Egg on the Brain

It may look as if domestic politics no longer exists in the new America--the one in which there is no money for anything besides guns and prisons but we don't care because we are all bowling together against the Axis of Evil. But that's not true. As long as there is a fertilized egg somewhere in this great land of ours, there will be domestic politics. George Bush may not be able to bring about the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth for the religious right, who gave him one in four of his votes. He may even realize that a serious victory for religious conservatives--significantly restricting the legality of abortion, say--would hurt the Republican Party, because California has more people than Utah. But he is doing what he can to keep the fundamentalists happy.

It must be frustrating for him--just when we're all supposed to pretend to love our differently faithed neighbor even if we know he's bound for hell, Christians keep saying weird things. First there was Jerry Falwell's remark that God let terrorists blow up the World Trade Center because he was fed up with "the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians...[and] the ACLU"; Falwell apologized, only to express the same thought a bit more obliquely on November 11 at a Florida church: "If the church had been awake and performing that duty"--proselytizing the ungodly--"I can tell you that we wouldn't be in the mess we're in today." God, says Falwell, "even loves the Taliban"--it's just liberals he can't stand.

And then there's Attorney General John Ashcroft, who burqaed the semi-nude statue of the Spirit of Justice because he felt upstaged by her perky breast at press conferences, and who thinks calico cats are emissaries of the devil, when everyone knows it's black cats. Ashcroft is in trouble with Arab-Americans for offering this proof of the superiority of Christianity to Islam as quoted by conservative columnist Cal Thomas on his radio show on November 9 (and belatedly denied by a Justice Department spokeswoman): "Islam is a religion in which God requires you to send your son to die for him. Christianity is a faith in which God sends his son to die for you." Not to get too wound up in theology here, but if the Christian God sent his own son to die doesn't that make him, according to Ashcroft's definition, a Muslim?

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