By Eric E. Clingan
Arizona Daily Wildcat
February 4, 1998

When the far right is wrong

Arizona Daily Wildcat Eric E. Clingan

Ambrose Bierce once defined a "Christian" as, "One who believes that the New Testament is a divinely inspired book admirably suited to the spiritual needs of his neighbor. One who follows the teachings of Christ insofar as they are not inconsistent with a life of sin."

However they feel about the New Testament, some Christians today are seeking to severely restrict the freedoms of their neighbors in America. This small but vocal group of Deep South, Bible Belt rednecks has even employed terrorism to fulfill its desires. Not surprisingly, such activities are rooted in history.

From Copernicus to Galileo, from the Crusades to the Inquisition, religious zealots have shown a propensity toward violence and oppression as means of conversion and control. In this country alone, such activities have progressed over at least the past fifty years from book burnings to bombings of offensive buildings.

The latest atrocity committed by Bible Belt Christians is last week's bombing of the New Woman All Women Health Care clinic in Birmingham, Alabama. The clinic is one of four in Alabama challenging new state laws barring late-term abortions.

Regardless of one's position on aborting the life of an eight-month-old fetus, the destruction of life and property as a means of communicating such disagreement is to be deplored in the strongest of terms. Indeed, such terrorism only invokes greater disgust among voting Americans for these Operation Rescue types who harass and berate young women already frightened by their future.

Until last week, bombings at abortion clinics had never claimed a life. Zealots had previously used guns. Five people have been shot to death at U.S. abortion clinics since 1993, not to mention the countless others forever scarred by injuries received in those violent outbreaks. What these yahoos of Bible-thumping, brow-beating kin of Klansmen like to call sacrifice, normal Americans call sacrilege.

However, the Christian Coalition and its allies aren't satisfied with murdering their countrymen; they desire to fully restrict and regulate our freedom, too. These attempts are starting with our children, threatening to subject them to an unconstitutional merging of church and state. For example, during the last session of Congress, multiple attempts were made at altering the Constitution in the name of God. The proposal of several school prayer amendments and multiple bills designed to force-feed religion to our children, beginning with those in nursery school, show that this bedeviled band will stop at nothing to inject Jesus into our hallways and classrooms.

And from the classroom, they are moving toward our homes, specifically our home computers. With all the fear that a Dark Ages pope could muster toward science (and perhaps with similar motive), the Christian Coalition is currently campaigning to censor, regulate and roll back the advances of today's Internet.

These Testament toters pushed for and won passage of the Communications Decency Act a few years back. Thank God we have a Supreme Court that understands the difference between the founding fathers' Constitution and a book written by only God knows whom. By overturning the act, they rejected the religious right's effort to censor thought and speech and quite logically spoke to the masses: "If you don't like what you see, don't look at it!"

Today, with the same religious zealots pushing him forward, Senator Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.) is proposing to eliminate all semblance of gambling on the World Wide Web. More Americans visited casinos in 1995 than attended major league baseball games and while the gambling industry last year alone took in three times the profits of General Motors, these militant Christian activists are drawing a line and pronouncing freedom's edge.

All around the country, the cries for less government are finally giving way to the realization that these Christians in fact prefer more government, their type of government to be exact. On issues like abortion, censoring the Internet and school prayer, it's obvious that such groups are actually speaking in tongues.

Eric E. Clingan is a senior majoring in political science. His column, "The Provacateur," appears every Wednesday.