(more below the fold!)I'm in the middle of a book that you simply MUST read: Eternal Hostility by Frederick Clarkson. (It's available from his website at http://www.frederickclarkson.com/) He has written a thorough examination of the Religious Right, where they're coming from, what they're doing, and where they're going. This is a bigger 'yikes!' situation than even I'd thought. They want nothing less to dismantle our democracy and install a theocracy. And what a theocracy! These folks even have ties to Sun Yung Moon (really- and the Bush family is in pretty deep, along with a surprising number of fundamentalist Christians), and a significant group of them- the Reconstructionists, want to set up a government that enforces Old Testament law- all of it. They intend to demand a religious test (the very thing excluded by Article Four of the Constitution) for all public offices, and eventually for citizenship. In short, to dismantle our society.
I had known parts of this for awhile, but had never put it together, such as the Moonie connection (Washington Times, for one thing) to the fundamentalist activists. It is really an eye-opener.
As Clarkson says, the movement is neither a juggernaut nor a joke, but must be fought NOW, or we'll lose our footing and all that we treasure. I am minded of Will Shakespeare's line from Henry V- "And if he be not fought withal, my lord, let us not live in France". And it seems that the time is now.