Nothing fires up the base more than hate and fear:

[Mark] Potok of the Southern Poverty Law Center said the personal vilification and the false science against gay men and lesbians issued by institutions of the religious right are not only hateful, but dangerous.

“It is quite remarkable how they claim to hate the sin but love the sinner. That’s an absurd claim. We have reports that clearly show this kind of rhetoric paves the way to violence,” he said. “Without question, gay men and lesbians are the most attacked group — and the hate crimes toward them are more violent.”

The typical hate crime offender is a white man between the ages of 14 and 21, and offenders often say they are simply acting out the wishes of the larger community, Potok said.

So when Christian leaders spout anti-gay messages and preachers sermonize on the “moral intrinsic evil” of homosexuals, as Catholic Church officials have stated, there is little doubt the language leads to violence, Potok added.
“These leaders are acting in a sense as permission-givers for violence,” he said.

Jay Smith Brown, communication strategies director for the Washington, D.C.-based Human Rights Campaign, agreed.
“The rhetoric that hate groups are spewing fuels hate, and that hate can all too easily turn into violence. It’s a dangerous cycle that must be countered with serious education efforts,” he said.

On the backward ass state of Kansas and the "Scopes II" hearings on the teaching of "Intelligent Design" in public schools (emphasis added):


As a Kansas taxpayer, voter, and parent of a student in the public school system, I take serious issue with the waste of time and resources spent on these hearings. It is a foregone conclusion that the 6-4 majority on the board will vote to adopt the science standard recommendations of the Minority Report. They have stacked the deck in their favor. They have launched tenacious propagandistic attacks against sound science, and are preparing to flatten the wall of separation of church and state. My wife and I teach our son spirituality in the home, where such education belongs.

Board member Kathy Martin, the out-spoken former teacher from Clay Center, Kansas, minces no words about her agenda, or her tenuous grasp of the facts. In an interview with the Clay Center newspaper, Ms. Martin said, "Evolution has been proven false. Intelligent Design is science-based and strong in facts." Going further, she stated, "Man has changed and evolved, but we are not going to change back into monkeys." When asked if Intelligent Design was a form of Creationism, she commented, "Of course this is a Christian agenda. We are a Christian nation. Our country is made up of Christian conservatives. We don't often speak up, but we need to stand up and let our voices be heard." Ms. Martin saved her most revealing dictum for last. "Why shouldn't theology be taught in the classroom? Morality ought to be taught in every class. Prayer ought to be allowed. Whenever a child wanted to pray in class, I prayed with them. All children believe in God. Even little children whose parents don't take them to church believe in God." If you are a parent, and do not feel shock and dismay as you envision this woman rendering decisions which affect the education of our children, it is time to awaken from your intellectual slumber.


David Horowitz's electronic rag has an editorial on the conference on Dominionism held last weekend:

"In a conference entitled, “Examining the Real Agenda of the Religious Far Right” and co-sponsored by CUNY and The Open Center, he [Bob Edgar, General Secretary of the National Council of Churches (NCC)] was referring to Christian fundamentalism, a force that the participants of the weekend bash at CUNY see as a tremendous threat to democracy.
 
That’s right, don’t worry about al-Zarqawi and Osama bin Laden, or the murder and mayhem carried out worldwide by their order and with their blessing. The real threat to freedom and liberty, it turns out, is Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, and the seditious propaganda of Tim LaHaye, author of the best-selling apocalyptic fiction series Left Behind."

No one on the left is saying we shouldn't worry about Islamic terrorism. Or domestic terrorism. But we do think the radical right is a threat to America. Look at their agenda, and tell me it would not drastically change the United States as we know it. They would like to:

1. Tear down the wall between church and state.
2. Strip the Judiciary of much of its power.
3. Squelch dissent, both political and religious.
4. End entitlement programs such as Social Security and Medicare
5. Eliminate the right to privacy
6. Eliminate regulatory agencies such as the EPA, OSHA, and the FDA.
7. End legal abortions
8. Make homosexuality illegal
9. Impose the death penalty for non-violent crimes

Sounds pretty dangerous to me.

