corrente

A reader stands up for liberal, enlightenment values:

There was a Bush campaign ad on TV recently in which the president, facing the camera, gave a list of problems facing the country and in each case said, "I know" how to deal with these issues. The message given was that he had the answers.

Several months ago President Bush stated the the United States had a "calling" to bring freedom and democracy to Iraq. In Bush's fundamentalist Christian world, that word has a special meaning. It is something preordained, not action taken after investigation and sober reflection of facts and alternatives. It is something dictated by a higher power.

Add this to his frequent statements that there is no middle ground between good and evil, his administration's plan for "faith-based initiatives," and his opposition to freedom of choice and his attempts to define "marriage." Do we not have a government moving toward decision-making based on someone's interpretation of certain religious teachings and beliefs?

How does this differ, except by degree, from the message of the imams and ayatollahs that government exists not to carry out the will of the people, but the will of the prophet as they choose to interpret it?

ANTHONY McMANUS
Dover, N.H.
(via the Boston Gblob)

We don't need a War on Terror. We need a Campaign Against Fundamentalistm—at home and abroad.
(See back here for WOT versus CAF analysis.)