DELIVER US FROM THEOCRACY

By: Thomas McKelvey Cleaver

Over the past two weeks, Americans have been treated to a not-so-pretty picture, as religious extremists have come out from under their rocks to participate in the collective public insanity known as The Schiavo Case, an event one can fervently hope will come to an end in the next few days.

The Schiavo Case may come to an end, but what is going on in the streets of Pinellas, Florida, is not going away.

These people may be crazy, but that doesn't mean they aren't dangerous. I was privileged to know the great screenwriter and director Billy Wilder in his latter years, and he told me about the years he spent in Berlin in the 1920s and 30s, watching Hitler and the Nazis rise to power, how they latched onto any public controversy in order to advance their cause. As he pointed out, one reason the Nazis got as far as they did was that the rest of the population considered them crazy, and with that appellation they were dismissed as something not to be taken seriously. "My friends used to call me an extremist, that I took them as seriously as I did," he once told me. On the morning after the Nazis won a plurality of the vote in the 1933 elections and it appeared Hitler would come to power, Wilder put his worldly belongings into a steamer trunk, bought a one-way ticket and caught the Paris Express from the Berlin station. "All my friends, who thought Hitler was crazy and the Nazis were fools, they all ended up dead."

It is easy to dismiss these people outside the hospice as loonies, and to see their Congressional allies as cynical opportunists. In a recent Time poll, 68% of Republicans have stated they are opposed to the intervention of Congress and the President in this matter, with 54% stating a willingness to vote against their Congressional representative for taking part in this. 62% of those identifying themselves as evangelical Christians are opposed to what they are seeing on the streets.

These good, decent, conservatives and evangelicals are not the people I am speaking of. The far fundamentalist right - some have identified them as "the rapture right" - is not "conservative." It is not even "reactionary." It is fundamentally "revolutionary" in the same sense Hitler's Nazis were, because it refuses to make its argument for change within the system of government we have had for the past 218 years. They seek nothing less than the overthrow of the constitution and the substitution of a theocracy no different from that advocated by Osama Bin Laden in its repression.

A friend who is more religiously-oriented than I am once pointed out to me that "Judaism," "Christianity" and "Islam" are all nouns - but when you place the word "Fundamentalist" before them, they become adjectives, merely describing different varieties of the same thing.

In the past 30 years, Muslim fundamentalists have revived a medieval provision of Islamic law called "hisba," which means "bringing to account." The way it works is that an individual who is not directly a party to a particular event, acting on behalf of society, will bring a case when he feels great harm has been done to religion. The best-known example of such religiously-based interference is that of Nasr Hamid Abu Zaid in Egypt. Abu Zaid - a respected modern scholar of Koranic studies - argued that contrary to medieval interpretations of Islamic law, women and men should receive equal inheritance shares. He was accused by Islamic fundamentalists of sacrilege; that charge was then used to bring a suit to have the courts forcibly divorce him from his wife, on the grounds a Muslim woman cannot be married to an infidel. In 1995, the hisba court actually found against Abu Zaid and his wife, who were then forced to flee to Europe, ultimately settling in Holland. The most objectionable feature of this is that persons without standing can interfere in private affairs. A perfect stranger can file a case about your marriage, because they represent themselves as defending and upholding religion and morality.

The Republican far right is increasingly willing to make private, intimate decisions matters of public interest and then bring the courts and the legislature to bear on them, repeating the tactics of Islamic fundamentalists in places like Egypt and Pakistan. Do you think "it can't happen here?" It already is! Back in the 1970s, when living will legislation first gained support, the anti-abortion movement was adamantly opposed to these demands for "death with dignity." Though the religious extremists lost this fight in the 1980s, Schiavo's case has re-energized their opposition to living wills, in the guise of opposition to euthanasia and assisted suicide. Right now, Republicans in the Wisconsin State Assembly have passed a "defense of medical morality" bill that allows doctors, nurses, pharmacists and other medical personnel who morally disagree with the guidelines regarding feeding and hydration tubes to ignore living wills and any advance directives an individual may have made for such a situation. This legislation is likely to pass the Republican-controlled State Senate in coming weeks.