The left is beginning to realize the threat posed by Dominionism:

NEW YORK -- Secular humanists and leftist activists convened here over the weekend to strategize how to counter what they contend is a growing political threat from Christian conservatives. 
Understanding and answering the "religious far right" that propelled President Bush's re-election is key to preventing a "theocracy" from governing the nation, speakers argued at a weekend conference. 
"The religious right now has an unprecedented influence on American politics and policy," said Ralph White, co-founder of the Open Center, a New York City institution focused on holistic learning. "It is incumbent upon all of us to understand as precisely as possible its aims, methods, beliefs, theology and psychology."

[snip]

Speakers outlined such concepts -- others would say conspiracy theories -- as Christian reconstructionism and dominionism to a crowd that Mr. White said does "not understand the further reaches of religion." 
Dominionism is the theory that the account in Genesis in which God gave man dominion over the earth has become a political teaching advocating that Christians gain and hold power. Christian reconstructionism is the theory that Christian conservatives intend to impose Old Testament law in America. 
The United States is "not yet a theocracy," Joan Bokaer, founder of TheocracyWatch.org, said Friday night, but she argued that "the United States is beginning to fit the model of a reconstructed America."

From an excellent essay on the dominionists:


"The American theocrats may claim they want the Constitution to be "restored," by forbidding judicial challenges to government recognition of the biblical God. But the Founders who wrote the Constitution, themselves believers in a higher power they often called Providence, made it clear that religious liberty, not religious tyranny, was one of the governing principles of the United States of America.

[snip]

The Constitution is for all Americans and the president is supposed to be the president of all Americans, not just those who adhere to a particular religious belief.

[snip]

Of course, the American theocrats would strive to keep non-Christians (true non-Christians and those they define as such), from ever attaining the presidency. The very fact that they are theocrats shows that they have no use for Art. VI Cl. 3 of the Constitution, which says:

The Senators and Representatives before mentioned, and the Members of the several State Legislatures, and all executive and judicial Officers, both of the United States and of the several States, shall be bound by Oath or Affirmation, to support this Constitution; but no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States. (emphasis mine).

So even before we get to the Bill of Rights, it's clear that our constitutional system of government does not uphold any form of Christianity as the supreme law of the land. Instead, the Founders wrote a constitution under which Americans of all beliefs or none could live and hold office under.

'Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion . . .' That's the very first clause of the First Amendment. NO ESTABLISHED RELIGION!"

If it walks like a duck:

Opponents have little trouble linking (Dominionism) with evangelicals.

“They don’t talk about dominionism, but they are in fact mini-dominionists,” said Mel White, executive director of Soulforce, a gay and lesbian advocacy group based in Lynchburg.

If they have their way, White said, the Ten Commandments would be posted in every courthouse, abortions would be illegal and gay sex would be punishable by death, though White said many stop short of calling for the execution of homosexuals.

In short, White said, they argue for a government based on a literal reading of the Bible.

[snip]

Grant Azdell, dean of religious life at Lynchburg College, said some people consider dominionist and evangelical labels interchangeable.

“It (dominionism) takes the evangelical message and takes it to the extreme,” he said. “It is a powder keg issue because you’re branded a heretic or a non-Christian if you don’t agree.”

The idea that Christians have dominion over every facet of life, including the government, leaves out large segments of American society, he said. “It goes against everything the Constitution stands for.”

Advocates of a Bible-centered government are increasingly influencing public policy, he said, because religious moderates are not speaking out.

Dominion theocracy began as series of small social, cultural and political movements concerning issues like abortion and school prayer, according to the religion Web site www.explore-religion.com.

Followers base their name on a verse in the book of Genesis 1:26, “And God said, ‘Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.’”

In layman’s terms, God made man dominion over the Earth, which the Web site states, includes all levels of the U.S. government, from the Oval Office to local soil and water conservation boards.

More evidence of the influence of the radical religious right from the Congressional record:

Mr. STEARNS: I agree with Justice Scalia and with the vast majority of the American people. In fact, to quote former Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas: ``We are a religious people whose institutions presuppose a supreme being.'' That is why I have introduced legislation to display the Ten Commandments in the Capitol.

Mr. Speaker, the fact of the matter is that the Ten Commandments are a historical document that contains moral, ethical, and legal truisms that any person of any religion or even an atheist can recognize and appreciate. They present a concise set of values that represent the moral background of this Nation and our common view on right and wrong.

