Religious Republicans Pursue Destiny Through Nuclear Option

An odd thing happened a few months ago, not too long after Election Day. I began receiving email newsletters from an ultra-nationalist Republican religious organization called the American Family Association. The messages always began with the address “Dear littlejonnie_Atheist_fag” – a quaint introduction from a group that claims to represent American families.

The thing is, I am a family man. I have a wife, and a son and a daughter. We all live together in a house that we own in a nice, small village. But, I never asked to join the American Family Association, never asked them for a newsletter, and I certainly never authorized this organization to speak on my behalf, although they are clearly claiming to do so.

It seems that someone with a great deal of anger in their heart towards liberal Americans signed me up with the American Family Association without my permission, even going so far as to assign me a username with the description “fag” in it, under the strange Republican presumption that all liberals must be homosexual.

I thought for a minute about quickly cancelling my subscription to the American Family Association newsletter, but then I started reading it, and thought the better of it. You see, there are a lot of strange little things that right wing groups will say to their members that they will never utter in public. I’ve learned a lot about what goes through the minds of right wing extremists by reading the American Family Association newsletter.

Today, for example, I got an email message from Donald E. Wildmon, the chairman and founder of the American Family Association. He wrote to me, “Dear littlejonnie_Atheist_fag, we have come down to the final days and hours in the fight for our destiny. Now is your last chance to have input into the filibuster fight. Call your two Senators today and ask them to vote to kill the filibuster. If they do not, only those nominees who would become a liberal activist judge will ever get a vote on the Senate floor.”

There are a couple things that stand out to me in this message (other than that Don Wildmon is so affectionate as to address me as Dear littlejonnie_Atheist_fag – what a caring man!). First, it’s striking to me that in the minds of Republican activists like those at the American Family Association, only liberal activist judges would ever be able to get the approval of the United States Senate under the traditional Senate rules currently in place. That’s odd, because since the Republicans have controlled the Senate, the vast majority of judges proposed by the Bush Administration have been voted on and approved by the Senate. So, that means that, according to the American Family Association, President Bush and the Republicans in the Senate have been pushing liberal activist judges into the courts for years! Hm. Something doesn’t add up there.

As strange as the idea of Bush’s judges being liberal activists is, there’s another idea in this message that is even stranger. It’s the idea of destiny. Read the message again and you’ll see that the American Family Association is telling its members that the fight to eliminate the right to filibuster in Senate is a part of a larger fight for “our destiny”.

Destiny strikes me as a very odd word to use to describe a political agenda. The word “destiny” is defined by the American Heritage Dictionary as “The inevitable or necessary fate to which a particular person or thing is destined; one’s lot, a predetermined course of events considered as something beyond human power or control, and the power or agency thought to predetermine events.”

One nutty dimension to this usage of the word “destiny” is that the mere idea of fighting for one’s destiny is internally contradictory. If something is your destiny, after all, it is certain to happen, no matter what you do – so why bother fighting for it?

More disturbingly, this message suggests that the Republicans are not just trying to destroy the traditional rules of the Senate in order to gain the typical sort of political power. It suggests that the Republicans are seeking political power as part of a larger campaign to move America towards some kind of fate that they imagine is its destiny. They honestly believe that the universe has ordained that they will be victorious over us, and that they are entitled by the cosmos itself to impose their vision on the nation and on the world. The believe that it is their destiny to enshrine their religious vision into the heart of the United States government.

When activists of any kind believe that they are on a cosmic mission of destiny, it’s a sign that they’ve gone off the deep end. So, when Republican Senator Bill Frist calls for a vote on the Nuclear Option to destroy the traditional right to filibuster this week, watch out. It’s a move to cast the entire United States of America smack into the middle of destiny that has been sought by the Religious Right for generations – a destiny we’ll all have to take part in, whether we want to or not.