Culture War Issues Back Big-Time as 2012 Elections Approach

In the news today: they're baaaack.  The culture wars are back in a big way as the Republican party seeks to anoint a presidential candidate, and as signs that the economy may be mending slightly under the current Democratic president dishearten the Republicans and their allies, who are desperately seeking to change the subject from the economy to 1) the gays, 2) uppity women, 3) contraception, 4) religious freedom, 5) Obama's war on religion/Catholics, etc.  Take your pick.

As I write this posting, an article by Laurie Kellman about these dynamics is Huffington Post's top story of the moment.  An excerpt: 

But where Republicans cast the White House's contraception policy as an assault on the freedom of religion itself, Democrats argued for the preservation of affordable birth control for women. The White House circulated letters from women's groups defending the policy and signaled on Tuesday that a compromise was possible. 

Former Obama aide Jen Psaki suggested the uproar was due in part to the GOP nomination fight, noting that the administration's directive requiring church-affiliated employers to cover birth control for their employees was based on a policy used by many states. 

"Where has the outrage been up to now?" Psaki said.

And here's Ira Chernus at Alternet: Chernus notes that, surprisingly, the white born-again evangelical "values voters" who are now the backbone of the Republican party are more inclined than any other demographic to give Newt Gingrich a pass for his serial monogamy interspersed with serial philandering, though they've been claiming for years now that their mission is to save embattled values and, above all, the sanctity of traditional marriage. And then he observes, 

However, it seems most Protestant evangelicals do want a president who will let private religious belief trump public health and equity concerns. They’re the only group that opposes Barack Obama’s stand requiring Catholic hospitals to cover contraception in their employee health plans. (Catholics are more likely than Americans as a whole to support Obama on this one.)

His conclusion: "non-wealthy whites" are the president's biggest stumbling block as he seeks re-election, and the Republicans are now using every red-meat "values-oriented" issue they can get their hands on to play to the animosities of this demographic.  There's a strong sense of alienation, powerlessness, and dispossession ("They've taken our country away!") among the values-voters base of the Republican party, and Republican leaders know how to play to the primal fears of the base.  Above all, they want to exploit a deep distrust of government itself that they have succeeded in seeding in their base for several decades now, keeping the rage at a boiling point.

And so bring on the change-the-conversation wedge issues once again in 2012 (no matter how much the nation as a whole suffers from the empty theater of these recurring cycles of rediscovered values and religious commitment).

(Postscript: the alliance of the Catholic bishops with the evangelical sectors of the religious right as the bishops try to nudge angry white Catholic voters in swing states to the Republican party has produced some ludicrous spectacles in American politics, but none quite so ludicrous, to my mind, as Rev. Mike Huckabee's declaration a day ago that "we're all Catholics now."  Huckabee, who's an ordained Southern Baptist minister, means, of course, that right-wing evangelicals want to latch onto the Obama's-attacking-Catholics rhetoric and use it for partisan political gain.

And so I wonder if Rev. Huckabee is going to change his tune on capital punishment now that he's discovered Catholic pro-life values.  In 1997, he offered the notorious suggestion that Jesus's death on the cross somehow proves that Jesus was pro-capital punishment.  

Now that Rev. Huckabee has just become a pro-life Catholic, can we expect him to begin boning up on John Paul II's encyclical Evangelium Vitae, which says that, even if we can theoretically imagine the moral feasibility of capital punishment as a last resort to protect society, the penal system of almost all societies is now sufficiently developed that cases requiring such protection of society via the death penalty are "very rare, if not practically non-existent."  This argument is now incorporated into the Catechism of the Catholic Church.)