I Like Being Validated

On December 7, I wrote On Guillotines and Gibbets, a piece on the conflict between not the Left and the Right, but between the Left and the Religious Right. Pertinent quotes:

What, I think, the Left fears from the religious Right is a conclusion that the Left is actively, deliberately evil in its pursuit of its Utopia.

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The Left, intolerant and unbending, agressively evangelical, historically in control of the education of youth and the flow of information to everyone, fears a Christian backlash and a modern-day massacre of St. Bartholomew’s Eve. They don’t much fear the non-religious among the Right – we’re not organized enough. We’re not true believers. But they understand that when men like Theodore Dalrymple start throwing the religiously-weighted word “EVIL” around, then the backlash might not be far away.

So I was quite pleased today when I read John Hinderaker’s (of Power Line fame) Weekly Standard piece “Rapture” Rapture. From the opening of John’s piece:

ONE OF LIBERALS’ chief motivations these days is fear of the religious right. Ask people on the left to explain their loathing of President Bush or the Republican party, and the answer often comes around to Jerry Falwell, evangelicals, theocracy, and so on.

John doesn’t attribute that fear, as I do, to a subconscious (or even conscious) expectation of an organized violent backlash, but at least I’m not the only one who sees the behavior of the left not as simple political maneuverings. They really do fear the religious right.