Bitter ol’ PZ Myers (I know the man’s not truly bitter) wrote a couple of posts since the election of Barack Obama, which “pissed in peoples corn flakes.” He’s written (emphasis mine):

Obama is a conservative/centrist Democrat who will at best implement a small shift in American policies — he hasn’t promised any strong change in Iraq, and his health care plans are an incremental improvement over the existing situation.

…

We’re still afflicted with the curse of religiosity as a political prerequisite, and Obama has strengthened it. That is a poison that will harm us over the long term; we may have made the more rational choice in this one election, but reinforcing the potency of irrationality will come back to bite us over and over again.

I dread the possibility that jubilation will lead to complacency, that moderation will produce stasis, and that what will follow an Obama presidency could be something far, far worse than we can imagine.

I should also add, before everyone condemns this as simply the act of a primitive society, that the same impulse is at work right here in America. Those people who voted yes on Proposition 8 in California were simply performing a slightly more civilized version of casting a stone at those who offend their moral and religious sense of propriety.

Honestly, I can say I fully agree.

When I look at Obama versus McCain (pre-election, not tied to Palin), I didn’t see progressive leftism versus regressive conservatism. I saw a right to center-right candidate and a right-wing candidate.

I would not vote for either candidate if they were running here in Canada.

The problem, as I see it, is that American democracy has been stolen, not just by the Republicans, but by the Democrats and the Republicans.

By some major scam, the two main parties in the USA have convinced nearly everyone in the country (including the third parties) that “a vote for a third party is a wasted vote.” The Democrats blame Nader for costing Gore the election in 2000 (think about the rationality of chastising someone for trying to represent another voice on the stage, and try to reconcile that with the ideals of “rule by the people”) and the Republicans are such a mixed bag of Christian fundamentalists, big businesses, and libertarians that I’m surprised they haven’t killed each other yet.

Yet, despite their disdain for each other, neither party would admit that the American electoral system is deeply flawed.

Why would anyone want more than two choices for government, one might ask? Doesn’t having two parties make it as simple as a governing party and an opposition, and when one doesn’t work, you can vote for the other? (I have actually heard these questions from Conservative Albertans).

This of course makes as much sense as on the Simpsons when Kang and Kodos take control of the US and put each other as the nominees, or Futurama when John Jackson and Jack Johnson run against each other. The essence of the satire is that with only two choices, they tend to become nearly the same politically in order to appeal to the widest demographic. Why do you think American landslides occur when one party gets more than 55% of the popular vote?

So how do you fix this problem?

First, with the Democrats in power, Obama needs to prove his commitment to democracy by capping all election spending, and not at the ridiculous amount he raised and spent, but at something that’s reasonable for a popular (but as of yet unelectable) third party can have an equal chance of getting it’s message out. Election ads can then also be given equal time on the major networks (for all parties, not just the two main ones). This won’t happen, of course, because he’s got power now and won it through raising ridiculous amounts of money. I’d like to be wrong here, but I’m not holding my breath.

Second, strong third party candidates should be included in the televised debates. Canada put Elizabeth May, Green Party leader, on the federal leaders debate (bringing the number of leaders present at the debate to five), and America could follow suit. Having Nader and Barr at the leader’s debate would definitely have rallied their respective supporters and given them realistic chances at least a few college votes.

Third, stop letting partisan companies put electronic voting machines in. Create a federal election overseeing board and ensure some standard. Make sure that this standard can’t be violated by Republicans, Democrats, or anyone. It’s not hard, but it stops things like 2000 in Florida. I think the issue is Americans need to learn that sometimes government isn’t bad.

Finally, although I’m not familiar enough with it, the electoral college system likely needs to be revamped. I’m not sure if this system is still valuable to American democracy, and perhaps change would be for the better.

So in conlcusion, I’m not saying that Canada has a great electoral system (we don’t), but I feel sorry for American voters who had to choose between two candidates who are forced to pander to get as many votes as possible. Take the momentum you have, America, and push for some electoral reform.

But then again, I’m not American, so you don’t have to take my advice.

Ingraham begins by noting the variation between his opinion put into his article The War Between the Wars for Slate in July and his newfound admiration for Barack Obama. In the July article, Hitchens wrote:

If we had left Iraq according to the timetable of the anti-war movement… the Iraqi people would now be excruciatingly tyrannized by the gloating sadists of al-Qaida, who could further boast of having inflicted a battlefield defeat on the United States. I dare say the word of that would have spread to Afghanistan fast enough and, indeed, to other places where the enemy operates. -July 14, 2008; Slate.com

Hitchens then responds by saying that Obama’s values have been getting progressively “better and more teachable”.

During the program, I did notice that Ingraham acted defensively and on several occasions, cut Hitchens off. I think it would be reasonable to say that she behaved unfairly, making connections to her personal life and in support of McCain-Palin in order to give the notion that she was under personal attack. How she performed did not entirely matter, it was just bad journalism.

