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Corrupt Government Title: The Revolution Eats Its Own - GAY MEN REPUBLICANS ARE A NATIONAL SECURITY RISK AND SHOULD BE REMOVED FROM THE PARTY PRONTO The Revolution Eats Its Own By Stirling Newberry | bio While many have written of the smell of new revolution in the air. The Foley-Hastert scandal shows an older revolution eating its children - that is, the "Gingrich revolution". What makes the scandal powerful is that it is really three scandals - the first is the sex predator scandal of Foley and pages, the second is the cover up scandal which includes Hastert and the FBI, the third is also a sex and cover up scandal, but it is the one which is the glue that holds the entire roving meltdown together. It about Gay Republicans. Specifically Gay Republicans. That's Gay Republicans. The Three Faces of Scandal Democratic politicians are already taking advantage of the Republican civil war in ads. And while the Republican governor's association is spit out the same "higher taxes and cop killers" rile up the base ads for Rep Bass, Lt. Gov Healey and a host of others - the polls show how the scandal is destroying Republican leadership's races - Reynolds is in deep trouble and sinking fast. The three scandals do a delicate dance, and each one keeps the others alive, each one strengthens the others, and each one is one that embarasses some people, while it arouses others into fury. If the scandal were any one of the the three, it would have been rushed off the pages, pun intended, ages ago. Imagine if Foley had simply resigned last year when confronted with evidence of wrong doing. On the other hand, replace female with male pages, and this becomes a non-scandal, because the Republican masses, rather than exploding with rage, would be swelling up with pride. "Sure, our boy gets it. See Republicanism is better than Viagra." Instead, Foley's behavior is both what the right wing used to tar Clinton with, and he embodies the terror of the reactionary guard, namely that it is gay pedophiles who infect heterosexual boys with homosexuality. That roving promiscuity that comes from a man with power who sponges weaker wills to his ends. Worse still, Foley's behavior effeminate. I'm going to spare people the wave of post-structuralist verbiage because most people couldn't sort out what is useful from what is nonsense, but let us reduce it down to fundamentals, in the world of deeply closeted men, there are those who penetrate, and those who are penetrated. In half a dozen "down low" type subcultures I am familiar with, men who penetrate other men or boys will look at you with a straight face and tell you "I'm not gay. I just have sex with men." To be homosexual in these subcultures is to be penetrated. Foley's obsession with penises - which tramps through dozens of chats and emails - clearly makes him, within the down low world of Republicans a "faggot". I use this offensive word because it their word, and it is the revulsion of the reactionary masses which is keeping this scandal going. They are the marginal viewers of news, and when they watch, ratings go through the roof. This is why the cable networks have marched to the right, this is why the New York Times appointed a "(Free Re)Public Editor", this is why Jayson Blair was "a scandal" while Judith Miller was a hero. Because what the reactionary masses want to watch makes a great deal of money. The base is slowly deserting old outlets for news, so catching the waves has been important. These people like to watch bombs flying, and hence the war in Iraq is kept viable by suppressing things like flag draped coffins, videos of attacks on US forces and coverage of the Battle of Baghdad. These people also love their morality plays. That is why Clinton's problems ran and reran - they simply could not get enough of watching a marriage of a liberal, in their terms, Democrat getting his just rewards for fooling around. Each leg of the scandal has its audience. Political junkies can't stop talking about the cover up by Reynolds and Hastert, and see it as an eruption of the emasculation of the Ethics committee, and the partisan use of executive power with an FBI cover up and participation in the Republican counter attack. The Republicans want to counter this scandal with two time honored lies of smear. The first is to claim that the Democrats knew, and should be investigated, and the second is that Democrats released the material to the press. Both of these claims are false, but the FBI itself has put forward the first by accusing CREW of having the emails in question during the spring. The second scandal is the angle which emphasizes the youth of the pages involved. They are "children". This wing of the scandal is why attempts to change the subject are impotent, because the scandal is part of one of the ur-terrors of middle America. This terror is a complex of the sexualization of children and teenagers, and the violence directed against children and teenagers in the society. The mythology here equates teenagers with pre-sexual children. The reasons for this equation are complex, but two of the most important are as follows. For