But, We Were Just Minding Our Own Business!

Not! The left, in their complete incomprehension of the electoral clock-cleaning they've just received, are telling themselves that Christians and the 'Religious Right' are the aggressors in this culture, while the left is just trying to get along with everybody and promote tolerance. Don Feder has an overview of just how wrong this is.

excerpts:

Here’s one for Ripley’s Believe-It-Or-Not: The Democrats have spent decades making life miserable for Christians. On Election Day, Christians returned the favor.

Since at least the mid-1970s, the Democratic Party and its allies have devoted themselves to alternately sneering at and savaging Christians.

They’ve depicted the followers of Jesus – evangelical Protestants and traditional Catholics in particular – as superstitious degenerates, bigots, trailer-park misogynists, both sexually repressed and hypocritically lecherous, and a gang of Torquemada wannabes who constitute a clear and present danger to democracy and the 21st century.

The only problem the left seems to have is in deciding whether Christians are more Elmer Gantry or Elmer Fudd.

They’ve derided their values, indoctrinated their children, given their teenaged sons condoms (and told their teenaged daughters how to get an abortion without their parents knowledge or consent), used their tax dollars to fund "art" like a crucifix submerged in a jar of urine, eliminated the mildest public expressions of faith, and tried to overturn 3,300 years of Judeo-Christian tradition by mandating gay marriage from the bench.

After all of this, the Democrats are shocked to discover that they aren’t wildly popular in the Bible Belt. Where, oh where did we go wrong, they moan, as George W. rallies Christian support to become the first president since 1936 to win reelection and increase his party’s representation in both houses of Congress.

The media believe Bush’s opposition to gay marriage swept the president to victory. While the issue – and the presence of 11 traditional marriage ballot questions (all of which carried, with an average vote of over 70%) – clearly played a role in Bush’s reelection, the war between the Democratic party and religious America extends far beyond the marriage debate.

...

In the latest evolution of liberal anti-Catholicism, Senate Democrats have established what amounts to a religious test for public office. Kennedy and his cohorts have announced that, no matter how qualified, a pro-life judicial nominee will be automatically rejected. They might as well hang a sign on the door of every federal courthouse in the land – "Catholics Need Not Apply."

...

The news media’s disdain for orthodox Christians was illustrated by a throw-away line in a front-page story in The Washington Post a decade ago. Reporter Michael Weisskopf contemptuously characterized conservative Christians as, "poor, uneducated and easy to command." This is an ugly stereotype, akin to saying that poor, ignorant darkies like to tap-dance while eating fried chicken.

Said condescension was manifested again in the 2000 presidential election, when the president named Jesus as his favorite philosopher. You could hear the media guffaws – from the newsroom of The New York Times to the editorial department of The L.A. Times.

Senate Democrats have launched unprecedented filibusters to block Bush’s judicial nominations. Federal judges are overwhelmingly liberal (activist and elitist) and Democrats are determined to keep them that way.

The judiciary has led the frontal assault on faith.

Since 1963, it’s banished prayer from the public schools, rejected a moment of silent meditation (lest someone be encouraged to meditate on God), outlawed non-denominational prayers at graduation ceremonies and student-initiated prayers at football games, prohibited posting The Ten Commandments on school bulletin boards, ordered removal of Ten Commandments monuments, and come close to taking God out of the Pledge of Allegiance (required by the 9th. Circuit Appeals Court, reversed by the Supreme Court, on technical grounds).

At the same time, the Supreme Court or lower federal courts have struck down anti-sodomy laws and the most modest restraints on abortion, including parental-notification (again, in some jurisdictions) and attempts to ban partial-birth abortion. In Kerry country, the judiciary mandated homosexual marriage.

The courts are telling Christians: While we will not permit even symbolic affirmations of your faith, we have every right to force our faith on you.

In Academia, Christians are besieged. At least a dozen colleges and universities have withdrawn recognition of Christian clubs, for violating the school’s non-discrimination code, by refusing to admit homosexuals and non-Christians as members – notwithstanding that to do so would violate the basic tenets of their faith.

From start to finish, the war on Christianity is a blue-country operation. It is relentlessly waged by the Democrats’ core constituencies: the entertainment industry, journalists, the public education establishment (every four years, the endorsement of the Democratic nominee by the National Education Association is a pro forma matter), college administrators and the courts.

Christians would have to be masochistic not to revolt against this constant abuse, and totally lacking in discernment not to see it all leading to a nation where faith is marginalized, humanistic values are enshrined in government and the culture, and hate-crimes laws are used to punish dissent.

Evangelical Christians have been in the arena a long time. For once, they ate the lions.

The whole article is worth reading.

John Leo also says something about all of this:

But what can the Democrats do to attract social-issues voters? They can't sell out their constituency of gays and feminists, Newsday columnist Marie Cocco said on NPR. No, but they can tamp down the extremists like the ones who censored Casey. Maybe (gasp!) they can even allow a few antiabortion Democrats to run for an important office, rather than forcing them all to convert to pro-abortion stands as the price of getting funding and support. Republicans aren't clamoring for Arnold Schwarzenegger and Rudolph Giuliani to convert.

Democrats might want to tone down the contempt for evangelicals in particular and religious people in general that increasingly flows through their secular-dominated party. This is a very religious nation. If the Democrats aspire to become the majority party, why do they tolerate so much antireligious behavior and expression? They also might have a word with out-of-control adjuncts of the party like People for the American Way, whose mission is apparently to hammer away at religious conservatives, and the American Civil Liberties Union, which is always ready to descend on every 6-year-old who writes a school essay on Jesus or who says, "God bless you" after a sneeze. Do they think religious voters fail to notice?

They might also have second thoughts about the strategy of getting judges to impose solutions that they want but that the voters are unwilling to accept. It is beginning to dawn on many Democrats that John Kerry may have lost the election on Nov. 18, 2003, when Massachusetts's highest court, by a 4-to-3 vote, conjured up a right to gay marriage that nobody else had ever located anywhere in the state Constitution. In a backlash, state constitutional amendments banning gay marriage passed easily in all 11 states that had them on the ballot last week, including Ohio. Incredibly, Democratic leaders and the media didn't see this coming, though polls keep showing opposition to gay marriage of around 60 percent.

The other thing the Democrats might do is to acquire a copy of Thomas Frank's book "What's the Matter With Kansas?" and then ignore everything he says. Frank seems to be saying that voters are ignorant to vote on social issues. The book is an argument for a return to the same old-time liberalism that has paralyzed the Democratic Party. Frank has no understanding of why cultural issues are important to so many Americans. The fact is that the Democrats are unlikely to win the presidency again until they do something about the cultural divide.

I've got to agree with Leo regarding Frank's book. I haven't read it but I did scan it in depth. Frank has no idea what he's talking about. Frank thinks the Red Staters will accept socialism if the Dems can break them away from all of these 'values' red herrings that the Repubs are conning them with. As it happens, Frank has a NYT column today, with this cluelessness on full display (reg req'd).