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Right-wing activists showing up to trash the nation’s capital and its churches...I never want to hear another conservative lecture on patriotism and “Real America” and “its Judeo-Christian heritage.”
I can’t get over this. My whole life, conservatives have talked down to me from some imaginary height of glorious, righteous American moral heritage.
I have heard time and again—from center-right GWB types—about the left’s irreverence for America and its symbols.
I spent years in grad school hearing about all the various wrong turns where progressives undid the real American experiment, where they perjured the Federalist Papers and etc
I picked up a PhD in Government by reading the canon of Western political thought forwards and backwards and at least twice over just so hack conservatives could tell me that Obama’s reverential talk of US democracy was just a show to hide an “un-American agenda.”
I have heard about how opposition to a brutal war in Iraq forfeited my claims to patriotism. I have heard my long years of academic slog and repaid student loans denigrated as proof of my un-American elitism.
Yes, I have been assured that religion is key to understanding America, to understanding conservatives. I have read my theology and loved my Niebuhr and lived my own faith but had it scorned plenty for pulling me away from conservative policies.
And now, some Very Proud, Very Brave Boys—the brightest flowers of conservative political roots—are vandalizing the capital’s churches and oh, captains of conservative high dudgeon, where are you now?
Oh, you local chamber of commerce presidents. You stodgy social studies teachers. You paunchy grey men with your self-certainty and your arm’s-length sense of patriotic duty. You never cared half as much as you thought about America.
