Friday, June 24, 2005

America's "religious right" alert! :-)

You ain't seen nothing yet
Jun 23rd 2005 | COLORADO SPRINGS, MANASSAS AND WASHINGTON, DC
From The Economist print edition

AP

Christian America's political arm is more complex and more dynamic than it first appears. And it will be hard to stop
THIS week, for the fourth year in a row, President George Bush broke from affairs of state to address the Southern Baptist Convention. He promised the strict evangelical group, which has 16m members, that he would work hard to ban gay marriage and abortion, and that their “family values” were his values, too.

After the Scopes Monkey trial in 1925, where creationist ideas were widely discredited, the idea of fundamentalists from the Bible Belt ruling the roost would have looked foolish. In the 1960s, many liberal Americans thought they had banned religion from the public square for good. Yet nowadays the president, the secretary of state and the House speaker accept the evangelical label. A packed prayer breakfast takes place every Thursday in Congress. And liberals regularly contend that one of America's two great parties is bent on creating a theocracy—backed by a solid core of somewhere between a quarter and a third of the population.

http://economist.com/world/na/PrinterFriendly.cfm?Story_ID=4102212

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