Date: Tue, 8 Nov 1994 20:00:45 -0500 From: DENLEWIS@delphi.com To: Multiple recipients of list GLB-NEWS Subject: Beware of "Moderation" by the Far Right Is the Far Right moderating its positions in order to become palatable to mainstream voters? Commentator George R. Kaplan challenges that idea in his column, "Deceptions and Fallacies of the Religious Right," in the Nov. 2 issue of Education Week. Kaplan begins his column by citing examples that make some say "the religious right is changing the veneer and product description of the basic package" -- support of pro-choice Republicans Kay Bailey Hutchison in Texas and George Coverdell in Georgia, the push to recruit Catholics, Jews, Hispanics and African-Americans into the Far Right, the movement's adoption of "a less rigid tactical (but emphatically not substantive) stance on abortion." To further summarize the first half of Kaplan's column -- he touches on attempts by mainstream educators to "locate a common ground" with represen- tatives of the religious right. Kaplan then writes: It won't wash. The religious right's truckloads of prose on the evils (not just the admitted shortcomings) of public education provide a mother lode of reasons why any search for common ground is moonshine. The attacks have never been more strident, and they have been largely ignored by the heavy hitters of educational policy. Lest there remain any doubt about what the religious right really wants American education to be, one need only open the textbooks that nearly all fundamentalist Christian schools, "the next best thing to home schooling," according to [arch-fundamentalist Robert Simonds of Citizens for Excellence in Education], use day in and day out to instruct their young. Nowhere is there a more valid or instructional statement of the religious right's doctrinal underpinnings. In his eye-opening "Visions of Reality: What Fundamentalist Schools Teach" (Prometheus, 1993), Albert J. Menendez, a veteran analyst of religious fundamentalism, finds what adds up to a shocking refutation of commonly held views about American society and its central beliefs. Basic texts routinely deny or slight such ingrained qualities of national life as diversity, intellectual freedom, experimentation, and even religious tolerance. "These books," Mr. Menendez reports, "promote intolerance, separation and political reaction. They idealize a past that was itself intolerant and unjust or, in some cases, simply imaginary." Anyone who can find favorable mention of feminism, multiculturalism, or equity gets a gold star. While advocating a strict Christian value system, the authors of these widely used schoolbooks find Catholicism to be a fraudulent form of Christianity. In language saturated with ridicule and contempt, they slash and burn the beliefs and practices of Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, Episcopal- ians, Greek Orthodox, Mormons, Unitarians ("uniquely evil"), and, counting it as a religion, which no respectable theologian would, humanism ("an abomination"). Theirs must be a vengeful, intolerant God, certainly not a gentle shepherd. Of the unending parade of denunciations in these texts -- a key source of information and indoctrination for close to 1 million children every year -- the most worrying may be their almost casual demonization of American secularism and democracy. Only rarely audible or visible in the public utterances of the religious right's mandarins, this line of attack, as well as the political strategy of the larger movement, is eerily familiar to students of totalitarianism, notably of Communism, "the God that failed." Far from modeling themselves on the ethical and scrupulously nonpartisan League of Women Voters, the Christian Coalition and its most vociferous educational fellow-traveler, Citizens for Excellence in Education, advocate operational tactics that could have come straight from Coach Lenin's playbook. The similarities are impressive. Both have an entrenched base of ideological fervor that confers a feeling of belonging to something special on all, regardless of station or employment, who think as they do. As true believers, they share the zealot's consuming urge to convert waverers or non- believers. But they don't object too strenuously to expedient short-term accommodations with unlikely allies (the Roman Catholic Church hierarchy on sex education, for example) to make a particular point or advance a carefully vetted issue. Their loyalists are often prodigiously informed on narrowly defined topics, although their historical recall is usually distorted or blurred -- which doesn't bother them because, as Henry Ford once observed, "History is more or less bunk." Once in the sandbox of politics and community activism, Communists and the legions of the religious right have always been prepared to volunteer for the nastiest jobs and to pack the house for the most tedious and inconsequen- tial meetings. They relish boring from within organizations they find unres- ponsive to their preoccupation of the moment. Like their Marxist peers, they are not above distorting the truth, often by misrepresenting who they are at election time or by portraying opponents, many of them pillars of their com- munities, as anti-family extremists. While soft-pedaling their preference for a theocratic America, the grandees of the religious right are campaigning for exactly that. As long as they can get away with mislabeling themselves -- most tellingly to the millions of decent religious fundamentalists who care deeply about their children's upbringing -- the more likely they are to continue their recent advances. This is a time to hear from courageous officeholders of both parties (Republican Sen. Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania has distinguished himself in this regard), from national educational spokespersons (strangely silent to date), and from thinking parents. It is not a time to bow to a biased version of contemporary education or of any public matter just because it comes in a religious package, one that is often at odds with long-accepted views of the interplay between religion and public policy. The Rev. Joan Brown Campbell of the National Council of Churches got it right when she wrote, "Religious concerns are best fulfilled when political positions reflect the reality of a God who suffers with all who suffer, who cares for the integrity of all creation, who wills the well-being of all people, and whose will is always justice and peace."