One of my recurring nightmares is that I wake up one morning to find Virginia and the U.S. transformed into a right-wing theocracy.
If I go to a public library, I find my Internet access is severely restricted to information that a government committee has deemed morally and politically acceptable. A bourbon and water in my home at 6 p.m. is verboten. Dancing: forget it. Bible study classes are mandatory. If I falter in any way from the proscribed “norm,” cultural G-men and women (“G” for “Government” and “God”) will remove me to a self-help and brainwashing group.
In the past couple of years, I will admit, this nightmare has been on the wane. Political fortunes have eluded Virginia’s religious right with the election of moderates such as Mark Warner, Jim Webb, Tim Kaine and, of course, Barack Obama who represented the first time the Old Dominion has gone Democratic presidentially since the mid-1960s.
The state Republican Party, following disaster after disaster, is still trying to get its act together, meaning that the radical, social and religious wing of the party has been on the run.
But maybe not. The GOP, meeting in Richmond over the weekend, nominated hard right former attorney general Bob McDonnell for governor and state Sen. Ken Cuccinelli for attorney general. McDonnell is a grad from Regent University Law School, a creation of televangelist Pat Robertson who has for decades projected his own version of Christ-driven government. Cuccinelli is a pro-life fanatic, who, according to The Washington Post, is unwilling to follow fellow Republicans’ advice and tone down any divisive social conservatism that turns off voters.
While this is happening, controversy rages in Lynchburg, where Liberty University, the creation of another televangelist, the late Jerry Falwell, is all but banning a Democratic Club for students. Incredibly, Falwell’s son, the school’s leader, says that the Democratic Party has immoral ideals, so the club is being done away with.
Religious schools have their place and there are many fine ones, indeed. But Liberty seems to go way over the top in policing student behavior. According to Kevin Roose, a Brown student who spent an undercover semester at Liberty pretending to be an evangelical Christian, students must follow a 46-page “Code of Conduct” that forbids drinking, smoking, dancing and “hugging” that lasts for more than three seconds (do they all carry stopwatches?). In an interview with National Public Radio, Roose says that the courses he took were difficult and informative. But he balked at one exam question: “Was Noah’s Ark big enough to accommodate various species of dinosaurs?”
That reminds me of a story the Richmond Times-Dispatch did long ago, back when it actually did some reporting rather than just holding Phil Donahue-style encounter groups and calling it community service. At one class infiltrated by a TD reporter, the professor was ranting against rebellious Danish philosopher and theologian Soren Kierkegaard, but the professor had badly misspelled his name on the blackboard. At the time, founder Falwell was moving the school from some temporary mobile homes to real buildings. But the reporter noted that in admissions brochures, the pamphlets showed the multi-story Virginia National Bank building downtown but with the VNB logo airbrushed out. The idea seemed to be to pretend the building was part of the university.
From these humble beginnings, Liberty is now banning the Democratic Party.
There’s another school in the category. Patrick Henry College in Purcellville in far western Loudoun County has a conduct code very similar to Liberty’s. It was founded in 2000 by Michael P. Farris, a right wing constitutional lawyer who gained fame pushing home schooling.
Loudoun, some of you may remember, had some controversies about seriously restricting the Internet at the county’s public libraries because some little Pugsley feeling his teenaged hormones might pick up some porn. It was quite a tussle. And now we find that Patrick Henry grads have been interning in the library system.
That’s not all. Taking advantage of its proximity to Washington and its government agencies, Patrick Henry has courses tailored to get “Christian” minded men and women to find work at the CIA, DIA, DEA, FBI, NSA, Homeland Security and so forth. Terrorism is a threat and patriotism is fine, but how do you know that some religious fanatics might go over the line and start monitoring your email and telephone conversations for information they consider ethically subversive and “anti-Christian?”
This is not to say that such schools produce Bible thumping robotons. The lifeguard at my neighborhood pool is a Liberty student who is very conscientious watching the little kids and has a knack for getting along well with them. I worked once with a Liberty grad who was good at what he did and had a sense of humor. We joked about moving to Lynchburg and starting an alternative newspaper titled “Beelzebub.”
But it’s not the grads themselves that I really worry about. It is the bosses at these schools who wrap themselves in the American flag and then trash American principles of freedom of speech and political choice. All the while, they evoke the usual Virginia political thinkers such as Patrick Henry, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison whose views are actually the polar opposite of theirs.
Peter Galuszka