The legislative branch has been firing volleys at the judicial branch of late, most likely at the behest of the radical right. From the Congressional Record:

Mr. GOHMERT: When our highest Court seeks international opinion on what is right or wrong, it should ask itself where international opinion was when the Nazis were killing millions of people. It should ask itself where was the international opinion when Saddam Hussein was killing thousands of his own people. Some of the sources of this international opinion they rely on were selling equipment and supplies to Saddam Hussein as he murdered people.

Friends, I have not mentioned the propriety or impropriety of the actual outcomes of these recent Supreme Court decisions, but I call to account the disgustingly subjective and arbitrary process that has been guiding this Supreme Court . The majority on the Supreme Court has figuratively been a bunch of emperors with no clothes. The few judges left on the court with judgment must find it difficult working with a bunch of naked self-crowned autocrats.

In England, devoted patriots are fond of saying, ``God save the Queen.'' In America, it is time for devoted Americans to say and to pray in earnest, ``God save us from this Supreme Court ,'' and then remove those who have ceased being judges and have become the worst nightmares of our Founding Fathers.

The "Houses of Worship Free Speech Restoration Act of 2005" allows churches to promote political causes and still retain their tax exempt status:

This legislation is another attempt by religious conservatives to misrepresent the truth. By calling the legislation "Free Speech Restoration Act," the religious make it sound as if the free speech rights of church officials are being inhibited. The law being repealed is a tax code violation for those organizations that benefit from religious tax exemptions to not engage in political actions, such as, voicing a preference for a specific candidate from the pulpit of the organization.

[snip]

Please write to your Representative and ask them to not support H.R. 235, Houses of Worship Free Speech Restoration Act of 2005.

The word "Restoration" is an indicator of a theocratic agenda. See Constitution Restoration Act.

File this under "what the hell was he thinking": Howard Ahmanson, the money behind Christian Reconstructionism, is funding an exhibition of Caravaggio's art in London.

[Caravaggio] was alleged to have kept a boy lover and slept with a dagger by his bed, scandalised the Roman Catholic church's senior hierarchy as much for his hedonistic ways as his shocking depictions of the Virgin Mary, for which he used his prostitute muse as a model.

...The acclaimed exhibition was made possible thanks to the generous donation of a reclusive US millionaire who bankrolled a fundamentalist religious movement founded by a man who endorsed the execution of homosexuals and adulterers.

[snip]

Never far from controversy, Howard Ahmanson funds and sits on the board of the Discovery Institute, a Seattle-based organisation committed to proving Darwin's theory of evolution was 'wrong' and the universe was created by the 'intelligent design' of a superior being.

'We've been tracking Howard Ahmanson for many years,' said Rob Boston of Americans United for Separation of Church and State. 'He was one of the main funders of Christian reconstructionism, which calls for the imposition of Old Testament law. He tries to get his stuff into schools which may explain why today 45 per cent of Americans doubt evolution.'

[snip]

But it is his past funding of the Chalcedon Foundation, started by his mentor, Rousas John Rushdoony, which really alarms liberals. Rushdoony once wrote 'the only true order is founded on biblical law' and quoted Leviticus approvingly. 'If a man also lie with mankind...they shall be put to death...This is certainly clear enough and there is not a single text in all of the New Testament to indicate that this penalty has been altered or removed.'

On fundamentalists and the return of the Dark Ages (emphasis added):

Evangelicals refer to themselves as "people of faith." Almost without exception, however, either overtly or covertly, they mean truth when they talk about their beliefs. They are unable or unwilling to understand that propositions of faith are accepted without evidence. Truth, on the other hand, applies to propositions or claims that have been established as true based on logic or facts. The significant consequence of this clarification is that propositions of faith can never qualify as truth until verification has happened.

[snip]

It has been traditional to compliment people for exercising faith. Would it not be more proper to compliment people who take the effort to study, seek all the facts which have a bearing on the issue, suspend judgment until facts and understanding take place and then draw valid conclusions?

If such a regimen could become a habit, biblical literalism would become as extinct as the dinosaur. In my judgment, the unpardonable sin of the literalists is their willingness to waste a faculty that sets mankind above the whole animal kingdom. I have in mind the towering intellect of humans to think and to solve problems.

But this expectation is optimistic. If the religious right continues to grow and to use the clout at their disposal, it is possible that we may regress intellectually to a modern version of the Dark Ages. Literalism is itself a regression from modernity to the thought patterns of the Middle Ages. Don't say, "It can't happen here." It really can.

