Tuesday, March 18, 2008

Double Standard II

Expanding on Fixer's post, this from one who actually did it. HuffPo.

Obama's Minister Committed "Treason" But When My Father Said the Same Thing He Was a Republican Hero

When Senator Obama's preacher thundered about racism and injustice Obama suffered smear-by-association. But when my late father -- Religious Right leader Francis Schaeffer -- denounced America and even called for the violent overthrow of the US government, he was invited to lunch with presidents Ford, Reagan and Bush, Sr.

We Republican agitators of the mid 1970s to the late 1980s were genuinely anti-American in the same spirit that later Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson (both followers of my father) were anti-American when they said God had removed his blessing from America on 9/11, because America accepted gays. Falwell and Robertson recanted but we never did.

My dad's books denouncing America and comparing the USA to Hitler are still best sellers in the "respectable" evangelical community and he's still hailed as a prophet by many Republican leaders. When Mike Huckabee was recently asked by Katie Couric to name one book he'd take with him to a desert island, besides the Bible, he named Dad's Whatever Happened to the Human Race? a book where Dad also compared America to Hitler's Germany.

The hypocrisy of the right denouncing Obama, because of his minister's words, is staggering. [...]

Go read the rest of this if you have a strong stomach.

One thing I take away from this is that two diametrically opposed sides - us progressive-leaning reality-based patriotic Americans who wish to see fairness and justice for all under the law of the land, and the christofascist phony religious whackjobs - both invoke the spectre of Nazism when talking about our country for vastly different reasons.

Us, when railing against the systematic dismantling of our freedom under the Constitution, them when railing against secular freedom and wanting it to be dismantled and then doing things their way.

We're right and they're wrong, of course.

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