In 1692 Salem, in modern day Massachusetts, the original Right Wing Christian Conservatives put 19 people to death for witch craft. Salem had begun to change and was losing its identity as a Puritan religious polity in the new world and was beginning to become a more secular community. When several children began to have visions and began to accuse those percieved to be less than the most devout in the community of witch craft the town erupted in an orgy of fear based homcide that didn't end until the children accused Governor Winthrops wife of witch craft.
We have had other incidents of this type in our nation. The McCarthy era comes to mind and reading Arthur Miller's play about the witch trials, The Crucible, should remind us that this is not a war on religion or faith. The insanity of fear based hysteria and the destruction that it does to innocent lives was what Miller was really getting at in his parable that was about Salem and The House Un-American Affairs Committee in the early 1950's. In all of these cases justice, fairness, and human rights get suspended until people stand up and demand an end to the insanity.
Today, pushed by Rick Santorum, America's self appointed Grand Inquisitor, women are back on trial because women standing up for themselves and refusing to be compliant "little women" is threatening to a group of angry old white men who are fearful of their autocratic and paternalistic rule coming to an end in a diverse world.
There is no war on religion but the Christian Right is making a war on women that is not about matters of faith but male control of a woman's rights. We know from studying the history of marriage that it was never made in heaven, it was made in a lawyers office and is really about inheritance and division of property not to mention the Lord of the Manor's progeny.
The little petty dictators like Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich have no understanding of the difference between faith and religion. They think they are the same thing which they aren't.
Faith is a matter of the heart. Fear is the absence of faith. Based on the Right Wing's feeding frenzy of fear many on the Christian Right are a pretty faithless lot which is what self- righteousness is really about.
Religion on the other hand has always been about social control. God had nothing to do with it. Believe me no one with any sense would want to worship the insecure tyrant that the Christian Right tries to push on the rest of us as God. Who wants a God who chooses favorites and seems to derive an almost sadistic pleasure in punishing his people for every thing. If you fear your God you don't love him. Lost on Republicans is the simple truth that you can beat people into compliance but that is far cry from either love or faith.
In Witch trials they often used something called trial by ordeal which was not all that different from the scene in Monty Python and the Holy Grail and the witch scene, because they would take a woman accused of witch craft and tie her hands and feet up stuff her in a bag and weigh it down with rocks and throw her in the river. If she sank and drowned opps she wasn't a witch after all. If somehow she didn't sink or got out of the bag she must be a witch so they would dry her off and hang her or burn her at the stake.
Some of these new laws Republicans are passing over abortion and contraception, particularly the one Bob McDonnell passed today in Virginia should remind everyone of forcing women to a trial by ordeal. At least the protests forced these zealots to back off the requirement for a vaginal untrasound. But trial by ordeal is still on the books. Don't need Big Government in mens business affairs but we need Big government to pry into controling a womens reproductive choices.
The fact that women still must have an ultra sound even if she is having a miscarriage, will delay medical treatment cruelly and unnecessarily, and then I presume this ultra sound is to try to shame and brow beat the woman into a different choice. This is about male fears of a woman's power to control reproduction thus life begins at conception.
Maybe Santorum was right the Devil came to America in 2008. The only problem is he brought his Republican voter ID with him.
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