From an article by Carolyn Baker, a professor of US history:

Were Jesus with us today, he would be an enormous problem for the Dominionists, and we can be certain that he would be perceived by them not unlike a homeless street person or an antiwar protestor. Jesus and his followers would be marginalized, arrested, and imprisoned. Contrary to the Jesus contrived by the Dominionists, the historical Jesus did not perceive himself as a savior of anyone. Whereas today’s fundamentalist Christian insists that one must accept Jesus as one’s “personal savior,” Jesus never taught this concept. Rather, he was a spiritual mystic and an activist on behalf of human rights and social justice.

[snip]

Contrary to Dominionist designs, Jesus would not promote the establishment of a theocracy. He was born into an empire and spoke unambiguously against it. Railing against abuses of religion, he brashly threw the religious elite out of the temple because they were charging the poor for worshipping there. Constantly throwing the plight of the poor in the faces of the exploitative Pharisees, he blatantly argued that in God’s eyes, the poor were more valued than the rich—a spectacular inversion of Dominionist ideology which like the dogma of seventeenth-century American Puritanism holds that wealth is an indication of God’s blessing.

From an article in the Seattle Weekly on Bush and the Fundamentalist Right:

Few have preached harder against the Christian right's wrongs than the Rev. Rich Lang of Seattle's Trinity United Methodist Church in Ballard. "This administration is a culture of death, and so is the religious right," says Lang. In his Open Letter to George Bush, published in Real Change, Lang thunders, "You claim Christ but act like Caesar. There is blood all over your hands with the promise of even more blood to come. You sit atop the nations like the Biblical Whore of Babylon openly fornicating with the military men of might." His sermon "George Bush and the Rise of Christian Fascism" (posted like Luther's theses on the church Web site, www.tumseattle.org) rails that "the power and seduction of this administration emerges from its diabolical manipulation of Christian rhetoric . . .  the mirror opposite of what Jesus embodied. It is, indeed, the materialization of the spirit of Antichrist: a perversion of Christian faith and practice."

From a review of the new book Cruel and Unusual by Mark Crispin Miller:

"While reporters were engrossed in the sensational affairs of televangelists like Jimmy Swaggart and the Bakkers," he writes, "and then attending to the racist thuggery of the Christian Identity cultists in the far Northwest, an elite theocratic movement of extreme commitment and considerable wealth was fast becoming the most influential force on the religious right. This is the postmillenarian movement known as Christian Reconstructionism." Its goal: to transform this world, "every humanistic institution wiped out root and branch," writes Miller, who adds this chilling quote from a Reconstructionist:

"The Christian goal for the world is the universal development of Biblical theocratic republics, in which every area of life is redeemed and placed under the Lordship of Jesus Christ and the rule of God's law."

"The movement's luminaries are all members of a highly secretive organization called the Council for National Policy (CNP), based in Alexandria, Virginia," Miller writes.

"Whoever set it up, the CNP has, of course had R.J. Rushdoony [a major movement ideologist] as a member, along with all the leading Christian antihumanists, including Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, Ralph Reed, Paul Weyrich, Donald Wildmon, Oliver North, and Howard Phillips, as well as erstwhile members of the Reagan team," Miller writes.

More familiar names associated with the CNP include Tom DeLay, Dan Burton, Trent Lott, Lauch Faircloth, Don Nickles, Dick Armey, Jesse Helms and (this shouldn't come as a shock) US Attorney General John Ashcroft (not a member, but who has spoken at meetings).

Oh, and George W. Bush, who made a speech there in 1999 as a presidential candidate that has never been released.

"The only legal way to halt the nation's slide into theocracy, it seems, would be to open serious investigations by the Congress and the press, begin a robust national debate, and finally vote the zealots out of power," says Miller (who then adds that the computerized, no-paper-trail voting machines now widely used are "actually the handiwork of Reconstructionist ideologues").

Alan Keyes, the Illinois GOP's choice to go up against Barak Obama, is a Dominionist. He believes the United States should be a theocracy, based on religious law and the Ten Commandments. He's an advocate of the Constitution Restoration Act which would strip the Judicial branch of its power to rule on religious matters and would prohibit judges from citing international law in judgments. In short, he's an extreme right wing nutjob.