Peddling Hatred in America
The Prescription for the Ultimate Destruction of the Republican Party

Friday, October 16th, 1998 --- New York (APJP) -- The murder of Matthew Shepard, an openly gay freshman at the University of Wyoming, is directly linked to the ultra-right wing hatemongers and "New Moralists" now corrupting post-modern America. The foundation was laid in the 1960s by students who found their parents' goals empty and largely non-alluring.

Those students now control the wealth of this nation.

While the '60s brought with it too much love, not enough peace and a focus on civil rights, it also encouraged those among us who are different to free ourselves from whatever closet we were trapped and move into the mainstream of society. While no one can argue that the period starting with Kennedy and ending with the resignation of Richard Nixon was also a period of foolhardy and outright dangerous drug experimentation, few historians will disagree that decade forever changed the intellectual and moral foundation of the United States -- discourse rose from kneejerk reactionary closedmindedness to thoughtful consideration of difference.

Since 1976, however, conservatives -- often led by the incoherent-to-the-masses William F. Buckley -- struggled to advance and regain power they had not held since Ike led the troops home from Normandy. They failed, time and again. Liberals maintained a headlock on government, and rightfully so. Religious zealots, who themselves were being exposed as hypocrites one after another in the late 1970s and early '80s, were genuinely fearful of losing whatever power they had over their largely "televangilized" audiences. With the help of political and media gurus, they forged a daring partnership with Newt Gingrich, the forked-tongued conservative pseudointellectual who appealed to American's basest need -- cash. While Gingrich appealed to greed, the Moral Majority and its even more zealous successor the Christian Coalition appealed to salvation. The greed factor finally caught up with American's lust for money -- and Republicans finally took both houses of Congress during Bill Clinton's watch. If greed, through empty promises like the "first hundred days" and phony tax "cuts," could be used to garner a majority in the House, perhaps the super-prize -- the presidency itself -- could be captured by proselytizing and preaching.

To that effect, Christian fundamentalists united sometime in 1993 to begin a concerted attack on the power of the presidency -- and the President himself, a man who, tragically gave them ample fuel with which to fuel voter fears that they might all burn in Hades should they continue to give him power.

This battle has raged for nearly 6 years.

American history is peppered with movements that undid some of the horrors left intact by the "Founding Fathers." Lest we forget, these "Fathers" -- most of whom the Republican right wing has lately deified -- were, in many ways, not the sort of individuals our nation should be proud of. Most were powermongers, slaveholders and bigots -- yet the conservative movement, headed by cretins like Tom DeLay, Gary Bauer, Trent Lott and telepreacher Pat Robertson, would like you to forget that the founders gave the vote only to men, only to white men, only to white men who owned property. People of color, especially blacks and native Americans, were left out of the Constitution -- or at least were neither mentioned nor protected by the earliest Supreme Courts. And women -- they were chattel. It took Jack Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, nearly 200 years after the "Fathers" adopted the Constitution, to enforce civil rights laws in the South -- and even then the reason was selfish! It was not serendipity that blacks would go on to vote en bloc for Democrats. They, earlier than most, saw the Republican Party for what it was and for who led it -- they stared the likes of Strom "Ku Klux" Thurmond and Jesse Helms in the face long before suburban American began to "freak out" at integration seeping into their post-war matchbox house communities, the Levittowns scattered across the nation.

Matthew Shepard, a 1990s gay college student, was dragged to a desolate spot by two young men who "befriended him" -- much as Linda Tripp "befriended" Monica Lewinsky and Dick Scaife "befriended" Paula Jones.

Matthew was tied to a fence, bashed in the head and left in the cold for 18 hours before being found comatose.

He never woke up.

Like Matthew, blacks, welfare recipients, women who choose abortion, non-Christians, homosexuals, Asian-Americans, Hispanic-Americans and others in minority groups are now targeted by the GOP and its minions. While I understand that many Republicans are horrified by the groups with which their Grand Old Party associates, they seem not horrified enough to step up and say enough is enough.

