The Public Eye magazine has just posted my most recent article online.  I am posting a few excertps below (and more than the usual excerpts, since umm, its my article) but you will have to click over to The Public Eye to read the whole thing.

I take the view that it is important that we have a sufficient understanding of our own history, and an ability to articulate it (and its not as hard as it sounds, once you have a well-framed narrative -- four suggested books in the article) so that we can recapture the narrative of American history from the Christian nationalists whose views are seeping into public life and play a surprising role in electoral politics.

I address these points in the excerpts below, but there is much more in the whole article.

In the life of successful social and political movements, leaders, elections, and even institutions come and go, but the movement goes on. This has certainly been true of the religious right. The recent elections, for example, were a set back, and there is some shaking out going on:  but there is no evidence that the wider movement has peaked.

But I have opened here with a disgression.  This post is not about the religious right. It is about us.

One of the strangest and most disturbing of activities of the religious right in the U.S., is it's international alliance with the Vatican, the Mormon Church, and Islamic governments in the Middle East. While these entities might find themselves opposed on such matters as the war in Iraq, they form a united front in the fight against reproductive rights in the United Nations system.  

Pam Chamberlain of Political Research Associates has an excellent overview in the current issue of The Public Eye magazine. She describes how the alliance works, including the roles of such leading Christian Right groups as Concerned Women for America headed by Beverly LaHaye; the Family Research Council, headed by Tony Perkins, and the Catholic Family and Human Rights Institute (aka, CFam), headed by Austin Ruse who celebrated their activities at one UN meeting saying:

"We attended all of the women's meetings and essentially took them over. Memos were going back from the conference in New York to governments in the European Union that radical fundamentalists had taken over the meeting, and that was us."

"It may be tempting to see Roy Moore as an exception" I wrote in the current issue of The Public Eye magazine, about the man best known as 'the ten commandments judge,'

but his rise is reviving old coalitions. In 2004, his former spokesman and legal advisor, Tom Parker, was elected as an Associate Justice of the Alabama Supreme Court. At Parker's request, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas made the trek to Montgomery to swear him in. Exjudge Moore then also swore him in. "The Chief's courage to stand for principle over personal position inspired me and animated voters during my campaign for the Alabama Supreme Court" said Parker. "So, I have been doubly blessed to have been sworn into office by two heroes of the judiciary."  But Parker's politics has additional roots in the politics of the former Governor George] Wallace era.

He has ties to neoconfederate organizations such as the Council of Conservative Citizens and the white supremacist League of the South.

A January 1, 2006 op-ed by Parker from The Birmingham News, is currently posted over at the Alliance Defense Fund, a key Christian Right legal strategy organization.  

Parker starts out with a breathtaking assertion, by contemporary standards, regarding the Alabama Supreme Court's recent overturning of a death sentence of a juvenile.  He declares that the Alabama court should ignore the U.S. Supreme Court's ban on juvenille executions because it is "the unconstitutional opinion of five liberal justices on the U.S. Supreme Court," and is therefore not binding. He invokes the discredited notion of "interposition," which argues that the states may defy the decisions of the U.S. Supreme Court.

When Roy Moore, the Chief Justice of the Alabama State Supreme Court, installed a two-and-one-half-ton granite monument to the Ten Commandments in the Alabama state courthouse in Montgomery in June of 2001, he knew it was a deeply symbolic act. He was saying that God's laws are the foundation of the nation; and of all our laws. Or at least, they ought to be. The monument (wags call it "Roy's rock") was installed under cover of night - but Moore had a camera crew from Rev. D. James Kennedy's Coral Ridge Ministries on hand to record the historic event. Kennedy then sold videos of the installation as a fundraiser for Moore's legal defense.

They knew he would need it.

The story of Roy's rock epitomizes the rise of what many are calling "dominionism." It is a story of how notions of "Biblical law" as an alternative to traditional, secular ideas of constitutional law are edging into mainstream American politics.