The Jaundiced Tumblr

Mainstream journalists have taken great pains over the past year to distinguish between the Christian right and the Tea Party, and it is true that a few tea partiers, particularly Rand Paul in Kentucky, are not Christian soldiers but anti-government libertarians. In a practical sense, though, there is a huge overlap between the Christian right and the tea party movement, between the Republican Party and the Tea Party. One of the signature achievements of the Christian right over the past 30 years has been to meld traditional anti-tax and anti-government positions with support for government intervention on behalf of the morality articulated by conservative Christians. This was not the case for earlier generations of Christian fundamentalist politicians, most notably William Jennings Bryan, who was a biblical literalist, an anti-evolutionist, and an economic populist.

For the present generation, though government is bad if it’s taxing you to help the poor, but it’s good if it prevents you from marrying a partner of the same sex, obtaining contraceptives if you’re unmarried, or having an abortion.

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• politics
• teh gay