By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) | – –
Both Christianity and Islam as religions comprise large numbers of people and contain a spectrum of believers from the secular to the moderate to the extreme. At the far right fringes of the Muslim extremists you get al-Qaeda. At the far right fringes of Christian extremists you get the Lord’s Resistance Army in Africa.
Just short of the violent extremists however, you have the inflexible far right fundamentalists. Judge Roy Moore of Alabama, who lost Tuesday’s senate contest, has a great deal in common with the extreme Muslim fundamentalists.
Since Trump and his evil puppeteer and white supremacist Steve “Breitbart” Bannon both backed Moore to the hilt, this means that the Trump wing of the Republican Party is now committed to a form of politics indistinguishable from Muslim fundamentalism.
For instance, Moore thought it is all right to date 14 year old girls as a 32 year old man. He even said he got their mothers’ permission.
The minimum legal marriage age for girls in fundamentalist Iran is 13, and with the permission of the court and their fathers they can marry at even a younger age.
So what is the difference between Moore and Iran’s ayatollahs?
Moore was removed twice from the bench at Alabama’s supreme court for insisting that biblical law trumps the laws of the United States and of the state of Alabama.
Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran (d. 1989) said that if the Iranian electorate voted one way, and the 12 vicars (Imams) of the prophet Muhammad voted the opposite way, the Imams would be right and the Iranian people would be wrong. In other words, Khomeini denied the Enlightenment principle of popular sovereignty, that the people’s will as indicated at the ballot box is the law of the land.
Roy Moore denies popular sovereignty, saying that his interpretation of the Bible is more important.
So what is the difference between Moore and Ayatollah Khomeini?
Moore holds that Muslims may not serve in the US Congress (that will come as a surprise to Keith Ellison [D-MN]) because they cannot take an oath on the Bible. But the constitution does not require an oath on the Bible, and Ellison swore on Thomas Jefferson’s copy of the Qur’an. Jake Tapper had to point this out to Moore’s spokesman:
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CNN: “Jake Tapper fact checks Roy Moore spokesman”
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Muslim fundamentalists in Indonesia objected to a Christian being governor of Jakarta, and managed to get him removed on trumped up charges of blasphemy.
Roy Moore “probably” still thinks homosexuality should be illegal, in contrast to the US Supreme Court.
Although a majority of American Muslims believe that homosexuality should be accepted, fundamentalist preachers elsewhere want to see it banned.
Moore believes that 9/11 struck the US because its public fell away from God.
Saudi cleric Bin Baz also held that calamities are punishment for not obeying God’s laws.
So Trump and Bannon are not trying to install ordinary conservative Christians in power. They are backing the Christian Taliban.
Luckily for the nation, sane Alabamans defeated Moore on Tuesday.
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Related video:
Doug Jones Triumphs Over Roy Moore In Alabama Senate Election | The Last Word | MSNBC
This may be a low brow response to the election but here in the south we use a dismissive expression that fits this situation perfectly….
Hey Roy and Kayla….F%&k you and the horse you rode to town on!
And yet Moore still got over 70% of the White vote in an election where many Whites stayed home.
We have to ask ourselves this: are we going to stay in a country with such people? And my answer is: yes, for the sake of those whom they would oppress and even enslave if they seceded or if left-wing states seceded.
But given that, we must accept that we will spend the rest of our lives in a country with people so extreme that our lives are in danger, and our children’s lives will be in danger. Act based on that, and not on a fantasy that some “White working class” will really change after it gets pissed off at betrayal by the capitalists. To quote Il Douche himself, “He knew what he was getting into.” They have accepted the pleasures of institutionalized violent sadism, like their forefathers, as a permanent substitute for justice.
This post complements yesterdays, insofar as backward attitudes toward knowledge exist is both religions. Any ‘good’ (functional) religion will include the self-serving justifications and empowerment needed for survival.
Modernity appears to be the real threat to those everywhere who are unequipped to adapt or unwilling to do so. There has been a enormous rural to urban shift around the world over recent years, including in the US, and people with the mental capital, in terms of brains and/or the disposition to adapt, are leaving their cousins in the provinces behind to starve.
As the man said, they are left with only their guns and religion.
The average age of marriage for women in Iran is 23 overall, and 25 in urban cities. And while on paper it may be 13 (with the parents and courts permission), it is extremely rare. In the rare instances that it does occur, it’s in rural areas amongst farmers.
In the US however half of the states 25/50 don’t even have a minimum age of marriage. Girls as young as 10 are legally married in the USA using such laws.
link to independent.co.uk
Moore isn’t like an Iranian theocrat. He is alleged to have dated girls in their early teens, or to have pursued them for that purpose whereas the Iranian theocrats absolutely condemn any dating. They permit marriage of early teens but not dating.
That’s really true. The cowboy hat is the symbol of Good Ol’ Days American identity. It might explain why so many Whites who grew up in the 1950s somehow conflate their childhood Golden Age not with New Deal policies but with the Gilded Age that coincided with the Wild West; half the shows on TV were Westerns and the suburban “pioneers” were practically living a second fantasy life as cowboys and settlers. The real Black cowboys were coded out of existence but the hats were coded White for Good, Black for Evil.
All of which means, a White oligarch or theocrat can wear a cowboy hat, like Reagan or Bush Junior, and immediately signal that he’s a tribal chauvinist who will take the side of his “people” over all others. Which is the only real problem Christian fundamentalists have with Moslem fundementalists; they are a rival tribe contending with our tribe for global control of resources and it is assumed that their version of Judeo-Christian-Moslem patriarchy is rigged to favor brown folks just as the Christian version is expected to be rigged to favor Whites.