I spent the last week completely divorced from the world as I healed from a recent surgery. Yesterday was the first day that I felt the fortitude to dive into the news again to see what I missed. I didn't get any further than the recent Value Voters Summit hosted by pinched bigot Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council. Over the course of the past two days, I watched in nauseated fascination as Sarah Palin served up her word salad covered in spoiled buttermilk ranch. I circled the toilet for hours with the likes of Mat Staver, the Benham Twins, Lt. Col. Oliver North, and Glenn Beck. And, of course, I listened to much wind being passed by perennial right-wing presidential hopefuls such as Rand Paul, Bobby Jindal and Ted Cruz. Each and every one of these people took to the stage, raging that they no longer had the freedom to say whatever the hell it was they were saying.
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It didn't take long before a common thread emerged. It was clear that this year's Value Voter Summit was designed to do one important thing—bring together the various factions of their movement to adopt and promote an official rhetorical gimmick. Granted, this gimmick has been percolating ever since the High Court slapped their old, easily discredited arguments about the head and shoulders in June of 2013. It is as desperate as it is transparent and now it's official. With so little left to grasp at, this summit managed to rally a unified face to insist it is being persecuted into Martyrdom by Silencing. Blaming everyone from the Obama Administration to the Gay America-Bringer-Downers, thunderous speeches were made about the loss of the right to their Freedom of Speech. Of particular concern is the freedom of certain Americans to lord Jesus over anyone they disagree with and the alarming dip of its effectiveness as a tool.
With their new official company line of playing the persecuted victim, bobble head after bobble head got up in front of the seated bobble heads and nailed themselves to their carefully crafted crosses, vowing revenge on those who made them do it. The Value Voter will not be silenced! The Value Voter will be heard! The Value Voter is superior! Only they haven't been silenced. We can still hear them and their blaring fog horn of desperation. And, of course, courts across the land have found them decidedly not superior to the United States Constitution.
Strategy has been a game this crowd has been fairly adept at over the years. Since the election of St. Ronald Reagan and the rise of the "Moral Majority," these folks enjoyed a successful stretch of influencing American politics in an astonishingly disproportionate measure. But that was decades ago and the bloom is off that rose. The Republican Party is now reaping the harvest of the clusterfuck Reagan planted all those years ago. It has been yanked into such fringe territory that the attendees of this summit straw polled a figure as polarizing as Ted Cruz to lead them into the next presidential election cycle. Yikes for Oval Office aspirations.
This year's Value Voters Summit was touted by the people who attended as a great success. Granted, they got some big names to join Tony Perkins in declaring this The Age of Christian Persecution. But as a strategy for winning the country over, it's just cringeworthy embarrassing.
Given time, people will not fail to notice that not even one homeschooled family was whisked away in the dead of night to a FEMA re-education compound. It will be discovered that not one congregation found it necessary to take up their Sunday collection plate to bail their pastor out of jail for speaking his opinion. The butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker? All fine so long as they don't hang up a sign declaring "We Do Not Serve a Certain Kind."
In short, their persecution strategy will fail spectacularly when it is shown that our constitution protects us all equally. Ironically, I have absolutely no doubt that they will find this disastrous for America.