parents to claim virtually unlimited power over their young adult offspring, they have to see teenagers as closer to children with regards to sexuality than to adults. The infantilization of teenagers with regard to sex is the rationalization that middle America's parents have to errect barriers to birth control and abortion. The second part is that the infantilization of children is a vain attempt to create a divide which forbids adults from having sex with children. One can see this in the prosecution of female teachers having sex with their underage male students. This never used to be a law enforcement issue. It is now. This leg of the scandal hits the undercurrent of desire that adults have for teenagers, who are both acquiring sexuality, and which our society dresses as fully sexual adults. This is exacerbated by the life cycle of much of non-college America, where people are supposed to find their lifetime partner in High School. So on one hand teenagers are forbidden from having sex, on the other hand, they must engage in enough sexual signaling to attract, and keep, a spouse. The Republicans are trying to respond to this leg of the scandal by saying that it was "naughty emails" and that Foley never had sex, with that boy. This lies about the point - use of the internet across state lines makes the age line 18, not DC's 16 for sex - and the chats and emails clearly show how Foley forced his attentions - welcome or unwelcome - on people who were below him in the hierarchy. That is, we have proof positive that Foley did with boys what Clinton was accused of doing with women. However, these two legs would not, alone, support the political and electoral meltdown of the Republican Party. The third leg spews up from the dark subterranean realities of the right wing, and it is the driving force both for the voracious appetite for revelation, and the relentless response. This leg goes to the sexual politics of the reactionary movement, the sexual politics of the intelligentsia, and how they play out in the world of public politics. Sexual Congress The reality of the reactionary base is that it has a particular way of life that it wants to defend. It doesn't actually live this life, but it feels that it is a normative way of being. The reactionary world has a contagion theory of homosexuality – gayness is something you are "infected" with, and by moral weakness are seduced into. In the view of the reactionary world – and we see this in modern day Africa where traditional societies are firm in their belief that there were no homosexuals in Africa until Europeans arrived – being gay is something that one catches from other people. This world also believes in conspiracies of manipulation.. In their view there is a vast homosexual conspiracy to infect youth with gay secular humanism. In short, the evangelical world sees a counter world – a Satanism of secularlism, that like themselves, infects people with exposure. One is not an evangelical Christian, in their view, until one is exposed to it. One is not, therefore, a member of "the enemy" until one has been exposed. In the Manichean war, the forces of light and the forces of darkness engage in a race to reach, and save or corrupt, the unconverted. This wing of the vote goes beyond the merely pro-life vote, and far beyond the anti-teenage sex, or even anti-sex, vote. It is a wing of American politics ardently wishing for theocracy, and willing to support any policy which can be put in theocratic terms. It is this core that is willing to accept the World War III paradigm of neo-conservatism. The reality is that the Republican Party promised these voters something hard to define in mainstream terms, but very easy to explain: the Republicans would defend them from "the other" as post-modern sociology puts it. In modern terms, there is a core of Christianist xenophobia, and the rise of Rove and Bush rests on the promise to protect. The first result of this is the fear of the loss of this core of voters, as Rick Perlstein, author of the forth coming book Nixonland: The Politics and Culture of the American Berserk, 1965-1972. puts it, a reversion to the natural state of the evangelical vote as generally disconnected from politics: The important part comes next. S/he doesn't say s/he'll be voting for Democrats now. S/he says; "I'll never vote again." This brings up a very important historical point for progressive activists to understand. For most of its history, until the late 1970s, the more evangelical one was, the more likely one was to be not involved in politics AT ALL--to see it as an inherently sinful realm. See, for instance, this letter I collected at an archive from 1970 to Maine Senator Margaret Chase: "I bumped into many women who had religious objections to voting. This area is strongly fundamentalist, including Holiness Churches, and the general idea is to let God look after things." "I'll never vote again": these are the most terrifying words Karl Rove can ever hear from a Christian--worse, even, than "I hate Bush." "I hate Bush" can be turned around, or at any rate will become moot after Bush leaves the scene. "I'll never vote again" means, basically, "I