What is the greatest moral danger in the US?  Hint; it’s not the dirty f&@king hippies.  A few days ago my friend Shaun Mullen explained why the Catholic Church has no moral authority.  PZ Myers explains how that applies to the Republican Party in this must read post.

Today is my wedding anniversary. I’ve been married to the same woman for 31 years, without ever straying. Newt Gingrich has been married 3 times, divorced one wife while she was recovering from surgery, and has had extra-marital affairs.

Guess who is considered the defender of traditional sexual morality?

It’s a strange situation where the political party with more ex-wives than candidates, that houses and defends a disturbingly amoral network of fundamentalist operators is regarded as the protector of the sanctity of the family. They’re anything but.

The Christian fundamentalists that make up a large share of the Republican base are slaves to an ancient middle eastern tribal document, The Old Testament,  not unlike the Islamic fundamentalists they love to hate.  PZ Meyers again:

Now look at those dirty rotten hippies, like me. We say the ties between a couple should be made with respect and affection, not the strictures of law and precedent; letting gays marry, for instance, strengthens the public approval of our kinds of bond, while weakening the authoritarian bonds. Our ideal is a community of equals, while theirs is a hierarchy of power, a relic of Old Testament values in which marrying a woman was like buying a camel, a certification of ownership, and nothing must compromise the Big Man’s possession of properties.

If we strip marriage of the asymmetry of power, as we must if we allow men to marry men and women to marry women, then we also strip away the man and wife, dominant and submissive, owner and owned, master and servant relationship that characterizes the conservative view of marriage. This is what they want to preserve, and this is what they are talking about when people like Gingrich echo those tired phrases about “Judeo-Christian values” and complain that their “civilization is under attack”. And it is, when we challenge their right to treat one partner, so-called, as chattel.

The family values as preached by the religious fundamentalist of the Republican party is little more than an attempt to maintain the male dominance of the Old Testament and it’s not new but what the Catholic Church was all about from the very beginning.  Not really that much different than the Sharia Law they love to condemn.