Dirty Dishes	Dirty Dishes Archive

Dawn managed to resist the temptation to open a vein after the election debacle. Sure, America has survived bitterly acrimonious elections before (think Jefferson v. Adams, 1800). We've endured racist Presidents allied with fascist attorney generals (think Woodrow Wilson and A. Mitchell Palmer, architect of the eponymous raids). We've even gotten past Presidents conspiring to subvert the Constitution to prosecute illegal wars and undercut political opponents (think Nixon... or Bush père, for that matter).

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But this time it feels different.

Bush is animated by a cabal of ultra-Right, would-be theocrats whose ideological fervor and profoundly irrational bigotries can legitimately be compared to Nazi-ism.

Students of history will remember that the National Socialist German Workers' Party gained power in Germany through legal means and the electoral process; even after they'd solidified totalitarian control (following a "terrorist" attack on the Reichstag), Nazis were careful to observe the form of law, though "laws" were nothing more than rubber stamps on dictatorial decrees by fiat.

So, it would be a mistake to suppose that "modern," theocratic American fascism will manifest itself through anything other than "legal" means. And to judge by a perusal of the websites of those evangelicals credited with giving Bush a mandate to forge a more "decent" America, increased restrictions of sexual freedoms and punishments for sexual deviants are likely to be the first manifestations of crypto-fascism metastasizing.

Of course, the process is well underway: all fifty states brand many garden-variety homosexuals as "sexual dangerous persons" needing life-long registration and tracking. Even heterosexual oral sex counts as a registerable offense in some states: check out Louisiana's sex offender website (www.lasocpr.lsp.org/socpr); therein, you'll find black female face after black female face staring back at you. What heinous sex crime did all these women commit that justifies posting their picture, address, and work history on the web? They-- allegedly-- offered oral sex for a price, and since oral sex remains a "crime against nature" in the home state of David Duke, these run-of-the-mill hookers are broadcast as enemies of the (decent) state, in need of life-long hounding and supervision.

To this already entrenched machinery, today's Republicans have proposed additions: Massachusetts Governor Willard Romney wants to ban gay marriage because he sees gay people as a threat to children (always a favorite claim of bigots of any stripe). Picking up on the threat-to-children theme, South Carolina's new senator Jim Demint has called for banning gay people from teaching school. And Oklahoma's new senator Tom Coburn has proposed executing doctors who perform abortions as murderers. (Presumably, the mothers would be killed, too, since they "conspired" in the "murders.")

All this is already bad enough, but looking at the Religious Right's web sites (and remember, these are the folks who elected Bush and whom Bush praises endlessly) it is clear that the final solution to the "homosexual problem" is contained in Leviticus 20:13: "They shall surely be put to death." Check out www.hatecrime.org/subpages/hatespeech/hitler.html to see just how eeriely today's Republican anti-gay screed echoes Hitlerian rhetoric about Jews.

Of course, America need not go over the abyss. Evangelical bigots are only a minority of the country (though so were Nazis when they seized power...)-- most Americans do not desire theocratic rule. If the majority of non-loony Americans can resist being stampeded by manufactured fear, and if a popular pro-freedom movement can be forged to give backbone to otherwise craven political opposition (i.e., spineless Democrats), looming tragedy can be avoided. Otherwise, see you in the camps....