Linkmeister

Balkans version 2.0?

I ran across word of this conference at Shakespeare’s Sister's place. I’m really beginning to believe that there’s a small group of American Christians who’ve been studying at Slobodan Milosevic’s School of Serbian Victimhood. Look at the panels offered:

• The Gay Agenda: America Won’t Be Happy
• The ACLU And Radical Secularism: Driving God From The Public Square
• Hollywood: Christians Through A Distorted Lens
• Jews Confront The War On Christians
• The Judiciary: Overruling God
• The Media: Megaphone For Anti-Faith Values
• Taking Our Faith To The Ballot Box

Now look at the scheduled speakers:

Senator Sam Brownback
Senator John Cornyn
Congressman Tom DeLay
Congressman Todd Akin
Congressman Louis Gohmert
Rick Scarborough
Phyllis Schlafly
Alan Keyes
Gary Bauer
Janet Parshall

There's even an online poll which the viewer can take to decide which godless judge should be impeached first.

Ordinarily I'd blow this off, but after hearing about the 50,000 mourners thronging a public square in Belgrade to pay tribute to Milosevic today, I'm not so sure. Milosevic came to power and held onto it by claiming to defend Serbia against the outside. From another NYT article: "In fact, refugees here [Belgrade] say that like themselves, Mr. Milosevic was a victim of foreign powers, a theme that is an obsession for Serbs and has been repeated throughout their history."

Given that Milosevic managed to start four wars by utilizing Serbian victimhood as a rallying cry, maybe we shouldn't just laugh at the radical Christian right when it tries to do the same. There are some similarities between the two. Look at the list of enemies.

• The non-Christian (Here: The Secular; there: Muslims in Bosnia-Herzogovina)
• The media
• The outsider (Here: Gays; there: non-Serbs)

Then look at the list of politicians aligning themselves with this: Brownback, who may run for President in 2008; Cornyn, who believes "the Supreme Court seems more inclined to protect pornography than to protect religious expression"; DeLay, a man who needs little introduction; Akin, whose claim to fame or notoriety seems to be that he's a fiscal conservative rated as far right as you can get by the National Journal; and Gohmert, who seems to have gotten his seat in Congress as a result of the mid-cycle Texas redistricting directed by Tom DeLay. Don't they just fill you with confidence about the road they'd like to take your country down?

The remainder of the speakers are the usual suspects, although I've never heard of Janet Parshall. (Update: I looked her up. She's host of a religious radio broadcast in D.C.). I'd hate to assign guilt by association, but given the company she's in (Scarborough? Schlafly? Bauer? Keyes?) I doubt that she's the token liberal.

Maybe we ought to take these people a little more seriously.

Posted by Linkmeister at March 18, 2006 02:16 PM | TrackBack