UPDATES below

For years the culture warriors have waged a slowly rising campaign against the women and the feminine in all forms other than the pregnant submissive housewife or cold-hearted ideological warriors such as Coulter, Palin, and Bachmann.  One of the few authoritarian right wingers with solid academic credentials, Harvey Mansfield, wrote a book, Manliness that argued if women were properly subordinate “manly” men would behave themselves.  Mostly it proved the Harvard Political Science Department has very low standards. Mansfield’s argument was then elaborated in various ways by other right wing ‘intellectuals,’ but these efforts were wisely ignored by most people other than beltway pundits. (I read Manliness so you don’t have to.  I assure you there is nothing manly about it.)

At a more popular level, ignorant or cynical preachers and people who read Ayn Rand and never grew up attacked the feminine and all women who questioned the right of some to dominate others, the rich to dominate the poor, the strong to dominate the weak.  The ‘religious’ ones seized the title “pro-life” because of their love of zygotes.  Real human beings never were able to rank highly enough in their eyes for their lives to be valued, as could be seen by their support for the death penalty, torture, and war.  But their flattering label stuck, accepted by the dim or the corrupt.

They have had a long and poisonous run, but it may be finally coming to a blessed end, destroyed by its own excesses. 

The moral bankruptcy of the culture warrior right is rapidly rising to the surface for all to see as enough Americans finally pushed back, having had enough of their self-righteous hatred for anyone different from themselves.  It is appropriate that the hardest push back is from the women they  denigrate and seek to completely subordinate.  Now Black Americans are joining in, and many of even us old white guys who still have an ability to care about others are giving support.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, their decline started with their attack on women and contraception.  At this point they went beyond their false label of being “pro-life” to show to all that there was no stopping point in their attacks until women everywhere were subordinated to an American Taliban. When they provoked a huge push-back after their Koman adventure, one that is continuing, they redoubled their efforts. But when their attempts to require doctors to lie to their female patients about abortion and its nonexistent relationship to breast cancer as well as allowing doctors to lie about diagnoses when telling the truth might cause a woman top choose an abortion, they provoked even harder push backs.

At this point they seem to have cracked.  With real opposition their veneer of humanity completely cracked, exposing the fear, anger and sometimes even hatred underneath.

Never in my wildest dreams would I have imagined Bill O’Reilly and Geraldo Rivera use wearing a hoodie as equal in responsibility for murder to the person pulling the trigger. Never would I have imagined Rush Limbaugh spending three days calling a private citizens a slut and asking to see her sex tapes because she testified to a congressional committee.  These buffoons are coming unhinged.  The anger that motivated them all along had been kept more or less under wraps so long as they were not widely challenged.  But ever since the hit job on Planned Parenthood backfired they have gradually lost it. Here for example is a compilation of comments by Fox News commentors on Trayvon Martin’s murder. This comes only days after they commented on the murder of Afghan men, women, and children by an American soldier or soldiers. (These comments are difficult to read but they indicate the moral and spiritual lebvel of many on the hard core right. Now they are showing what they used to keep hidden.

Everyone with a soul and the ability to read or watch TV knows Trayvon Martin was murdered.  Even so, the past few days have seen a concerted effort to smear Trayvon Martin by right wingers nationally.  Their effort is mostly based on complete lies and the Sanford police department is assisting by providing irrelevant details of a minor nature in an effort to make the murdered kid look bad.  Such as he apparently used marijuana.  All this does is convince me of the complete venality and worse of the men in the police department.  Not just the chief needs firing. Inspired by the Sanford cops, other racist bigoted police officers in other cities are now showing their true colors as well.

The popular campaign against Limbaugh’s advertisers succeeded beyond almost anyone’s expectations. Perhaps buoyed by that success, some have taken aim at the

National Organization for Marriage’s attempted boycott of Starbucks for supporting marriage equality.   NOM has so far obtained under 20,000 supporting signatures, maybe way under.  A counter petition in support of Starbucks’ stand in favor of gay marriage netted over 250,000, and rapidly rising, despite having been started only a few days ago. It has swamped the bigots on the right.

You can sign the petition yourself.

Meanwhile their War on Women is being exposed as even worse than I imagined.  And I for one imagined it as very bad.  It turns out that contraceptives are a major reason women’s wages have increased as much as they did during the 1990s.  By eliminating contraceptives the right will not only dis-empower women’s control over their futures, they will strike a hard blow against the rise in wages they have experienced over the past few decades.

We need to immediately and always deny the right wing any legitimacy in their attempt to describe themselves as moral, pro-life, or motivated by “values.”  They aren’t.  They have in many cases been exposed as the moral nihilists and sociopaths they are, and we need to push this line at every opportunity.  Pagans and those other spiritual traditions that are opening themselves to the sacredness of the earth and physical embodiment need to push hard now to reclaim the moral high ground and identify the religious among the culture warriors as essentially demon-worshippers and the secular among them as nihilists.

Coming next, (when I can get a good short account written rather than a book) the deeper levels of what we are witnessing.

UPDATE

The National Organization for Marriage was just  exposed through the leakage of secret documents as seeking to win by turning Blacks and white gays against one another.  I think it falls short of seeking “race war” as America Blog describes it, but the leaked documents demonstrate that the right wing achieves power only through creating hostility and division between people who absent their work would not have such problems.  This, of course, was long the tactic of Southern elites to pit poor whites against Blacks.  As enemies of our country they put the old Communist Party to shame.

UPDATE 2

More right wing racism exposed concerning Martin and lies they are telling about him.