The Christian Right, now seemingly in control of the Republican Party, has begun what Andrew Sullivan calls "moral righteousness" -- a frightening departure from its post-Carter "liberation of the people from state control." The Bible has replaced the Constitution in many conservative minds, and God is the shield behind which they hide their hatred and mistrust of anything not White, Christian and straight.

Americans, without realizing it, are now asking themselves the age-old question -- "What the heck is going on?" -- without getting a clear answer. They feel it as they watch Kenneth Starr, a wounded and savage attack dog for the Christian Right, continue his harassment of Bill Clinton and his family through egregious abuse of the legal system and the Independent Counsel statute. They smell it in the Starr "report," a volume of mostly uncorroborated character assassination packed to the hilt with lascivious detail on the President's private life and sick little mentions that "Mrs. Clinton was out of the country..." or "the President was considering leaving his wife."

Starr couldn't care less. He laughs with those same snide, self-righteous Stanford University students mocking innocent Chelsea Clinton -- making her campus life a nightmare.

Ken Starr was sitting on that fence where Matthew Shepard was taking his last breaths the day before yesterday.

While Matthew's parents and friends mourn, commercials -- courtesy of fundamentalist Christian organizations -- have been airing nationwide telling Americans that homosexuality is a psychosis that can be repaired with psycho-babble and a good shot of down-home religious fervor.

The hidden message? "Vote Republican -- the Party of the New Crusades."

Republicans have set out to make Americans hate each other for not being what they are -- they pit black against white, woman against man, Congress against President, straight against gay. They are turning back the clock -- not to the McCarthy era, but to Hitler's 1933, the year that set the stage for "queers and kikes" to join each other in concentration camps waiting for a "shower."

Republicans today remind one of the early campaigners for birth control "rights." They adopted Eugenics -- a theory that people who were defective should sterilize themselves -- in an effort to cloud the real issue: that women should have the right to take birth control pills (although not available as of then.) While these women, the early founders of Planned Parenthood, had a laudable goal, they nearly destroyed it by cloaking it too with a Hitlerian mantle.

But Eugenics is back -- in a strange way. Now, it seems everything wrong with you is simply your fault, and everything you are comfortable with but does not fit into the King James Bible is your fault as well!

Republicans are now touting the fact that they "put: 400,000 welfare recipients into the work force. Oh, yes, they are proud of it -- but fail to tell the horror stories resultant therefrom. They fail to remind us that "welfare-to-work" is simply a catch phrase for "pulling the rug out with no warning."

The Republican intellectual elite would prefer to call this moral fervor "Conservative Reconstructionism" -- a movement toward Big Brother government control of morality that flies directly in the faces of the 1960s ethos which taught us that a person's private life is sacrosanct unless and until it harms others. -- or the 1980's Reagan ethos that preached reliance on oneself without government help.

What leading conservative thinkers now want you to believe is that private lives mean only "family lives" -- everything else is fair game. It was no accident that Dick Morris was photographed with a prostitute on the balcony of a swank hotel in Washington even though his marriage had been essentially dead long before. And it was no accident that Ken Starr, after failing in his quest for the President's head on alleged scandals and legal theory, now wears the cape of moral decay.

Remember -- the White House is NOT the people's house, as your GOP friends would have you believe. If it was, you could come and go as you please. No -- it's the President's House, and what goes on within is, as a matter of fact, his own business.

According to Andrew Sullivan, writing in last Sunday's New York Times magazine, it is William Kristol -- the impish and ever idiot-grinning co-panelist of Sam and Cokie's Sunday "Clinton Roast" officially called This Week -- who leads the pack.

Kristol's truly awful, hate-inspiring magazine The Weekly Standard is owned by cash-fundamentalist Rupert Murdoch -- who also controls Tony Snow and Brit Hume through his Fox Network broadcast and cable operations. One can only wonder what Hume must be thinking of all this, remembering the tragic suicide of his own reportedly gay son only months ago as he preaches the New Moralism on Fox. Kristol can be seen giggling and smiling like a Cheshire cat each Sunday on ABC as he calls for Republican colleagues to focus on "morality" as the key issue with which to castrate the Democratic Party this coming November.

