The United States needs a Democracy Doomsday Clock like the one the Union of Atomic Scientists maintains as to when their creations of nuclear weapons will bring about the catastrophic danger that scientists knowingly wrought - if nothing else scientists have done warrants the kind of critique of science which I engage in, that is merely one of the reasons which makes it justified and essential.
But this is about the clear and present danger that egalitarian democracy under the United States Constitution is in, an egalitarian democracy that is not the product of that Constitution but of the two hundred plus years of struggle to cash the promissory note that was contained in the Declaration of Independence, which the original Constitution did its best to renege on, quite successfully till the Voting Rights and Civil Rights acts were made law, as the "originalists" on the Supreme Court and in the Republican Party have very successfully done everything in their power to overturn those massive improvements to the Constitution.
I think one of the greatest things that are needed in fighting against fascism is for there to be a large, forceful, and effective RELIGIOUS LEFT organized and which is more than a counterpart of the "religious right" that the Republican Party has gulled into supporting depravity up to and including Trump. The secular left which became ascendant in the late 19th century, which included many nominally religious lefties who increasingly rejected a Christian articulation of equality, the right of the destitute and poor the means of having a decent life and the rest of a legitimate traditional American liberal agenda to what they rather naively assumed was a more "scientific" or "Constitutional" secular left which did a lot more than just avoid sectarian differences, it undermined and repudiated the very basis for the positions that the American tradition of liberalism relies on.
Science cannot support the contention of human equality, for a start. It can be twisted to assert equality but only in terms of alleged measurement of things like intelligence or, perhaps with slightly less fraudulence, health. And a lot of that "measurement" is far from scientifically rigorous or valid, or, most seriously, without bias. Often the "things" measured are nothing more than artifacts of unconsidered prejudices and unconsidered habitually assumed assumptions and social prejudices.
And science cannot give a reason for even-handed treatment of anyone, those deemed "inferior" or even those deemed "equal," or "superior", that even-handed and fair treatment of others is based in morality which, by common agreement, science does not deal it nor is it capable of discerning.
Fairness, equal treatment, morality are all things which fall outside of the capacity of science to treat, which leads the practitioners and devotees of scientism to claim that those are either mere social conventions* or illusions.
But that's not the basis of political and social equality which must be asserted in the face of differences in intellectual capacity - much of incapacity being a matter of choice and chance, having nothing or little or less to do with some biological differences in potential the basis of political and social equality must come from elsewhere than can be found with science or, I would argue, secular philosophy.
I am thoroughly convinced - and against long standing personal habits of thought, perhaps even personal preference - that all of those bases of egalitarian democracy, social and, especially, economic equality, fairness, decency are found no where else but in the belief in a Creator, God, and in the intent and desire of God, as summed up in the repeated assertion in Genesis that the creation was found good and that, after the creation of human beings, that it was "very good." Going on from there, it would seem to be left to human beings to find as much of that good among us as we could manage to discern and make real, trying to make that "will be done on Earth as it is in heaven." Perhaps our potential to find that being what was "very good"
The problems I can see in coming together in a Religious Left are a. the Barry Lynn kind of "separation of church and state" language will make a lot of religious people chicken out of it for fear of being tut-tutted over that, b. the real differences among religious leftists on a few issues such as the right to legal abortion and a few of the other hard issues. But those issues, in the first one, ridiculously applying requirements of the secular government to religious individuals in their political activities and in the second, coming to grips with how to effectively reduce the avoidably high numbers of abortions in the United States (other countries have far, far fewer because there are far, far fewer unintended, unwanted or medically dangerous pregnancies)** and a few other areas of things like sexual moral assertion*** must be overcome or all will be lost.
I think one of the hardest things to overcome is the idea emanating from materialist-scientistic-secularist hegemony that we are to allow even the most depraved immoral ideas and ideologies the chances of swamping equality, fairness, decency out of some daffy concept of "even-handedness" and even some distorted, deformed thing called "fairness." As I mentioned a number of times, the insanity of that postion became obvious to me when the ACLU represented the Nazis who wanted to terrorize the community having the highest number of Holocaust survivors anywhere outside of Israel in 1977 in the infamous Skokie case.
The ACLU position on that is the classic secular-liberal-leftist position that we are to never learn anything from the hardest of history, that in each and every case we are to allow entities like the Nazis another chance to do what they did before up to and including taking control THROUGH ELECTIONS and installing themselves in power to discriminate against, to attack, to murder millions. A position which the ACLU boasts about its role in making the law of the land even as it boasts about the rulings it advocated that opened us up to Trump and his gang of thugs talking AND ACTING openly to rig elections and even annul them. That is the lunacy of this kind of amoralism as "fairness" to fascists, niceness to Nazis, etc. Which, the largely white, largely affluent, largely professionally established lawyers of the ACLU, no doubt, mostly fear nothing from. And what you can say about them you can say about the majority of those in "journalism" and academia.
No, if we are going to save American democracy, egalitarian democracy, the legitimate traditional American liberal agenda of equality and a decent life for everyone, secularism is one of the things we will have to leave behind along with the wretched record of what it has brought into being. We need a religious left that is united on at least the issues of doing to others what you would have done to you, the moral basis of egalitarian democracy, the only safe way to have that is to acknowledge that it is a morally binding requirement, a responsibility which we all share, equally, violations of that to be discouraged, serious ones punished into compliance. I see no other way to avoid the catastrophe that the debauching of Christianity in the "evangelicals" and "traditionalist-Catholics" and its debasement among the secular left has brought us to.
* The idea that fairness, equality and morality are a product of "social conventions" has to fight against the fact that even when those are asserted, they are anything like reliably practiced within even the most egalitarian and moral societies, and try to find those in human history. You'll need a very good lens to see it.
** The idea that making abortion illegal will end abortions is immoral nonsense. When abortion was illegal in all but the most dire of medical emergencies there were many, many abortions and many, many women died from them, were injured from them, were terribly exploited through them, etc. Making abortion illegal is the farthest thing from abolishing abortion, it merely makes the ones that happen more dangerous. That is something that those wishing to make abortion illegal have to answer, along with the problem of allowing the state to regulate the bodies of women. I think it should be a principle of law that the state's interest in regulating our lives ends at the skin, though it can certainly regulate matters of commerce. The only rational way to "end abortion" is by the widespread, correct, consistent use of effective contraceptives. The ridiculous "rhythm method" as pushed by Catholic conservatives is certainly none of that and in more cases than not it is an ineffective fraud that should be regulated out of the marketplace.
*** As an LGBT man, I both insist on absolute equality and non-discrimination for us even as I have to say as a gay man I am the opposite of accepting of the irresponsiblity of many gay men in and around issues of sex. As an increasingly reluctant student of pornography - you have to see what's there to write about it - every depravity that is found among straight men is also present among gay men, promoted by pornography. I would, if I had the power to do so, abolish all pornography and the inevitable pathological inequality and exploitation and cruelty AND INTERNALIZED SELF-HATRED that is inevitably a part of it. It is sheer lunacy to pretend that the promotion of exploitative inequality has any right to the support of any real traditional American liberal or any religious leftist. The widespread self-hatred taught through sex to gay me is evil, the promotion of racism, white supremacy, anti-egalitarianism, sexual inequality, misogyny, everything up to and including American Nazism (white supremacy symbolized in the American swastika, the Confederate flag) to German Nazism is rampant in gay porn. So is child porn, something it shares in common with straight porn. No matter how much campaigning has been done on the issue of child porn-prostitution, it abounds online where it should be abolished and prosecuted.
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