choose salvation over voting, because politics is an inherently sinful realm." It means: the groundwork of a generation--turning evangelical Christians into political activists--can disintegrate. And with it, the entire Republican coalition. It signifies the entropic reversion to the natural state of things: apolitical evangelicals. Rove always known, deep down, that it takes active work and maintenance to keep this entropy from happening. An observation given strong empirical grounding in the cratering of Rep. Reynolds – head of the RNCC and "long time powerhouse" in the words of the Buffalo News. However, merely losing shock troops and believers is not the end of the problem. There is more, and as a dead sitcom from the 1990's said "Well of course there is more, that's what more means." This Manichean world view as a consumer product – complete with mega-churches, radio stations, books, rock bands and code words – is not the indigenous product of the people who believe in it. One can see this by the split in the Republican Party over immigration. To the xenophobes, Mexicans are infectious threats, to the core of the Washington Party they are future pro-life social conservative votes, and the source of cheap labor to make profits for Republican agri-business and keep food costs down. No, the devastating second part of the problem is that there is a fundamental element of gayness in the means by which theocratic imperialism was turned from a marginal belief into a powerful political force. Let's go back to the 1990's. The packaging of anti-federal isolationism at that time produced a few members of Congress, the Brushfire rebellion in the West – and a great deal of trouble. Ruby Ridge, Waco and Oklahoma City were the products of the extreme end of the Christianist militia movement. The problems with utilizing this movement politically were numerous and obvious. Not the least of which was their suspicion of the outside world. It was this very same population that murmured darkly about George Herbert Walker Bush's "New World Order" and equated it with UN plots. Fast forward to 9/11 – it is 9/11 that turns the isolationist xenophobe, to the expansionist xenophobe. Perlstein's characterization of this as the politics of the berserk is particularly apt. Key to the transformation, was not only the equation of Saddam with Hitler, but the equation of the invasion of Iraq as part of a larger "clash of civilizations". This is a phrase that means two different things to two different groups of people. To the Christianist it is a pointer to the war of heterosexual god fearing America against homosexual degenerate secular humanism. To another group of people, it means something else. This other group of people are the plutocratic wing of the intelligentsia. The view from liberal, and liberal-esque commentators has been that the Republican Party is an alliance of "social conservatives" and "fiscal conservatives". Foley himself provided the counterpoint – he is a socially conservative gay Republican. He voted for the "Defense of Marriage Act", he voted for the Shiavo Law. He is a social conservative. He just happens to be promiscuous and gay and has a taste for boys and an obsession with their penises. The fundamental dynamic going on here is between a royal court system, which relies upon debauchery as part of its attraction, and the peasant supporters of that system, who agree on the royalist, top down and militaristically nationalist structure of society – that is of a society which is rigidly hierarchical and controlled by an elite which is given privileges that the lower section of society can only envy. The reactionary hinterland allow themselves doses of debauchery, but see it as a threat to their economic well being. They would be less moral if they could be, which is why they support their elites in success. There are two ways that the Foley-Hastert dance plays into this dynamic. The first is the obvious – many of the elites of that court system are gay. Many of them engage in the very behavior the allegations of which were used to justify what Joe Conason called The Hunting of the President. Namely the perpetual search for sex partners. This is causing an explosive fear among Gay Republican Washington. If the reactionary base demands a purge – the Rumpification of the Republican Revolution – then that purge will and must happen. One reason that Republicans are not falling on their swords as they have in so many past scandals –starting with the donors piloting a nuclear submarine – is that the fate of those who are cast out is not a cushy K-Street job, but ostracism. Compare this to the quiet resignation of a White House aid over Ambramoff recently, or the ending of the careers of DeLay, Ney or Cunningham. They literally could not get far away from the ballot box fast enough. Corruption is not a bar to continued employment, but homosexuality makes the bearer of infection radioactive. This is why conservatives such as Howard Kurtz, Andrew Sullivan and Christopher Caldwell are trying to put a firebreak between "gay" and "pedophile", or downplaying the scandal entire. They know that a purge of gay men from the