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| Mitt Romney and Richard Mourdock, 4 Aug. 2012, Evansville, IN |
I appreciate Paul Brandeis Raushenbusch's response to the astonishing claim of Indiana GOP senatorial candidate Richard Mourdock that God has "intended" pregnancies occurring due to rape. Raushenbush replies baldly:
No. God. Didn't.
And he's right. What is offensive above all about the men who created the religious right coalition in the latter part of the 20th century and who continue to dominate that coalition is their pretense to own God. It's their pretense to be God--since, as Mary Daly incisively observed, if God is male, then the male is God.
The men who created and continue to control the powerful religious-right coalition imagine that they and they alone speak in the name of God. They do so because they have made God in their own image, as powerful heterosexual (or pretend-heterosexual) males who are, for the most part, white.
And until we challenge their claim to own God (and, truth be told, to be God) at a very fundamental level, by asserting the preferential claim that the dispossessed and marginalized, the least among us, have to represent God, they'll continue to be an exceptionally dangerous threat to the political life of the U.S.
And to the future of the planet, given the power the U.S. wields in the global community.
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