The Culture Wars
With all the attention we aren't paying to our President's fascination with war and his incompetence with regard to money matters, I would like to see us spend more time not thinking about President Bush's vision of society. If anyone has read the book "Inherit the Wind" or seen one of the movies, you have already been introduced to Bush's model society: Hillsboro.
The society that Bush wants is one of all God, all the time. If Bush gets his way, the Ten Commandments will be hung everywhere, public school prayer will re-emerge, Darwin will be banished from the classroom, and more speech will be abridged as the FCC fines anything and everything that they consider "immoral."
To a great extent, we did it to ourselves. During moderate administrations we created fake abortion rights where no such rights existed, and we pretended that the First Amendment forbade all public displays of religion.
The sad fact is that the right to choose is based on a right that doesn't exist. It is pure judicial fiction. Instead of advocating for a right to choose law passed by Congress, society got the right through the courts (of course Bush and a Republican Congress could pass anti-abortion legislation if the right had been created legislatively, but that would be far more difficult than merely replacing two Supreme Court justices). If such a right were indeed guaranteed, we would be ok, but the fact is that while one Court can create the right, another court will be able to destroy the right. The fact that the right is based on judicial fiction makes the process that much easier. And, with another term, President Bush will be able to replace enough Supreme Court Justices to do just that.
Likewise, the Lemon decision (Lemon v. Kurtzman) created a framework that doesn't have a solid constitutional base. Whether we like it or not, the First Amendment only proscribes (1) Congress from (2) Establishing a Religion (like England did). As much as most of us disapprove Judge Moore and his mountain-size 10 Comandments sculpture, he is not Congress and the sculpture didn't establish a religion. A far right Court will overturn the Lemon decision and religion will be all around us. Of course, if we disapprove of people like Moore, we can oust them from office, but in the time they serve, they can make religion so ubiquitous, that it will be hard to tell where the church ends and public property begins.
It is almost ironic that in a time when the moderates in Iran are beginning to get a small foothold in society with an intention to "modernize" Iranian society, a far right nutcase like Bush is going to try to get back into the White House with the intention to "regress" American society. I firmly believe that as scary as it may seem, we saw the moderate George Bush in the first term (because he knew he would have to run for re-election). With no further election, he will be free to create the society that HE wants.
And with a Republican dominated Congress, the changes we see in society could be monumental.
__________________
"George W. Bush surrounds himself with smart people the way a hole surrounds itself with a donut." —Dennis Miller
|