How the Religious Right Fights

Recent events going back to the arguments for the 'Just and Fair War doctrine' arguments that provided religious cover for the Bush administration's fixation on going to war in Iraq, the Theresa Schiavo case (unlike so many others, I don't know her personally), the Justice Sunday attack on the courts, and more efforts than are reasonable to name here highlight how the dogmatic assertions of the religious right and far right are often framed as appeals to "Absolute True Principles That Nobody Should Dare Disagree With."

It is an approach, we must view with examples such as "Free Speech" unless you are saying something they don't like, "Pro-Life" at least until after you are born, "Academic Freedom" and "Self Determination" unless agaisayingre sayting something the religious right and far right don't like. Of course there are a host of other loaded terms such as "Fair and Balanced Speech", "Authoritative Direction," "Responsibility," "Obligation" which all have very different meanings to individuals and groups who frame their arguments with "Absolute True Principles That Nobody Should Dare Disagree With.

Away from their own flocks these religious poolemicists are unlikely to be persuasive, to facilitate arguments (as a way of clarification as opposed to irritating opinions), assess evidence or confront dilemmas. Such polemical stances create an unbreachable gulf of the wrong misguided foolish "Other," who by the way is going to hell.

This fashioning of distant, unapproachable but reproachable "others" is to represent the other side/other person/other camp as impoverished thinking, sin, problematic political foreign policy, Godlessness, and possessing poor social relationships at home, at work, and abroad. For those on the religious right, their lives are based on the assumption of an awareness of people's lives as expressed or emerging from "Abstract Absolutes" Often the expressive behavior encountered in polemical encounters (or imagined as are some monologues) entails invoking language and vocabulary that have a mechanical character. The world is simple and you who disagree with the "Absolute True Principles That Nobody Should Dare Disagree With" are wrong and there is no need to think about anything that you have to say or think or do.

Judgment and reasons are sidelined for some ersatz appeal to a phrase, text or attribution of "moral failing" or "hypocrisy" in the "Other." It becomes a shoddy game of the presentation of morally superior selves without much to suggest that skills, dilemmas, contradictions, and the alike are involved because everything is simple when you construct the world on "absolutely true principles."

More critically, there is a level of abstraction, not grounded claims and concerns that are linked to the way people live. An event such as the fate of Theresa Schiavo ends up extinguishing the anguishes that many people (parents, spouses, children, involved persons) have when dealing with matters relating to the dying of intimates or themselves. These are matters that are involved in the lives of people of a variety of ideological stripes. And very fortunately, many (not all) people find these to be troubling and filled with shades of grey rather than the realization of an abstract principle.

The most recent example of the use of "Absolute True Principles That Nobody Should Dare Disagree With" is the refusal of officials in Indiana to consider (and defend beyond some mechanical recitation of law or emotive indignation -- often a surrogate for moral sensibility as we all know so well) harvesting a condemned person's organs for a transplant is a shame and hypocrisy of the so-called "right to life" movement.

The most amusing aspect of "Absolute True Principles That Nobody Should Dare Disagree With is that of course, we can and must disagree with them.