I’ve just finished reading a long and somewhat alarming essay titled Infiltrating the U.S. Military: Gen. Boykin’s “Kingdom Warriors” by Katherine Yurica. The essay puts forth a very compelling argument that the hard-line Christian Right has been working towards infiltrating and usurping control over various institutions for decades starting with the Southern Baptist Convention then the Republican Party and more recently the U.S. Military all with the aim “to dominate and control American institutions, the American government, and the American culture by ‘Christians’ of the hard right.“
Since GOP leaders have tasted the heady stuff of unlimited power and watched the success of their bullying tactics, they seem to take pride in the fact that intimidation and coercion silences all opposition. They’ve begun to step more boldly toward the goal of taking control of the judiciary-and it appears that nothing can stop them from destroying the system of checks and balances built into our constitution. Americans don’t seem to mind. We love the swagger of the cowboys in charge.
We must love Tom DeLay’s boast, “I am the government!” else voters would throw him out on his ears. So those of us who sit and observe are spectators in the GOP’s sport of dismantling American constitutional rule. The Bush administration quietly sends the names of religiously ideological judges down to the Senate for confirmation, while the House devises diabolical bills to rip the heart out of our nation’s jurisprudence. By submitting legislation that seeks to strip the Supreme Court of its jurisdictional power, the House leaders hope to delimit what cases the federal courts can or cannot review. The hard right House leaders have gone so far as to introduce a bill that will grant congress the ability to overturn a Supreme Court decision that finds a law passed by congress is unconstitutional. It appears that the entire constitutional structure of our nation could be hanging in the balance in the 2004 election.
How has the Republican Party been so radicalized and transformed? The consequences that flow from the fact that a secret religious infiltration of the Republican Party took place over a period of years prior to the last two elections have simply been underreported in the press. Infiltration and control of the GOP has placed the religious hard right comfortably in control of the party, which in turn places our republic in danger of being controlled by a heretical religious core that began its program of dominance in the 1980’s.
It’s the sort of essay that I would normally brush off as more fodder for the conspiracy nuts, but it’s exceedingly well-written and is fully footnoted with supporting references and citations. Katherine Yurica is also very careful to mention possible explanations that run counter to her main argument and never claims that her conclusions are the only ones possible, but rather she lays out her points and allows you to connect the dots along the way. A lot of the material she draws from are events that have received a good amount of press coverage and that’s part of what makes the picture she paints so troubling as well as convincing. If she’s right then all the talk from the Conservatives and the Fundamentalists about how we’re engaged in a “Culture War” here in America takes on a very new significance that should be of concern to all Liberals, let alone atheists.
I know I’m going to have to further look into the Dominionist movement after reading this essay to see what I can learn about them as that section alone was quite an eye opener. Particularly this bit:
- According to the plan proposed by Paul Weyrich, the founder of the Free Congress Foundation, to secure the success of the hard right’s control and domination of the American culture, the subversives must “develop a network of parallel cultural institutions existing side-by-side” with the cultural institutions of America. Eric Heubeck, the author of Mr. Weyrich’s manual wrote: “Our movement will be entirely destructive, and entirely constructive. We will not try to reform the existing institutions. We only intend to weaken them, and eventually destroy them. We will endeavor to knock our opponents off-balance and unsettle them at every opportunity. All of our constructive energies will be dedicated to the creation of our own institutions…“
Go read it and mull it over. I’d be interested to hear what some of you folks think about it.
Posted on 10/14/2004 at 09:48 AM 
Posted on 10/23/2004 at 10:20 PM 
This and the Despoiling of America article should be required reading.