Just in case it wasn't abundantly clear by now:

"A Religious Protest Largely From the Left"

"Conservative Christians Say Fighting Cuts in Poverty Programs Is Not a Priority"


--Washington Post

"When hundreds of religious activists try to get arrested today to protest cutting programs for the poor, prominent conservatives such as James Dobson, Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell will not be among them.

That is a great relief to Republican leaders, who have dismissed the burgeoning protests as the work of liberals. But it raises the question: Why in recent years have conservative Christians asserted their influence on efforts to relieve Third World debt, AIDS in Africa, strife in Sudan and international sex trafficking -- but remained on the sidelines while liberal Christians protest domestic spending cuts?


Conservative Christian groups such as Focus on the Family say it is a matter of priorities, and their priorities are abortion, same-sex marriage and seating judges who will back their position against those practices.



***

Later that night (tonight), 115 protestors of the screw-the-poor budget plan were indeed arrested.

***

The real news is of course not the uber-fuckheadedness of Falwell, Dobson, and their cohorts, but that the religious left--here represented by Jim Wallis of Sojourners, one of the most visible faces of the Christian left these days, heading up a joint effort of five mainstream Protestant and evangelical denominations--is making the news more often these days.

I'm currently wading through "Moral Politics," maybe a third of the way through. I'm sure that Lakoff would have a good, succinct explanation for the psychological and philosophical basis of the right-wing leaders' position here, who explain variously that poverty is not the government's business because "the government is not capable of love;" whereas "pro-family tax cuts" are a good thing (I guess there's at least some warm affection there, anyway). For now I'm sticking with my standby of "they are evil motherfuckers."

Although I do think that what Wallis had proposed the arrested chant while being led away (cited in the previous article) is more elegant:

"Woe to you legislators of infamous laws . . . who refuse justice to the unfortunate, who cheat the poor among my people of their rights, who make widows their prey and rob the orphan."

Isaiah 10:1-4