Scott Chisholm Lamont, RN.

Listed on:

Search 4 RSS

Yeah, I'm a Technorati member

Weblog Directory Directory of blogs from all around the world.

)O( Green Man

Posted Sunday, April 10, 2005 @ 0913 PST
----- permalink ----- |

The Right's "Culture of Death".

Bless Frank Rich at the NY Times for nailing it on the head. Discussing the recent media hyped spectacles of ghoulishness, he points out that the right wing is not interested in life or making life better for those of us already here. Here is an excerpt:

What's disturbing about this spectacle is not so much its tastelessness; America will always have a fatal attraction to sideshows. What's unsettling is the nastier agenda that lies far less than six feet under the surface. Once the culture of death at its most virulent intersects with politicians in power, it starts to inflict damage on the living.

When those leaders, led by the Bush brothers, wallow in this culture, they do a bait-and-switch and claim to be upholding John Paul's vision of a "culture of life." This has to be one of the biggest shams of all time. Yes, these politicians oppose abortion, but the number of abortions has in fact been going down steadily in America under both Republican and Democratic presidents since 1990 - some 40 percent in all. The same cannot be said of American infant fatalities, AIDS cases and war casualties - all up in the George W. Bush years. Meanwhile, potentially lifesaving phenomena like condom-conscious sex education and federally run stem-cell research are in shackles.

This agenda is synergistic with the entertainment culture of Mr. Bush's base: No one does the culture of death with more of a vengeance - literally so - than the doomsday right. The "Left Behind" novels by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins all but pant for the bloody demise of nonbelievers at Armageddon. And now, as Eric J. Greenberg has reported in The Forward, there's even a children's auxiliary: a 40-title series, "Left Behind: The Kids," that warns Jewish children of the hell that awaits them if they don't convert before it's too late. Eleven million copies have been sold on top of the original series' 60 million.

The "Left Behind" kids series really makes my skin crawl. But there are hopeful signs that these wingnuts are not going to be able to dictate terms of life and death for the rest of us. It seems that people in the US are beginning to wonder about the influence of the religious right.