Katha Pollitt (The Nation): Backward Christian Soldiers

From The Nation
Dated Thursday March 31

Backward Christian Soldiers
By Katha Pollitt

Maybe, just maybe, the religious right and its Republican friends have finally gone too far with the Terri Schiavo case. Americans may tell pollsters the earth was created in six days flat and dinosaurs shared the planet with Adam and Eve, but I don't believe they want Tom DeLay to be their personal physician. I don't think they want fanatics moaning and praying outside the hospital while they're making hard decisions. I don't think they want people getting arrested trying to "feed" their comatose relatives, or issuing death threats against judges and spouses in the name of "life." I don't think John Q. Public wants Jeb Bush to adopt his wife or Newt Gingrich to call her by her first name or Senator Frist to diagnose her by video, or Jesse Jackson to pop in at the last minute for a prayer and a photo-op . . . .

For many ordinary Americans, the stem cell debate was the first time the religious right strove to deprive them of something valuable. It's one thing to make women pay for sex with childbirth, or to deprive your children of modern scientific education, or to ostracize homosexuals, but it's going too far to value a frozen embryo more than Cousin Jim with Parkinson's. Now, with the Schiavo case, Americans have another opportunity to ask themselves if they really want to live in Randall Terry's world, where the next Michael and Terri Schiavo could be anyone of us.

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I'm surprised Pollitt still doesn't get it. It doesn't matter what americans want. The state media will simply fabricate a storyline out of whole cloth portraying the country as full of clamoring fundamentalists (complete with "town hall meetings" populated with paid actors, filmed by the propaganda office and conveniently distributed to TV stations and networks as "news"), and then republican politicians will say they are responding to the "demands of americans."

While, against all sense and the majority as well as the evidence the MSM has done what exactly to help Americans share these natural and visceral
reactions to extremist lunacy?

The point is that majority are excluded and repressed from having any say in their lives or even discussing it as a nation for that matter. it is the WINDOW we are forced to look out of from our individual cells showing us the brutality in the courtyard(YOU could be next) that frames this discussion. It is our prison cell we should be concerned with not just the inevitable abuse with impunity.

The media and the political Coup are our Jailers. America IS Abu Ghraib.