{"id":1158,"date":"2013-10-10T22:07:00","date_gmt":"2013-10-10T22:07:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/rhetoricraceandreligion\/2013\/10\/expose-the-shutdown-clowns-jesusayn-rand-religion.html"},"modified":"2013-10-10T22:07:00","modified_gmt":"2013-10-10T22:07:00","slug":"expose-the-shutdown-clowns-jesusayn-rand-religion","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/rhetoricraceandreligion\/2013\/10\/expose-the-shutdown-clowns-jesusayn-rand-religion.html","title":{"rendered":"Expose the Shutdown Clowns\u2019 Jesus\/Ayn Rand Religion"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>
With the shutdown I\u2019m tempted to say \u201cI told you so.\u201d What did you expect?<\/strong>Religious morons hijack the GOP (with a big assist from my dad and me in the 1970s and 1980s) and now the lobotomized GOP has hijacked the rest of us and taken the country and world economy hostage.<\/span><\/div>\n
The shutdown is the religious right\u2019s biggest \u201cvictory\u201d and a loss for the rest of us that threatens everything we love. But it\u2019s not all \u201ctheir\u201d fault. Some of our best and brightest dropped the ball too. Contrary to the religious right\u2019s persecution\u00a0victimology<\/em>\u00a0complex our elite chattering classes have been far too polite about religion. They\u2019ve given a free pass to people who say they are serving God. This American \u201cgod\u201d is a weird hybrid of Ayn Rand and what\u2019s left of poor old Jesus after he got sold, packaged and enslaved by southern white \u201clibertarian\u201d fact-free bigots.<\/span><\/div>\n
For instance Paul Krugman and the\u00a0New York Times,<\/em>\u00a0have unintentionally sinned<\/strong>against their readers by not taking religion seriously enough. They have been overly polite about the horrible effect evangelical fundamentalist religion has had on our American \u201cshutdown\u201d politics. They are analyzing the shutdown but offering no solutions because they duck the truth. Until Krugman and the\u00a0Times\u00a0<\/em>editorial board and the rest of the media, attack the religious extremist root cause of the shutdown nothing can change. It\u2019s time to disrespect religion.<\/span><\/div>\n
Krugman\u2019s\u00a0<\/a>latest column in the\u00a0Times\u00a0<\/em><\/a>illustrates my point handily. I\u2019ll reproduce some of it here and add what he was too polite to say. Maybe I\u2019m more attuned to what Krugman won\u2019t say \u2014 that right wing religion has become right wing politics \u2014 because I was once an evangelical leader with a famous evangelical father (religious right founder\u00a0Francis Schaeffer<\/a>). I fled. But I remember.<\/span><\/div>\n
Read the rest here<\/a><\/span><\/div>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

With the shutdown I\u2019m tempted to say \u201cI told you so.\u201d What did you expect?Religious morons hijack the GOP (with a big assist from my dad and me in the 1970s and 1980s) and now the lobotomized GOP has hijacked the rest of us and taken the country and world economy hostage. The shutdown is […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2251,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1158","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\nExpose the Shutdown Clowns\u2019 Jesus\/Ayn Rand Religion<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"With the shutdown I\u2019m tempted to say \u201cI told you so.\u201d What did you expect?Religious morons hijack the GOP (with a big assist from my dad and me in the\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/rhetoricraceandreligion\/2013\/10\/expose-the-shutdown-clowns-jesusayn-rand-religion.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Expose the Shutdown Clowns\u2019 Jesus\/Ayn Rand Religion\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"With the shutdown I\u2019m tempted to say \u201cI told you so.\u201d What did you expect?Religious morons hijack the GOP (with a big assist from my dad and me in the\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/rhetoricraceandreligion\/2013\/10\/expose-the-shutdown-clowns-jesusayn-rand-religion.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Rhetoric Race and Religion\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2013-10-10T22:07:00+00:00\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Andre E. 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