The Christian right at war with itself
by digby
I wrote about that at Salon this morning. It could portend yet another fault line in the GOP coalition:
As Scott Eric Kaufman reported on this site, Ted Cruz went on the “Today” show yesterday and laid out his belief that the real victims of discrimination in this country are evangelical protestants, because the Supreme Court is unrepresentative of “flyover country” and the people who live there. The justices are a bunch of east coast Catholics and Jews, you see, and they just don’t have any respect for Real Americans. Cruz thinks all that untrammeled Catholic and Jewish power needs to be stopped. “There are no protestants, no evangelicals, on the Court,” he said. “They think our views are parochial and don’t deserve to be respected. What a crazy system to have the most important issues of our day decided by unelected lawyers.”
Oddly, this comment echoes Justice Scalia’s unhinged rant in his Obergefell dissent which Cruz turns back on Scalia himself. Scalia wrote:
“[T]o allow the policy question of same-sex marriage to be considered and resolved by a select, patrician, highly unrepresentative panel of nine is to violate a principle even more fundamental than no taxation without representation: no social transformation without representation.”
You’ll notice that when the justice said that the Court was out of touch because it was composed of a bunch of Ivy league-educated elites (like Ted Cruz, by the way) he didn’t say anything about evangelicals and protestants. He is, after all, a very famous Catholic who prides himself on his social conservatism. It’s unlikely that he meant to implicate his own religion in that “otherness.”
If Cruz is speaking for anyone but himself, this marks an interesting shift in the religious right and one that could be consequential. The alliance between conservative Catholics and evangelical Christians has been one of the most fruitful political collaborations in our history. And it was, for all of its pursuit of noxious public policy, a rather weird demonstration of American progress.
Read on. The history of this partnership is pretty interesting and the fraying of it right now has very little to do with theology and everything to do with politics.
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