From: emcmanus@gr.osf.org (Eamonn McManus)
Subject: Re: Why should I vote no on 9?
Organization: Open Software Foundation Research Institute, Grenoble
Date: Sun, 8 Nov 1992 13:11:22 GMT

black@sybase.com (Christina Black) writes:
>I had a real revelatory experience while reading _Molly Ivins Can't Say
>That, Can She?_.

I also found this particular essay very thought-provoking, though
obviously I am somewhat more distant from the politics in question.
Chris provides an accurate summary, but I thought readers might be
interested in the text in question.  It is from the essay _Magnolias
and Moonshine_.

--

  Perhaps the South deserves the persistence of the
  Southerner-as-bigot stereotype, but that should not itself be the
  basis for fresh bigotries.  P. J. O'Rourke is a right-winger of the
  cool school: he's young, he's hip, he writes for _Rolling Stone_.
  During an interview on Canadian Broadcasting, O'Rourke said of Pat
  Robertson's followers, "I hate fundamentalists.  I think they're
  dangerous.  I'm afraid of them.  They're terrible for the Republican
  party.  I wish they'd crawl back under their rocks."  If that's not
  religious bigotry, then how does it differ from anti-Catholicism or
  anti-Semiticism?

  According to the Gallup Poll, there are more than 50 million
  Evangelical Christians in America, and they sure do come in a lot of
  different flavors.  Yankee journalists who assumed Pat Robertson was
  going to show tremendous strength in the Southern primary have now
  learned that---and so has Brother Robertson.  The South killed his
  candidacy.

  The first response of your basic secular humanist to this
  respectable bigotry against born-again Christians is always to point
  out that fundamentalists themselves are notoriously intolerant.  And
  some of them sure as sin are.  But the kettle being black is no
  excuse for this kind of ugliness.  Dr. Os Guinness, a student of
  religious conflict, says:

    In the face of modernity, liberal believers believe less strongly
    and conservative believers believe more strongly.  The result is
    this fruitless and bitter contention.  American opinion makers
    must take their own share of the responsibility for this, because
    American intellectuals have made their own contribution to a
    situation that tends more and more to polarized extremes.  America
    is both the most modern and the most religious modern nation in
    the world.  Many intellectuals suffer from culture shock in their
    own country.

  Fundamentalists aren't evil; they're worried.  They're afraid of
  modernity, worried about the family, repelled by abortion, and yearn
  for traditional values.  All of us sinners like to see a hypocrite
  brought down, and sweet was the fall of Jim and Tammy Faye.  And
  Jimmy Swaggart had done his share of hatcheting other preachers.
  What goes around comes around, Brother Swaggart.  But you know who
  his followers are?  They're straight out of _Let Us Now Praise
  Famous Men_.  All their lives they've suffered from poverty,
  isolation, no opportunity, poor diet, poor education, and the scorn
  of others.  There was a time when progressives did not sneer at
  folks like that.

--

,
Eamonn
Newsgroups: soc.motss