upper ranks of Republicanism would do to the reactionary apparatus what AIDS did to the theatre world – erase half a generation of talent, well down into the farm team. This is supported by the Foley emails themselves – while many of the targets of his attentions were clearly unwilling, many were clearly quite eager to have an affair with an older man. The emails and chats are clear and persuasive evidence that the right wing has a large gay youth component. This connects with the contagion theory of homosexuality, and the "values" issue. Unelected gay staffers, as servants, are acceptable – more on this shortly – but elected gay officials mean that the reactionary base has participated in homosexuality. Since their theory is that there is a homosexual conspiracy that seduces unknowing heterosexuals into "the gay life style", they are tainted, and must purge the element which tainted them. The Republican around the filter noise machine is already trying to connect Democrats to the scandal, because in this way the noise machine can create the counter impression that Foley is a plant, a mole from the secular humanist gay agenda. In short, a programmed Cylon, who is not really responsible. In this conspiracy theory counter-narrative, it is really the Democrats who did the covering up, and are thus the real source of the infection. This infective narrative is easily countered by underlining the facts. This scandal is about gay Republicans and the gay Republican closet culture, which participates in depriving ordinary people of the same rights that they exercise with such, pardon the pun, gay abandon. The people protecting Foley were not, and are not, gay Democrats or gay liberals, but, like Fordham who used to be Foley's handler at parties, gay Republicans. Unfortunately for the Republicans, this leads to the second part of the matrix of gayness and the rise of reactionary politics, namely that many of the people who have packaged anti-gay hysteria as the means of justifying imperialist theocracy are, themselves, gay. More over, there is an important homo-erotic element to the narrative complex that they construct. The first part of this comes from the simple reality that gay men and women are the Jews of the reactionary movement – they are used, and useful at the top levels, even as they reviled by the base. There is a long standing realization in societies that people who are willing to forgo breeding are useful as they can devote themselves to their job or role. While not everyone who does so is homosexual, homosexuals, particularly in repressive cultures, are far more willing to be celibate or semi-celibate and devoted to their cause. This kind of sexualized asexuality has led to speculation about such figures as Condoleeza Rice and Harriet Miers, who give themselves over to the work of promoting George W. Bush. The fear that this reality creates is that it creates opportunities for the infection narrative. This is why Foley said he was abused by a priest, in order to connect the scandal with the "homosexual conspiracy" that the reactionary base is sure exists. Thus, people willing to sacrifice sex life for the cause are laudable, until such time as they becom suspected of being "carriers". The second part is that the receptive homosexual stance is an important part of the meme that Republicans are decisive doers, the Marlboro Man politics. It is a core part of, for example, David Brooks' appeals to red blooded, red zone red neckery. Republicans are the real men, Democrats are the sissies. In the down low paradigm, Republicans aren't gay, the people who they fuck are gay. Facing this sexualized narrative is important, because it joins together the various strands of self-hating liberals, who fall, with eager erotic tones, into the entire imperial project. Take Christopher Hitchens as a cardinal example. The actual sexuality is irrelevant, it is the sexual role in public discourse which is important. Brooks, Hitchens, Sullivan all told the same story to liberals in the middle: "bend over for he man Bush." Without this narrative, the Reactionaries cannot turn the all important corner of making legitimate the clash of civilizations narrative. Let me underline that – without the meme that neo-conservative militarism and expansionism are masculine, and that weaker receptive wills should give in to a need to obey, there is no invasion of Iraq, nor the dominance of Bush in politics. To summarize this point: the reason that the Foley scandal is burning through the Republican party with the reactionary base is not outrage at Hastert's cover up – of which there are few news items – but the cover up of the existence of Gay Republicans. Specifically, Gay Republicans having promiscuous sex with young boys and young men. The results flow in several directions. First it deactivates the reactionary base, which voted for Republicans to protect them from what they think of as a conspiracy to infect them with liberal, secular humanist homosexuality – these are tied up in one big ball to them. Second it reveals the truth that the elites of the right wing are heavily laced with both actual homosexuals, and with a narrative