Theocracy!

Ross Douthat has a must read for anyone interested in the coming "theocracy" promoted by the "theocons." Douthat convincely shows that the argument that there is a theocratic conspiracy is based largely (if not entirely) on paranoia, innuendo, and wild conjecture.  As they say, read the whole thing, but here is a snippet:

Sometimes it’s argued that what sets the contemporary Christian Right apart from previous iterations of politically active religion isn’t its Christianity per se but its unwillingness to couch argument in terms that nonbelievers can accept—to use “public reason,” in the Rawlsian phrase, to make a political case that doesn’t rely on Bible-thumping. As a prudential matter, the case for public reason makes a great deal of sense. But one searches American history in vain—from abolitionist polemics down to Martin Luther King’s Scripture-saturated speeches—for any evidence of this supposedly ironclad rule being rigorously applied, or applied at all.

And besides, religious conservatives do, frequently and loudly, make arguments for their positions on non-theological grounds. Perhaps not as often as they should, to judge by the movement’s repeated political and cultural defeats (defeats that the anti-theocrats gloss over, since it would complicate their portrait of an all-powerful Christofascism on the march). But the evils of abortion, the value of heterosexual monogamy, the costs of promiscuity and pornography—all these issues are constantly being raised by social conservatives without appeals to the divine inspiration of the Bible. Tellingly, when a professor at Patrick Henry College explains to Goldberg how he teaches students to “use terms and facts that the other side accepts as reasonable,” she calls it a “rhetorical two-step” and casts it as yet another example of the devious Christianist project of political infiltration: Heads you’re a theocrat, tails you’re a theocrat.