So here is Fox News Analyst Liz Trotta, analyzing her some Fox News and coming to the perfectly reasonable conclusion that Barack Obama is trying to kill God because the Affordable Care Act mandates that contraception be covered without a co-pay. Nothing really new here, but we were amused by Trotta's insistence that the contraception mandate is driven by "an eagerness to placate perpetually outraged feminists" and the administration's "zeal to stamp out adherence to faith and conscience." You know, by passing rules that require some religious institutions to provide benefits that many have already been providing for years. Trotta also warns that America is threatened by "extraordinary creeping paganism," which we suppose is kind of like Creeping Sharia only with more 18-inch replicas of Stonehenge.
There's the usual arglebargle about how requiring coverage for slut pills is a radical intrusion on employers' sacred right to dictate workers' moral choices, a “brazen violation of the separation between church and state,” and evidence of Barack Obama's "secular creed," but then she ups the ante and suggests that
"such disregard is deeply rooted in the extraordinary creeping paganism that makes a mockery of the so-called separation between church and state, not to mention the President’s very oath of office."
The only place where "paganism" seems to be making real gains, of course, is in wingnut rhetoric. In the good old days, it was "secular humanism" that was supposed to be taking over, but in recent years, these guys seem to be warning more and more about "paganism" -- by which they seem to mean almost anything they have a faith-based excuse for disliking, like The Gheys, regardless of whether those gheys are Druids. Fundies have always worried about anything they think might be occult or witchcraft -- consider the freakouts over Harry Potter -- but now the fear of a pagan planet seems to be increasingly seeping into garden-variety wingnut discourse like Trotta's. Back in January, Larry Pratt, the aptly named head of Gun Owners for America, even managed to label gun control proposals as "pagan" since laws restricting guns
"view inanimate objects as possessing their own will. That’s animism, that’s a return to the most pagan of paganism and look at what nutty political views it ends up supporting."
It's hard to get a sense of just how widespread this nutty "the pagans are coming" meme is, but it's definitely out there; consider also the freakouts over a handful of hecklers who shouted "Hail Satan!" at supporters of Texas's proposed abortion restrictions. That bit of trolling has become "proof" that opposition to the bill is a plot by organized Satanism.
So keep your eyes open, Wonkers; shouldn't be too long until some bright state legislator decides we need to protect children by passing some anti-paganism laws. We aren't saying you should panic, but it's never too soon to start hoarding megaliths.
[ Media Matters / RawStory ]
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Put the Yule back in Yuletide!