Though, because of her behavior, it was difficult to extract the real roots of Hitchens’s change in opinion.

But more importantly for the readers of this site she (perhaps wisely) did not discuss her religious views. In short, Sarah Palin is a closet Christian extremist. In a previous article, Roy mentioned that Palin believed in teaching creationism in the classroom. With China generating 300,000 engineering degrees a year – 240,000 more than the United States and roughly a 25% high rate per capita – we seriously risk endangering our position as the technology capital of the world especially if we are mired in such distractions.

She does not believe in abortion rights even in case of rape, incest, or the health of the mother, despite this position only supported by 18% of the population. Even among those who consider themselves ‘pro-life’, she is in the minority, as most believe that some sort of exception must be made.

Palin also has very little knowledge or opinions on foreign affairs and even less (if any) experience. But what she does believe in should scare you; I will let this video speak for itself.

This, combined with McCain indicating that he would pursue a hyperaggressive, confrontational foreign policy along with the possibility that neoconservative “Democrat” Joe Lieberman may fly up to Alaska to ‘tutor’ Palin on such matters is truly terrifying. In short, I cannot trust either McCain or Palin with the world’s most powerful conventional military and its second largest nuclear arsenal.

But behind every far-right fundamentalist is a far-right fundamentalist church. Meet the Wasilla Bible Church.

From it’s gay-to-straight conversion camps to its pastor invoking the typical “America is a sinful nation, Doomsday be upon you!” screed, it certainly does not look encouraging to secularists or even the majority of Christians.

Some may be wondering why I won’t bring up Barack Obama’s former pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright to be ‘fair’. This is because Rev. Wright’s political views are just that – political; although I don’t agree with much (if anything) that he said, after hearing his sermons it is clear that Rev. Wright justifies his views from his personal experiences and political leanings and NOT the Bible; it is very conceivable that if Rev. Wright were an atheist, Buddhist, or any other religion, he would still hold the same political views.

That being said, what does interest and concern me is the fact that just about everybody else in the country does seem to care about this stuff.

It is simply an unavoidable truth of our political circumstances (and a rather unpleasant truth at that for secular voters) that strong religious beliefs form the perspective through which a great many Americans view their prospective leaders. The normative American cultural assumption is that the Bible is the obvious foundational source of goodness (note its most popular colloquial appellation: “the Good Book”), and so candidates’ political stances are vetted as much by their congruence with Biblical values as they are with their actually being a good or a bad idea. In fact, on this pattern of “reasoning,” several very bad policies have persevered exclusively by their religious appeal, such as the so-called “Mexico City policy” and abstinence-only sex “education.”

And yet these policies persist, despite the fact that both examples above appear so brutally stupid that one most wonder whether they were designed with failure as an objective. This leads one to wonder: what is it about our political discourse that permits stupidity to be tolerable, even virtuous, to many American voters? Why is it that three candidates for helmsman of the world’s most powerful battleship-of-state would be permitted to publicly admit to being evolution deniers and not simply laughed out of our discourse?

I think that the answer to this question is what may sound like a contradiction: that the United States can be said to be in the softcore stages of a democratic theocracy. By this term I do not just mean any theocracy that permits voting (since even Iran allows its citizens to choose a President, though the Supreme Leader is appointed), but rather, a democratic theocracy would be any state where certain religious values are so endemic in a society’s values and customs that little to no legal framework whatsoever is even necessary. To be more specific, I think that a modern democratic theocracy has three relevant, salient features:

