“Religious Voters”

Over at Atrios’ shop, the whole Donohue hoo-ha has led to an interesting discussion between Atrios and Mark Kleiman concerning the insistence of Kara Vanderslice (who interestingly was one of Donohue’s victims in 2004, when he forced her off the Kerry campaign) on the Democrats’ alleged need to reach “religious voters”.

As Steve Gilliard notes (echoed by The Angry Black Woman in a discussion of Tucker Carlson’s trying to pretend that Barack Obama somehow isn’t a Real Live Christian because, well, he’s not white), the Democrats have PLENTY of “religious voters”. Gobs and gobs and GOBS of them.

They’re called BLACKS and HISPANICS.

But to people like Vanderslice on the left and Tucker Carlson on the right, they’re invisible. Only white racist nutball Fundies are “religious voters” as far as they’re concerned.

As Steve says: “White evangelicals are not Democrats because they largely dislike blacks and hispanics. You can pander to them all you want, but the core of their church has a racial undertone. The leading evangelicals were once leading segregationists.”

Egggsacktly. I call them “the religio-racist right” (or r3 for short) for that very reason.

Here’s a quickie quiz:

1) Why are there such things as Southern Baptists? Because the Southern Baptist Convention broke with the rest of the Baptist church in the 1840s.

2) What caused the break? The Southern Baptists favored slavery, while the rest of the church was working to abolish it.

3) Why didn’t the SBC rejoin the rest of the Baptist church once slavery was abolished? Because they still hope to turn back the clock to before 1863.

And as Marx and Lenin points out at Steve’s place, the r3s are wired to the corporate arm of the GOP. Both the corporates and the r3s don’t like paying taxes — the corporates just don’t like ’em, and the r3s live in mortal terror that somewhere, somehow, their tax dollars are going to support blacks and (Catholic) Hispanics.

And Marx and Lenin points out another thing: Abraham Foxman’s Anti-Defamation League freaks out when Jimmy Carter — taking a cue from various Israelis — uses the word “apartheid” to describe the Israeli government’s treatment of the Palestinians. Yet they don’t have a single word of criticism — not one — for William Donohue, who unlike Carter is a genuine anti-Semite. Why is this? Is this because of the growing alliances between conservative Christian evangelicals and various American Jewish groups?