Timothy Sandefur links to a rebuttal of the "fuck the south" rant that I linked to. He is of course correct that many of the founding fathers were from the south, including some of my favorites and his. And it is true that much of that rant was entirely filled with non sequiturs and ad hominems, as I noted when I linked to it. But it still cracked me up. And I was actually hoping that the Neal Pollack response that he linked to would be just as funny in hammering the other side. Alas, it's more of a sober minded critique of the sillier arguments made in the rant. Still, worth reading of course. But also worth keeping in mind that humor is almost always based on absurd exaggeration.
Sandefur also takes me to task just a bit over the Bob Jones letter, saying that I claimed that Bob Jones was representative of the Republican Party. Perhaps this is a good opportunity for me to clarify my position, and I probably don't do this often enough or consistently enough. I really do not believe that most Republicans are theocrats at all; I don't even believe that most religious rightists are theocrats. But I do believe that there is a powerful subset of folks within both groups that are, and I believe that they hold more sway than most of us would like to think. At the very least, the Republican party has to cater to those groups and acquiesce to at least a portion of their agenda in order to keep their base. Still, I probably use the term more broadly than I should sometimes. I certainly do not mean to imply that most Republicans share that agenda, because I don't believe they do, just like I don't believe that most people who are against gay marriage are homophobes and gay bashers. I just tend to aim my ire at those who are, and I probably should make that distinction more clear than I do.
I should also note here that when I attack the loonier elements of the Christian right, I do not intend for that to impugn Christianity as a religion or Christians as a group. I know full well that all Christians are not fundamentalists or creationists. Indeed, I rely upon that fact quite regularly and count moderate Christians among my closest and most valuable allies in the fight against those things. Again, a distinction I should probably make more often and more clearly than I do. This actually was something I thought about last night in the course of a conversation with Lynn and a few others, and I'm grateful to Mr. Sandefur for nudging me to make it clear here.
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When you say "...all Christians are not fundamentalists or creationists" you are saying the exact opposite of what you mean to say, which is: Not all Christians are fundamentalists or creationists. Your statement technically means: All X are not Y or not Z, in which X = Christians, Y = fundamentalists, and Z = creationists. But of course, some Christians (X) are obviously fundamentalists (Y), and some Christians are obviously creationists (Z). Thus your statement is false.
Another way of phrasing your original statement is "If someone is a Christian, he or she is not a fundamentalist or a creationist." That of course is also false.
PLease be more careful about the use of statements using the forms "All X are Y" and All X are not Y.
I tend also to disagree with Mr. Sandefur about the levels of control that each major party's fringe faction exercises in practice: The communists among the Democrats are almost certainly fewer and less influential than the theocrats are among the Republicans.
Further, I've always thought that socialists of most stripes were really pragmatists at heart, and thus potentially open to reasoned debate. The same cannot be said of people who believe that the transcendently correct social order was set down a couple thousand years ago by an omnipotent being who desires that we follow the letter of his law whether or not we understand it.
It's for these reasons that I find the Republican party a greater threat to liberty than its major opponent.