerry were not so great as to risk the domestic Kulturkampf that the religious right would unleash if Bush were to win. Others believed I was “hysterical” and concentrating too much on the gay issue. I think events since the election have buttressed my case. Gays could see this more clearly because we were so often the convenient target for the far right in the first term (although they have even more ambitious plans to curtail gay freedom in the second). But the religious right’s agenda is far more ambitious than merely stripping gays of civil rights or even minimal privacy. It’s about controlling the bodies and behaviors of all Americans to more faithfully conform to Biblical absolutes. Hence Schiavo; hence the need to purge the judiciary of any opposition; hence the abolition of a threatened judicial filibuster; hence the political alliance with the new papacy; hence “Justice Sunday.” These people are no longer merely one Republican faction. They control the GOP. We are now seeing that more clearly, while the war – understandably – obscured that a little. With Iraq less in the headlines, the domestic agenda of the new big government sectarian GOP is far clearer. My “hysteria” may eventually be seen as clarity – even to anti-anti-religious right contortionists like Mickey Kaus.