In the past two days, it has been widely reported that, hours after Judge Greer ordered this past Wednesday that Terri Schiavo wasn't to be removed from her hospice and directly ordered every sheriff and chief of police in the state to uphold the order, a team of from the Florida Department of Law Enforcement were dispatched from Tallahassee to seize her and have her feeding tube reinserted. This event was only stopped when local police told them they would enforce the judge's order. For perhaps an hour or so, local police - who have officers around the hospice to keep protesters out - prepared for an armed showdown with the State Department of Law Enforcement, with the police informing the DLE agents that if they didn't have Judge Greer with them, they would be forcibly prevented from entering the hospice. I wouldn't even think for a moment of writing a screenplay with this level of unreality in it. A few hours later, Governor Jeb Bush went on TV to say that evidently he didn't have as much authority as some people thought.

When an executive orders his armed forces to carry out his personal whim, in contradiction of the authority of every other entity in the constitutional system - the state courts and legislature, the federal courts and legislature, federal executive - this is the first step to America becoming an Iranian-style theocratic dictatorship.

As if this wasn't enough insanity, Richard Alan Meywes was arrested without incident at his home in Fairview, North Carolina, charged with murder for hire and the transmission of interstate threatening communications for offering a $250,000 bounty for the murder of Michael Schiavo! He is additionally charged with offering $50,000 to eliminate an un-named judge - most likely Judge Greer - who denied a request to intervene in the Schiavo case.

Meywes may merely be some nut job, but there are people out there who would take this offer seriously. Among the certifiably-looney publicity hounds who came to Florida this past week was James "Bo" Gritz, a long time poseur in the so-called "Militia movement" who has in recent years been associated through marriage with the Christian Identity Church - the leading white supremacist/neo-Nazi movement in the country. Gritz arrived to conduct a "citizen's arrest" of Michael Schiavo.

Gritz has upped the ante by enlisting God against the government and its supporters. He has said, "I can assure you that if I was ever convinced that it was God's Will for me to commit an act of violence against the laws of our land, I would hesitate only long enough to, like Gideon, be certain. I would then do all within my power to accomplish what I felt he required of me. . . If God does call me into the Phineas Priesthood . . . my defense will be the truth as inspired by the Messiah."

For those who have never heard the term before the fundamentalist far right believes the "Phineas Priesthood" is a group one enters by killing someone who has broken "God's law," making it easily the most radical and potentially dangerous component of the extremist right groups. It is certainly only different in degree from the Islamic terrorists we are told we are at war with.

Right now, most people in this country look at the far fundamentalist right in a similar light to that the Nazis were held in by the "Good Germans" before 1933. Indeed, it is easy to dismiss grandstanding demagogues like Randall Terry or Bo Gritz as the pathetic media hounds they in fact are, but this movement they are working every day to create - by taking advantage whenever possible of emotionally-charged situations like that in Florida - is truly dangerous. With right wing Congressional Republicans like Tom DeLay and Rick Santorum having demonstrated their ability to ally themselves with what is going on out on the streets, the "rapture right" - the American Taliban, - now represents the greatest threat to the Republic since the Civil War.

This is about much more than one woman's right to die in dignity. The far fundamentalist Right has made it clear that it wants to run our lives from the moment of conception until death, based on their bizarre interpretation of ancient religious texts. They are not about religion, or politics, other than that those are tools for the realization of the power to dominate this society and transform it beyond recognition, and they have no limits in how far they will go. These haters never really go away. They're demonic versions of the Energizer Bunny. As Randall Terry says: "Our goal is a Christian nation. We have a biblical duty, we are called by God to conquer this country. We don't want equal time. We don't want pluralism. Theocracy means God rules."

Morality is not only for the religious. Morality is in the DNA of good democracies, which forge the framework in which it can thrive. Godliness is not cynical ethics for the public realm. It is private and it should stay that way.

The Bush White House believes that even if only a small fraction of the country supports its intervention in the Schiavo case, they are the people who tend to be more passionate and more likely to vote on the issue, as opposed to the broad mass of the public that disapproves.

If we want to keep America the America we grew up in, it is time to tell George Bush and Tom DeLay and Bill Frist that they couldn't be more wrong.