• A de facto state religion is already in place, so no overt de jure state religion is necessary. One of the principles of a true democratic theocracy is that there need not be any legal strictures requiring high officials to be of a particular religious persuasion, as is the case in totalitarian states like Iran and Vatican City, because the voting popular electorate does all of the enforcing on its own. It would be wildly paranoiac of me to say that this is exactly the case in the United States in every instance, but even the most optimistic observer must concede that this is the case in many instances. The religious demographics of the United States Congress, for example, help to draw this picture: somewhere from 12-16% of Americans call themselves “not affiliated” with any religion, but only about 2% of Congresspeople decline to declare a religious affiliation (even atheist Peter Stark calls himself a Unitarian). The Presidential demographics are even more appalling; only one non-Protestant Christian has ever been elected President, both of the current likely candidates are fighting furiously for the votes of the devout, and who among us would doubt that both candidacies could be imperiled by even a very minor slight of religion-based public policy? Why does Obama feel the need to quote the Bible when advocating the elimination of poverty, which any half-witted humanist knows is a good idea without particularly caring whether or not the Bible approves?
• “Religious police” are not necessary because the religious body politic is fiercely self-policing. Again, nobody in the United States is going around killing their neighbors for picking up sticks on Sabbath, but we do have our own, peculiarly American ways of enforcing extremist religious values. Public criticism of any religion’s favorite metaphysics is obviously strictly off-limits for elected officials (even if such metaphysics are absolutely, demonstrably loony- note that the few politicians who do oppose teaching creationism in schools often do so on grounds of “keeping religion out of the classroom” rather than the factually appropriate “creationism is unscientific gobbledygook”), but this rule is more appropriately applied on the social level. People with sexual inclinations towards the same gender are essentially terrified into hiding the truth about themselves because they have good reason to fear such things as expulsion from their families, the obliteration of their good standing in certain communities, lifelong subjection to vitriol and venom from near and afar by the religious, and of course alienation from many religious communities. Where does this peculiar hatred of the homosexual come from? What logical reasons would we have for hating the gay, the secular, and the science teacher if not for our fellow citizens who place metaphysics above reason?
• A nation’s values, especially the value of its electorate, are inextricably congruent with explicitly religious values. Focus on the Family, the Christian Coalition, the ACLJ, the aggregate of American bishoprics, and their counterparts across the spectrum of American Christianity do such a fine job of telling voters how to vote, who to vote for, and why the Bible says you should vote this way for this person, that official regulations forbidding formal religious tests for high office are useless. Creationist think tanks like the Discovery Institute, Answers in Genesis, and Creation Science Evangelism are so good at deceiving the public into thinking that there is some kind of “controversy” about evolution within the scientific community that the United States (one of the most savagely anti-evolution nations in the world) can maintain a majority popular stance in favor of young-earth Creationism despite having public schools that are required to teach the exact opposite. This is particularly effective where lax homeschooling standards permit parents to feed whatever garbage pseudoscience they desire to their children because there is often little to no real accountability for students who never learn how to think differently from their parents. Also unlike nearly every other wealthy liberal democracy in the world, the United States is afflicted with a massively revisionist historical complex wherein the Puritans, a cult of totalitarians who left Europe only because they weren’t permitted to brutally oppress their children in the manner they desired, can be portrayed as devout victims of injustice who went on to found an (explicitly Christian) nation with the help of a loving creator-god named Jesus. No other national history so ruthlessly corrupts reality as to build what could only be called an official founding-mythology plagiarized unabashedly from another theocracy’s playbook.

I do not for a moment believe that the United States is at risk of becoming the next Iran. I do not entertain even an inkling that formal oppression of the non-Christian is around the corner (which is to say that I am nowhere near as paranoid as many of the religious are!) and I have never, ever feared that my open secularism would ever threaten my personal well-being. What I do fear, however, is that the socially normative Christian sense of entitlement is growing- we have always seen it in our politics, and far more scarily, in our military. Our government, at least by the letter, is formally intolerant of theocracy, but our society seems to thirst for it. The majority opinion wants God and his Creation Week taught in our schools, the majority opinion wants God on our money and on the lips of our children and politicians day and night, the majority thinks that I will be on fire forever after I die.

If I could ever be accused of paranoia, it would be for the opinion that society appears to me to be becoming more tolerant of hatred, prejudice, and bigotry than the ongoing liberalization of formal government policy in respect to religion would suggest. With the economy turning sour and the evangelicals letting their old frustrations about government fester at the prospect of a Democrat sweep this fall, I can only wonder what the next step in our social development will be. Will we finally permit our values to be congruent with the values of our secular republic’s government? Or will the religious majority let its anger and its devotion mix and grow until things become even worse for those whom it is already bad? Do we really want to let the best-armed members of our population (our military) be the most uniformly convinced that Jesus is the only one to build either a life or a state? I do not.

I worry about my country. Even as you and I get to watch the meteoric rise of a unified, highly-motivated secular movement in the United States, we also get to watch its backlash use our success as rallying cry. Perhaps I worry needlessly, but I wouldn’t be slinging words like “theocracy” and “religious police” around if I didn’t think that we were in a real danger of having to fear some of our religious neighbors far more than we will ever have to fear our religious leaders.

So there’s been a lot of flack to Republican running-mate Sarah Palin since John McCain announced her this past week. But can she really be that bad? I bet I can think of some good reasons for Sarah Palin to be on the ballot with McCain.

1. She’s a woman, and this means that women can be politicians too.
2. She’s from Alaska, that’s pretty cool.
3. She reminds us that the Republicans are still hypocritically behind anti-abortion legislation, and anti-contraception.
4. She makes Joe Biden look a lot more intelligent (not that he didn’t before, but this helps).
5. She gives the atheist blogs something to talk about for weeks.
6. She reminds the American public that if they don’t vote for Obama it’s going to be four more years closer to an all out Christian theocracy.
7. If McCain dies during his presidency (he is old), she’ll be president and that just has to bring Armageddon that much closer, and come on, who here doesn’t want to see the Armageddon?
8. Also, if she became president than Kim Cambell (only female prime minister of Canada) will look better by comparison.
9. She’ll keep global warming on track, so Canada will get nice and temperate.
10. Finally, a McCain-Palin candidate is ripe for comedic value (old man with a younger woman touring across the US).

(Note: I hope the satire is taken in this post, and if you’re offended, too freaking bad.)