By Judith Gayle | Political Waves

It happens every time. Give ‘em an inch, they’ll take a mile. Radical conservatives are doing what they’re famous for: pushing their own personal agenda up the arse of everyone else in the name of “American values” and their conviction that all people must join them in obedience to their religious convictions or there will be hell to pay. I know what you’re thinking: OMG, she’s going to bitch about the Republicans again. Yes. Yes, I am. And it’s not because I’m warring with my neighbor or judging some cross-section of humanity or furthering an us/them agenda; it’s because radical Republicans — bless their bony heads — have become the impediment against which we must all push if we are to stop our downward spiral, restore our civil liberties and knit up the nation’s wounds.

Admittedly, I have a bias. I was raised in a socially liberal, politically conservative household. That gave me a foot in both worlds. If I turned out politically and socially liberal, it’s because I found conservatism to be incestuous, mean-spirited and sclerotic. In my opinion, it’s downright un-American! Read history and you can only call the marriage of religion and government odd bedfellows, merging their authority in an uneasy arrangement of divided control over the citizenry, with absolute obedience to each required upon pain of death.

This nation purposely separated religious from governmental power for the very reason that liberty could not survive their combined influence, but as a lower vibrational philosophy, it’s hard to snuff out. Religion has never given up trying to pull us back into servitude. Listen, in your heart of hearts you know Pope Ratz would love to have that power again, impressing us willful little peons who oppose his message of straight, unprotected but absolutely married sex with his own version of the wrath of Gawd. It was as recently as 1908 that the Vatican’s Congregation of the Inquisition was renamed the Holy Office, which in the 1960s became the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. Perhaps you recognize it as the Vatican office that Cardinal Josef Ratzinger ran before he became Pope Benedict XVI? See? Incestuous, mean-spirited and sclerotic, not to mention a tad sadistic.

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