LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY sunfell)

This Daily Kos Diary has some interesting points. Here's a short excerpt:

The War against Right-wing Theocrats finally begins for real (updated)
by GlennGreenwald
Thu Nov 17, 2005 at 04:41:27 AM PDT

The first four years of the Bush Administration, particularly after 9/11, were characterized by a highly unusual, and at times downright creepy, uniformity of opinion. It was almost impossible to find a Republican anywhere expressing any criticism of George Bush -- on any issue, ever. And other than a few humiliating attacks launched by the party's most extreme elements against so-called GOP moderates made for the purpose of showing who was Boss in the GOP, Republicans almost never spoke ill of one another either, despite glaring differences in their views on a whole host of critically important issues.

In many ways, over this time period, the GOP more closely resembled a cult than a political party, and the cohesiveness of the cult was centered around Personality -- a glorification of, and blind reverence for, George W. Bush. But all of that is changing now...

With Bush's plummeting approval ratings, and with the Administration's competence and integrity being assaulted on all fronts, the political dynamic of the country is changing, and it is changing rapidly and dramatically, as two separate devleopments demonstrate -- the attack this week by George Will on "social conservatives," and a similar, long overdue assault on this theocratic movement by the Anti-Defamation League.

In what is sure to be a potent bellwether of the imminent war over religious and political freedom in this country, George Will uses his column this week to expressly accuse the "social conservative" wing of the GOP of being decidedly un-conservative in its objectives and ideology, and all but warns that the GOP will be destroyed by the continued ascendancy of this sector of the Republican Party. Using the truly embarrassing (but quite illustrative) decision of a Kansas school board to literally re-define science in order to permit the teaching of warmed-over creationism in the public schools, Will warns:

"It does me no injury," said Thomas Jefferson, "for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg." But it is injurious, and unneighborly, when zealots try to compel public education to infuse theism into scientific education.

The conservative coalition, which is coming unglued for many reasons, will rapidly disintegrate if limited-government conservatives become convinced that social conservatives are unwilling to concentrate their character-building and soul-saving energies on the private institutions that mediate between individuals and government, and instead try to conscript government into sectarian crusades.

There is not and has never been anything remotely conservative about these religious extremists. They do not favor limited government in any way. They believe so faithfully in the righteousness of their political agenda that they see any means to achieve their objectives as justifiable -- including exploiting and increasing the powers of all 3 branches of the federal government in order to achieve them.