Let's review

It's sometimes hard to remember, given the amount of daily news and the way it pours in (pick your metaphor: onslaught, avalanche, firehose), just what we're fighting for. Of course, we all remember that we're anti-gun, anti-war, pro-civil rights for women and queers, and pro-choice. (Or, let's call it what the other side calls it: pro-abortion. Because abortion itself really is the core issue we're fighting over when it comes to (what our side calls) reproductive rights. Yes, we can fight over details of parental notification and sex education and the distribution of condoms and so forth, but all those are side issues compared to the big one: Can you or can't you get an abortion when you want one?)

My stand, our stand -- at least, given what I know about the eight or so people who even read this weblog -- on these issues, taken together, form what would be called (by us) a progressive agenda or (by the other side) an ultra-liberal agenda. Yes, I'm conscious of using the right words for things, saying "I'm pro-choice" or "reproductive rights," but I'm also conscious of what the other side calls things. They'd say "pro-abortion" and "the right to kill your baby." I know this because I listen, partly for entertainment and partly because I want to know what the other side is thinking, to right-wing Christian radio, and I have for a long time. Over the past twenty years I've witnessed the programming on right-wing Christian radio stations becoming more and more sophisticated, as right-wingers start to understand that nowadays they have to put an educated gloss on what even they admit are views that are out of the mainstream. The never-say-die campaign by the Christian right against the theory of evolution, for example, now uses a collection of arguments collected under the rubric "Creation Science." Of course, it isn't real science, any more than Scientology is, but if you call something a science and you have Ph.D.s making proclamations on its behalf, then it sounds more credible. The Nazis understood this, and the Christian Right does, too.

(That was a cheap shot. The Nazis also understood that the Volkswagen was a good, dependable car, and that doesn't make everyone who drives one an anti-Semite. I know when I'm taking cheap shots, just like I know what I'm doing when I watch pornography. But it doesn't stop me from doing it.) (You'll notice a plethora of parentheses. This is the way I think. I make one statement and then I also think of what somebody might think of it, or I think what somebody on the other side might say. This deep-seated ambivalance about language, this recognition of how maleable it is, is what keeps me from being an effective essayist.)

So we've got these "progressive" political stances. But the point I was going to make is, do we all remember why we have them? Let's review.

The top priority for all the threatened white men is to take away abortion rights, and then birth control. The reason is utterly simple -- they want women burdened down with children and out of the workplace. For the same reason, they'll work to reverse other advances that have torn down the patriarchal edifice: domestic partners' laws, for example, not to mention the right of queers to marry (not that we're there yet) and thus gain access to all the marriage-related property and tax rights. And they'll fight against the recognition of queers as persons and queer sexuality as acceptable, because recognition that queers exist and are entitled to human rights also threatens the white-male dominated workplace.

The next priority for the threatened white men is to keep non-white people at each other's throats. That's why they fight so hard against the legalization of drugs: because the bigger the drug trade, the more blacks and latinos kill each other trying to control it. The huge amount of money generated ("wasted," according to the right-wing pundits, and it is a waste, though they don't really believe this) by the prison system, the anti-immigrant system and the police system goes mainly to this threatened white group, but more importantly, keeping drugs illegal keeps minorities in poverty by undercutting the economic and social health of their communities. Then they make sure guns are widely available by working to defeat gun control laws.

The next priority, and here the Bush administration is making a lot of progress (from their perspective), is to roll back environmental protections so they can make absolutely as much money as fast as possible from raping the earth. Similarly, the vast fast-food economy which dominates the diets of everyone in the U.S. and which is being pushed into other countries as fast as possible, plus the tobacco economy, is designed to exploit (and incidentally destroy) human ecosystems as surely as oil, gas, automobile and construction companies destroy geophraphical ecosystems.

You get the picture. I'm not saying there's a vast right-wing conspiracy by big blue meanies to destroy the world and control everybody; I'm saying that the right wing's intentions are purely economic. For example, though a huge Christian Right system exists to push the "pro-life" agenda under the name of religion, the fact is that the rich white men funding the system don't give a shit about religion or "saving babies" or saving anyone's souls. They just want women out of the workplace. That's all it's about.