If you haven't heard yet, there was a rather embarrassing moment at the DNC where Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa called for a public vote on last minute changes to the party platform to reinsert God and pro-Israel language. It took three tries to get the required two-thirds majority. From the Huffington Post:

Even though the no's were again as loud if not louder than the aye's on the third vote, Villaraigosa said he had determined that two thirds of those present had voted in favor. Boos filled the arena in response.
Within minutes, Republican National Committee staffers had uploaded the video to YouTube and were circulating it on Twitter.

First, this would never happen at the RNC. They would never air their dirty laundry in this manner. This shows how much less disciplined the Democrats are. If there's one thing you can say about Republicans, it's that they are loyal and fraternal. They know how to stick to a message, even if they personally disagree with it.

A co-chairman of the committee charged with drafting the Democrats' official party platform called it an "unfortunate omission." To me, what's a lot more "unfortunate" is that here, in 21st century America, to be successful, a major political party has to acquiesce to religious bullies.

Of course those on the right are running with this, which I can understand since it would play well with their base. But even those on the Democratic side state the "problem" as being that the "God" language was taken out in the first place. That is sad.

Conservatives go so far as to say the media are "covering it up." I love that. What's to "cover up?" How bad is it that here in 2012, excluding references to God equates to being immoral, anti-American, and downright evil. It didn't hurt the Founding Fathers to leave references to god or gods out of the Declaration of Independence, but 200 years later...

They refer to the Democratic Party as "The Party of Atheists, Homosexuals, Abortionists, and Muslims" like it's a bad thing. Really? So now, in 21st century America, a party defined as "good" has to exclude the non-religious (34.2 million, or 15% of Americans), the gay, the pro-choice (about half of all Americans), and non-Christians.

Face palm.

Being the contrarian that I am, whenever it becomes popular to ridicule something, I find myself asking "wait a minute. Is there more to this?" Many of the figures of the Tea Party movement are pretty easy targets, making it easy to dismiss the whole movement as a bunch of extremists, ignorant backwoodsmen or agents of some evil puppet-master.

There are things I should like about the movement. First, it started as a populist movement, which is what I think we need to shake up the current rigged two-party monopoly. But it hasn't played out that way. Tea Party proponents say they "don't care about party labels" and that they "don't care what party you're in; they just want to know if you reflect their values." However, in practice, there is no place for Democrats in the Tea Party - and what's more, all Tea Party candidates have run on the Republican ticket, not a third party ticket.

Ok, so the real Tea Party is older, white, somewhat more male, and 30% more likely to identify as "born-again" Christians than the general population. They have a favorable opinion of the Republican Party and an unfavorable opinion of the Democratic Party. But what do they want?

A common slogan is "Take back America." When I see representatives of the movement speak, whether official PR spokesmen or ordinary attendees at rallies etc. it feels like this is code for a number of what appear to be fear-driven goals. In a lot of ways, "Take back America" seems to mean taking America back to a mythical, idealized time in the past, when white people had it good, jobs were plentiful, taxes were low, and everybody feared/loved Jesus in appropriate quantities.


Tea Party enthusiasts are quick to throw around the word socialism in reference to Obama’s tax policies. They claim he wants to raise the tax burden on the rich and lower it on the poor to "distribute wealth" but the facts, again, don't bear it out. The rich continue to get richer. Even if Obama had gotten his way, it would have represented a pretty paltry tax increase for the richest people and, even then, it would only get things closer to where they were because, while the tax rates for nearly all households have been dropping since the 60s, the rates of the richest have dropped the most, by far. If the Tea Party sees a pro-business, pro-capitalism moderate such as Barack Obama as a socialist with all his tax cuts, imagine what they would think of a president who ran a federal government with significantly higher tax rates than today and who raised taxes while in office, specifically, Ronald Reagan.



The basic message of the Tea Party movement is quite appealing: Government is too expensive, too intrusive and too big. But the devil is in the details. In the end, I don't think there's anything new here. The Tea Party should be praised for managing to organize some of the anger and frustration that's out there into something people are looking at - and perhaps it can be a model for other populist movements in some way. But for the Tea Party itself, there is no "there" there, at least not yet - it's not that unlike the old "moral majority" but with a much narrower agenda. And like that movement, it will continue to be a fringe element. It is a movement that cannot deny that it is heavily loaded with extremists - truth hurts, sorry. Mocking them really is easy, and justified in most cases. Again, tough luck. You are what you are.

I've often been involved in conversations at parties and what not, in which people begin poking fun at some fringe religion, sometimes far fringe like "cults" but other times, somewhat less fringe like Mormon or Scientology. They joke around about how absurd the stories and so on, similar to how people speak about ancient Roman or Greek Mythology. What I usually try to point out in these situations is that the stories of modern "accepted" religions, including the most accepted one, Christianity, are no less far-fetched and fantastic.

Daniel Dennett, in an interview by Jonathan Miller says it much better than I do, of course. Listen below.



Here's a few quotes:

If somebody's a member of a cult, as we say, we have no trouble being rude with them, with laughing at the Raliens, or those people that got interested in the comet, various doomsday prophesiers when the prophesies don't come true, we laugh at those people and the world laughs with us at them. So we have a line where we consider some religious belief to be just too kooky to take seriously, and we are rude with impunity when talking about those.

If Christianity were a small sect in the world, I think it wouldn't receive the respect, but look at all the churches that the Christians have built, look at all the great art, look at all the great music. It's hard to be rude to a religion which has created so much great culture.

The biggest point for me is that, if one is informed and is being intellectually honest, Christianity is in fact just as "kooky" as any other religion across all time. The only thing that makes it seem less "kooky" is that it is so widely accepted and practiced and that most people are only exposed to a "sanitized" version of its traditions, edited to be more G-rated, one more consistent with 21st century morals and norms. If Christianity were a small sect in the world, it would receive no more respect than any cult or mythology in the world.