"Conservatism varies widely in time and space, but it always manages to invent a mythic history for itself ..."

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COMMENTS:
*  ... the southern US, in my experience, has the most pernicious form of bigotry, as demonstrated through fear, hatred, and ignorance, than any other region of the world that I spent any time in.
*  For the right it is all about freedom, the freedom to tell other people how to live so the wing nuts can feel good about their country. 
*  I find it truly amazing that a State's Supreme Court's Chief Justice that professes Christian values, is in a position to make judicial decisions while he seemingly is incapable of understanding the very Bible he claims guides him.  Roy Moore, intolerant, not compassionate, and unloving. Praise Jebus indeed.
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The South’s true face of hate: Oozing nonsense from demented and influential corners of religious right

Celebrating the anniversary of Lincoln's assassination? Disturbing people are pushing sick alternative history

By Paul Rosenberg, February 21, 2015

When a federal court recently struck down Alabama’s same-sex marriage ban, it wasn’t Governor Robert Bentley who insisted on repeating George Wallace’s ludicrous theatrics of treason, defying the authority of federal law and the Supreme Court. It was Alabama’s Chief Justice Roy Moore, ordering probate judges to ignore the federal court order and refuse to issue same-sex marriage licenses. The local media, to its credit, knew exactly what was going on:

Bentley refused to become the next Alabama governor making a show of defying the law in front of TV cameras and in the process sending the message that our state is still intolerant and a lawless place for some of its citizens who happen to be different from the majority.

But what Bentley refused to do, Moore did do. He is trying to stand in the courthouse door as surely as Wallace stood in the schoolhouse door. Shame on him.

At “The Daily Show,” Jon Stewart went for the foolish hypocrisy angle—or at least one of many: Moore and the probate judges following his lead explicitly invoking the Bible as the reason to reject same-sex marriage violates the Alabama Constitution, as just amended in the last election. Stewart played a clip from WSFA 12 news, last Nov. 3, describing the newly passed, so-called “Sharia Law” constitutional amendment, “It would prohibit judges and other state officials from basing any of their decisions on ‘foreign law,’” the newscaster explained in the clip. Pregnant pause. Then Stewart asked, “Where was the Bible written, again?”

It’s not so much that people want to laugh at Alabama’s idea of sober judicial leadership. But what are the alternatives?  Anything less leads deep into darkness and confusion. Taking Moore seriously certainly doesn’t work, as CNN’s Chris Cuomo discovered, much to his chagrin.  Moore is a first-rate dissembler and fabulist, who even tried comparing the federal judge’s order (and the Supreme Court’s refusal to stay it, which he manfully tried to ignore) to the Dred Scott and Plessy vs. Ferguson decisions, in an attempt to portray his own (sort of) Bible-based gut-level bigotry as just like being opposed to the (somewhat more than sort-of) Bible-based bigotry of slavery and segregation!

Comparing Moore precisely to Wallace may be mistaken—the differences are as instructive as the similarities—but Moore is actually more deeply reactionary than Wallace ever dreamed of, burrowing ever deeper into his bigoted rationalizations, rather than moving on and adjusting. Although Wallace’s infamous “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever!” pronouncement was unflinchingly categorical, he dropped that support like a hot potato when it became untenable after Martin Luther King’s watershed “I have a dream” speech. As Taylor Branch noted just before the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington, Wallace led the way in disavowing classical racism, creating a new brand of “principled conservatism” in the process:

By the end of 1963, with segregation losing its stable respectability, he [Wallace] dropped the word [segregation] altogether from a fresh stump speech denouncing “big government” by “pointy-headed bureaucrats,” tyrannical judges, and “tax, tax, spend, spend” legislators. He spurned racial discourse, calling it favoritism, and insisted with aplomb that he had never denigrated any person or group in his fight for local control.

Wallace’s complete rewrite of his history was typical of conservatism more generally. Conservatism varies widely in time and space, but it always manages to invent a mythic history for itself, making it the only logical alternative—even if that means a 180-degree turn from what it was saying five minutes before. But don’t expect Moore to suddenly shift gears as Wallace did. This is not one of those 180-degree moments. Wallace set conservatism off in a new direction, while Moore represents a culmination of that process over a period of decades, in which a bizarre, far-flung structure of historical lies and misleading fabulist narratives has been constructed and disseminated by a network of Christian Reconstructionists who want to remake America along the lines of “The Handmaid’s Tale.” To help spread their influencce, they’ve invented an entire alternative history universe, which the mainstream media and punditocracy continue to misunderstand, misrepresent or ignore. Moore and his supporters live in that alternative universe, and it’s only by studying them and their core lies that we can hope to get a fix on what they are really about.

[Major snippage.  Read the rest here.]
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