The Weekly Standard, under the watchful eye and pen of Kristol, focuses almost entirely on the Lewinsky scandal as a "moral crisis" for America. Nothing could be more absurd or intellectually dishonest, yet the supposed intelligentsia of television -- the Tim Russerts and Tom Brokaws of the major networks -- actually spend millions of dollars in television time airing this theory and giving its exponents credence. No one could be more surprised than Kristol -- and few could be more frightened than Republican leaders like Newt Gingrich, the most loathed and untrusted politician in the nation. He must now wonder when his own "colleagues" will be coming for him.

How could one imagine in back in 1965 that the likes of Pat Robertson would be seriously questioned by CBS News regarding "standards" for American conduct? Who could have believed that the likes of feminine-looking Gary Bauer would seriously consider wasting our time running for President as an anti-homosexual candidate?

The focal point of the New Moralism is, of course, Abortion with a big "A". It is Abortion that ties the conservative intellectual to the moronic fundamentalist. Here is what William Kristol wrote about abortion in the conservative monthly Commentary and so aptly quoted by Andrew Sullivan as a key to Kristol's psyche:

The truth is that abortion is today the bloody crossroads of American politics. It is where judicial liberation (from the constitution), sexual liberation (from traditional mores) and women's liberation (from natural distinctions) come together. It is the focal point for liberalism's simultaneous assault on self-government, morals and nature. So, challenging the judicially imposed regime of abortion-on-demand is key to a conservative reformation in politics, in morals, and in beliefs.

It is freedom.

Kristol urges the Republican Party to make abortion the central issue in Campaign 2000. What he is really urging is a link between abortion rights, school prayer, women's rights and gay rights -- which all told equal general but private moral liberty, something he does not like.

He urges the Ultra Right to weave these Supreme Court-based freedoms into a cloth of immorality and then to don it as a cloak of goodness against evil.

I was aghast to hear Bill Buckley, in an interview last week, attack the President on moral rather than legal grounds while calling for his resignation or impeachment. Buckley, no fool was, as usual, merely toying with those liberals who watch him with dazed awe. But conservatives, not known for academic brilliance, lap at the legs of Buckley's trough. While Buckley couldn't give a hoot about anything much more than sailing big Hinckley yachts, that expensive hobby leads him to continue his clearly impish television serials and ludicrous book writing (all but the sailing books) which somehow seek to convince America that its all for one and one for one -- the other fellow be damned. Buckley himself must be sitting fat and amused in his suitably worn Ralph Lauren leather armchair fingering the rim of an Austrian crystal whiskey tumbler and laughing his head off when Gingrich parrots this or that Buckleyism.

However, November will teach the GOP a tough lesson.

America has changed. Americans don't want to turn the clock back. They love their country the way it is -- not the way Gary Bauer, Jerry Falwell or Bill Kristol envision it, or at least pretend to envision it.

Republicans seek to gain a large number of seats in the House and/or Senate. I doubt they will -- it will be because zealots of any kind turn out in masses greater than those who are not so keen on foisting their morals, or lack thereof, on others. The zealot vote in 98, if it occurs at all, will turn out in 2000 to mark the death of power by the ultra-right. If more liberals voters wake up early enough this year, then that death will simply begin earlier.

Thanks to martyrs like Matthew Shepard, who could only have been murdered in the current atmosphere of hatred created by the ultra-right, America will eventually turn against the purveyors of hate.

You see, Mr. Gingrich, you cannot control hatred once you light it afire. That fire will spread and people will begin to finger the arsonist.

In the end, moderates on both sides of the aisle will control the government and the Bauers, Gingrichs, Kristols, Robertsons, Starrs and Frums will remain mere footnotes in the history of a nation so rooted in individual freedom so strong that it, by definition, is synonymous with morality.

Mac MacArthur