Rants About Conservatives Obscure the Debate

I posted on BlogHer today about the Mark Halperin suspension by MSNBC.  Then I posted a comment at BlogHer.com on another article on the site that bemoaned the supposed culture war being conducted against conservative women. 


It took me a couple hours to realize that both articles were about self-described conservatives who are actually radicals and not conservatives.  There are so many perspectives from which we can examine the lies of "conservatives."  I don't know that I have ever actually examined the right wing from a lexical one.  It is enlightening. 

What is it that Halperin and talking heads like him actually conserve?  What is it that Christian Theocrats hope to conserve?  Hot air?  Nope?  Original intention of the Constitution?  Nope.  Although I think that is what some right-wingers think they conserve.  The mortality of yesteryear?  Nope, although I think many right-wingers believe this to be their central uniting characteristic.

Tearing down civility and calling the President derogatory slurs would not be tolerated by a real conservative who was trying to preserve the intentions of the those who wrote the documents associated with the founding of our United States.  Would Jefferson, Adams, Franklin, or Hamilton use such derogatory language to describe a world leader in the news medium accessed by most of the citizenry?  I think not. Tearing down the civil constructs that hold our society together is closer to anarchy than conservatism. 

And social "conservatives" who insist on defining life as beginning and ending discontinuities rather than being the amazing interconnected web of life that it is, do not hearken back to any real time period that would uphold their radical legislative agenda.  Freedom of religion has been the law of the land since this land was defined.  What is conservative about Christian Fundamentalist Law?  Only the same things that are conservative about Islamic Sharia Law.  A patriarchal point of view culled and narrowed out North African belief systems at the Council of Nicea and at the founding of Islam in 610.  But I don't think that nurturing a belief that a patriarchal God is on your side, only, conserves any ubiquitous aspect of an earlier America. Constitutionalists promoted religious tolerance and  Anti-constitutionalists wanted to institute Protestant values in the republican government that first emerged in Pennsylvania in 1776.  The constitutionalists eventually prevailed at a larger level with the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment that states "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion."  This codified that the U.S. was not a Christian country even though the founders were of various Christian sects. 

Christian based laws and disrespectful treatment of leaders are just not and never were part of a previous America.  So-called conservatives who espouse such revisionist history are attempting to preserve and conserve a fiction.