WAAAAH! Obama Won’t Let Us Have Our Religio-Racist Traitor Party!
Posted by Phoenix Woman on July 6, 2009
When reading this Daily Kos diary on President Obama upholding the separation of church and state with regard to a planned B-2 flyover and Christian ceremony, this passage leapt out at me:
Concerns had been raised about one event in particular — an annual event held at Stone Mountain in Georgia.
Those of you who’ve been reading Mercury Rising for a while now have seen me use the term “religio-racist right” to describe the Neo-Confederate dominance within the conservative wing of American Protestant Christianity, and how the forces of bigotry have mastered the use of evangelical religion as a cloak to disguise their true aims. Just look at the self-styled leaders of the movement: Billy Graham, Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, James Dobson, and several dozen other lesser lights. All of these men owe more than a smattering of their style — and their following — to a conflation of evangelicalism and racism. (Remember, the whole reason there is a “Southern Baptist Convention” in the first place is because they split from the main Baptist church in the 1840s rather than tolerate the main church’s antislavery stance. And while other Protestant denominations saw their Southern branches split off before the Civil War and then reunite with their main branches afterwards, the SBC never did so.)
Now, what’s this have to do with Stone Mountain? Oh, nothing much — it’s just that Stone Mountain happens to be a shrine to the KKK.
Oh, and one of the other flyovers? In Nampa, Idaho. While Nampa is itself a decent town, the state of Idaho is notorious for being a longtime haven for white supremacists, especially the Hayden Lake area. James von Grunn, the guy who shot the guard at the Holocaust Museum, lived in Hayden Lake from 2004 to 2005.
This boil has needed lancing for some time.
3 Responses to “WAAAAH! Obama Won’t Let Us Have Our Religio-Racist Traitor Party!”
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Mercury Rising 鳯女 
Charles II said
The ties between the religious right and the military are very, very deep. Between the racist right and the military less so. I would bet it takes a generational change to reverse this.
Phoenix Woman said
What really ticks me off is that the spiritual descendants of the people who chose to turn traitor rather than dump slavery are now pushing themselves and their worldview as the truly moral and patriotic one (and getting away with it thanks to our media), whereas those of us who are the spiritual descendants of those who fought to end slavery are considered un-American.
Paul Sunstone said
I agree the ties between the military and the Religious Right might take a generation to reverse — or even longer. Especially since a great deal has been done to institutionalize those ties in order to insure they will endure beyond the deaths of those who have forged them.