Where Did the Religious Nuttery Come From?
They pulled into the local Hayward Walgreens pharmacy, where Jess picked up a box of condoms from a shelf and handed them to the clerk manning the register.
“Manning”
seems to be the right verb here: “John,” the Walgreens clerk, refused to ring
them up.
Jess,
confused, asked him why, pointing to the shelf where she’d picked up the
condoms.
“We can
sell that to you,” clerk “John” told Jess with
a smirk, “but I won’t because of my faith.”
There’s
no law in America against being an ass, so this Walgreens clerk was entirely
within his rights to behave like one. But, because of five Republicans on the
Supreme Court, it now is problematic —
and soon could be against the law nationwide, if Clarence Thomas gets his way —
for Walgreens to fire him for “exercising his faith” when working in a
drugstore.
The vast majority
of Americans, opinion research shows, think a situation like this is absurd. As
Jennifer Brooks notes in an
article about the Pentz’s experience for the Minneapolis Star-Tribune:
“When the Pew Research Center surveyed American attitudes about birth control, just 4% viewed contraception as morally wrong. Condoms protect us from disease and prevent unwanted pregnancies.
What's not to like?”
And
what’s so astonishing about the entire situation is that we have reached this
point not because the American public wants religious doctrine running our law,
and not because most religious people agree with an arrogant prick working at
Walgreens.
Instead,
it’s because a small group of rightwing billionaires didn’t want to pay their
taxes, wanted to get rid of their unions, and didn’t want regulation of the
pollution from their refineries and other operations.
Seriously.
They put
billions of dollars over five decades into a project to seize control of the
legislatures of a majority of the states, jam up the US Congress, and pack the
Supreme Court — and it was all about taxes, unions, and regulation.
So where
did the religious nuttery come from?
The rightwing billionaires and the corporations and foundations aligned with them knew back in 1971 — when Lewis Powell laid out their strategy in his infamous Powell Memo the year before Nixon put him on the Supreme Court — that most Americans wouldn’t happily vote to lower billionaires’ taxes, end unions and regulation of gun manufacturers, or increase the amount of refinery poisons in our air.
So the
strategy they came up with to capture control of our government was pretty
straightforward:
*Convince
Americans that taxes aren’t “the cost of a civil society” but, instead, a
“burden” that they were unfairly bearing. Once Republicans were elected on that
tax-cut platform, they’d massively cut the taxes of the morbidly rich while
throwing a small bone to the average person.
*Convince
Americans that regulations that protect consumers and the environment are also
“burdens” from an out-of-control “nanny state,” even though such regulations
save lives and benefit Americans far more than they cost.
*Convince
Americans that unions aren’t “democracy in the workplace” that protect workers’
rights but, instead, an elaborate scam to raid workers’ paychecks to the
benefit of “corrupt union bosses.”
To pull
these off, they spent five decades and billions of dollars to subsidize think
tanks and policy groups at both the federal and state level; there’s now an
extensive network of them reaching from coast-to-coast, all turning out policy
papers and press releases the way bunnies have babies.
But it wasn’t
quite enough to get the political power they needed.
They
sponsored rightwing talk radio to the tune of millions of dollars a year
(just Limbaugh and Hannity’s shows got over a million a year each) and Australian billionaire Rupert Murdoch rolled out Fox
“News” to compliment the propaganda campaign. Later would come social media
bots and trolls, along with thousands of new websites pretending to be local
newspapers.
Still,
that wasn’t quite enough to get them the political power they needed.
They
hooked up with the NRA, which helped sponsor the Reagan Revolution and was
richly rewarded with laws that forbade the federal government from compiling
gun death statistics and gave complete immunity from lawsuits to weapons
manufacturers and sellers for the damage their products cause (the only
industry in America that enjoys such immunity).
And they
finally got a lot of Americans to go along with their plan, because they’d
added in a religious “secret sauce.” More on that in a moment.
The
Reagan presidency was their first major victory; in eight short years he cut
union membership in America almost in half, dropped the taxes on billionaires
from a top 74% bracket down to 27%, and slashed thousands of protective
regulations, particularly around guns and the environment.
Over the
40 years of the Reagan revolution, we’ve gone from having about the same
gun-ownership density as Canada (around 15 guns per 100 people) to the most in
the world (over 120 guns per 100 people). We’re now drenched in blood: guns kill more American children than drunk drivers or any
other cause.
But
hating on unions, taxes, and the environment — and loving on guns — wasn’t
enough to reliably win elections over the long run. They needed a larger
bullhorn, a way of reaching into the lives of additional tens of millions of
American voters who really didn’t much care about those issues.
That’s
where Jerry Falwell and his friends came into the picture.
Falwell
was an inveterate grifter, hustling Jesus to build a multi-million-dollar
empire while ignoring Jesus’ teachings about humility, poverty, and the need to
care for others. A new, muscular Jesus — a Jesus who endorsed assault weapons
and private jets for preachers — came to dominate much of America’s protestant
Christianity.
This
Jesus wanted you to get rich — riches, they said, are a sign of God’s blessing
— and the “prosperity gospel” and all its perverted cousins were being preached
on TV and in megachurches across the nation throughout the 1980s.
Reagan
brought his vice president’s son — a young drunk named George W. Bush who got
sober with Jesus’ help (and a threat from his parents and wife) — and Bush
forged an alliance between the Reagan campaign and the then-emerging phenomenon
of Falwell/Bakker/Graham/Robertson televangelists.
The
televangelists became multimillionaires, churches openly defied IRS regulations
and preached politics from the pulpit, and millions of mostly non-political
church-goers were suddenly evangelists not just for Jesus but also for the
Republican Party.
With this
dramatically expanded base of voters, Republican politicians went on a 40-year spree
of cutting taxes, deregulating polluting industries, hustling guns, and busting
unions.
To keep
the rubes coming to the churches where they’d hear that GOP message,
Republicans on the Supreme Court had to throw them the occasional bone. Giving
bakers the right to tell gay people wanting a wedding cake to screw off was one
of them, setting up the “religious right” of pharmacists to refuse to sell
condoms.
Churches
kept getting richer and Republicans kept getting elected, but most people
didn’t realize the symbiosis at work.
At first,
these seemed problematic to many Americans, but, like Pastor Niemöller, it only
affected a small minority of us and typically did so in ways that weren’t
particularly public. Everybody figured it was somebody else’s problem, and the
people being hurt were mostly marginalized minorities.
Now that
the Supreme Court has struck down Roe v Wade, however, people are waking
up to this unholy alliance between religious grifters in the White Evangelical
movement, the Supreme Court, and the GOP.
Half the
population is now in their crosshairs.
It’s no
longer just a matter of that $50 trillion transfer of wealth from middle America to the top 1% through changes in tax law, or a few
hundred thousand children downstream of coal mines getting permanent neurological damage, or
workers thinking that maybe they’d have better wages and benefits if they had a
union.
Now
America is seeing clearly what the Republican coalition has brought us, from
mass shootings to medical bankruptcies to student debt to homelessness.
Literally
none of these things were major societal problems the year Reagan was elected;
all are the direct result of Republican policies, and all were made possible,
in part, by this unholy alliance of church and state that our nation’s Founders warned us against.
And now
they’re coming for your birth control.
Will
enough Americans finally wake up to this 40-year grift to put an end to it and
return our country to sanity?
We’ll
find out this November.
Thom Hartmann is a talk-show host and the author of The Hidden History of Neoliberalism and more than 30+ other books in print. He is a writing fellow at the Independent Media Institute and his writings are archived at hartmannreport.com.
