Juan Cole on the Christian Right

The prolific Juan Cole continues to crank out amazing amounts of sound and informative commentary and analysis. To have daily, well-thought out writing from one of the country's leading experts on Shi'a Islam is an invaluable resource.

In a recent post, he summarized the status of the Christian Right in the Republican Party very well: Frist Stance Setback to American Taliban Informed Comment blog 08/01/05.

The contemporary Republican Party is a coalition of 1) the corporate wealthy; 2) Southern whites (former Democrats) who are damned if they are going to be in the same party with Black people; Midwestern and Western rural folks who hate the government that gives them handouts; 4) Neoconservatives among Jews and Catholics who have a Wilsonian foreign policy emphasis but are more liberal on social issues and 5) evangelical and fundamentalist Christians. The party cleverly gives its small but fabulously wealthy corporate constituency economic benefits like tax cuts while offering its much larger constituencies among white Southerners and rightwing Christians mere symbolic gestures (Bush won't attend meetings of the NAACP, and promotes issues dear to the hearts of evangelicals).

He states bluntly one of the issues that putting John Roberts on the Supreme Court could make a very current one:

Look, 13,000 women every year have abortions in this country because they were raped and did not want to bear the child of the monster who attacked and impregnated them. Every time you hear someone bring up "pro-life" propaganda, ask him or her if they are in favor of making these women bear their rapists' children. If they are, then I should think they could fairly easily be defeated at the polls on that platform. Someone should please ask Senator Brownback this question, and ask the people of Kansas if that is really what they stand for. So even if we limited scientists to using fetal stem cells garnered from these abortions of the children of rapists, there would be plenty for scientific purposes. (I am told by a reader that federally funded research using fetal stem cells as opposed to embryonic ones [from in vitro fertilization] is not even on the table.)

And he ends on a hopeful note:

Meanwhile, one big question is whether the Christian Right as a dominant element in the Republican coalition has become so annoying to so many of the other coalition partners that the coalition might break apart, or at the very least become more independent of the evangelicals and fundamentalists (just as it is likely to become more independent of the Neoconservatives).