of homoerotic submission. This narrative connects to the final crowning irony, and that is the element of homo-erotic sadism that is essential to recruit people into the project of neo-conservative imperialism. Torture and Abu Ghraib, "my God is bigger than his God" and the entire structure of abusive militarism are, let us not get squeamish – homoerotic sadism for the reactionary masses. Having made homosexuality, itself, an infection and a danger, the reactionary system gives back the permission to engage in testosteronated abuse of acceptable targets. I don't need to reach for this, Clarence Thomas said as much in a court decision: homosexual rape is part of the punishment of prison. What the Foley-Hastert scandal does is expose the fundamental rift between Republican elites and the reactionary base. It is not a rift of "social conservatives" against "fiscal conservatives" – both groups believe in profligate borrow and squander policies to be paid back by a future that will be richer than the present – again, I don't need to reach for this, just read what the right wing economists say about global warming – basically, let the rich future pay for it. The rift then is not over objectives, nor over world view – both groups are borrow and squander right wing socialists. Both groups believe that the resources of the whole society should be available to protect "der volk" from threats. The difference between the two groups is not even over morality – both groups agree that wealth and success buy permission to engage in acts which are forbidden to ordinary people. The difference between the two is simpler, and outside of metropolitan discourse, because metropolitan discourse doesn't even recognize the question which is at stake. Who the devil is. The Number of the Beast To the Christianists, the enemy is a bringer of personal corruption in the form of lack of faith in God, homosexuality, questioning established boundaries, faithlessness. The enemy are hidden traitors. No program on television more explicitly and enthusiastically mythologizes the Christianist theocrat's view of the war on terrorism than the new Battlestar Galactica – along with 24, an unapologetic fictionalization of the idea that "they" infect "us" and that the solution is to make "them" like us. Bluntly speaking procreative heterosexual love is the road to salvation. To the neo-conservatives, the question is one of economic hegemony, not religious hegemony. While there is a large streak of a need for relgiocity among the intellectual right, to come out of the closet as unreconstructed believers in miracles and the importance of theocracy for social stability, as Robert Barro has devoted his career to at this point, a shockingly large number of the right wing elite understand theocracy in very cynical terms as a means to manipulate. However, the good versus evil world view is also in place here. The difference is that "evil" is seen in terms of threats to the plutocratic order, to the place of a system of ownership and control, rather than being seen in personal terms. These two world views are not in coalition, but intertwined – among economic elites there is a large streak of belief in divine providence for success. That is, one is ultra-rich because God intended it so. This belief – related to similar beliefs in the Calvinist strains of Protestantism – is, in itself, not new. However, by acting in conversation with the theology of conspiracy theory theocracy, it allowed the creation of a fusion of two stains which, left to themselves, would have difficulty coordinating. Let me state this bluntly – both the neo-conservative theocracy, and the evangelical theocracy believe that success is a sign of personal moral worth, and that lack of success comes from lack of personal moral worth. The both believe in the same economic strategy of bankrupting the power of the democratic state, in return for enriching a plutocratic and theocratic state. One might think that they would be in tight agreement, except for one generally insurmountable problem. For the plutocratic elite, membership in the elite is all forgiving – there are no boundaries or rules for the elites themselves. They are free of personal responsibility, and from the ordinary rules of family duty. For them, the evil in the world is that which threatens the corporate system of ownership, and those forces which would overthrow or dislodge their privilege are, ipso facto, bringers of chaos and what used to be termed "bolshevism". Their close cousins of the isolationist theocratic world do not believe that the elites are all permitted. Instead, they are willing to forgive their elites indulgence in desires that they are allowed to feel, but not act on for lack of money. Thus heterosexual sex, personal excess, mansions, fashion and so on, are permissible indulgences for the elite. However, desires which are forbidden because of intrinsic corruption, are not permitted. Cardinal among these is over homo-erotic expression. This is, to no small extent, a social imperative – in the world of military, resource extraction and long distance transport – anywhere where men leave the home and are among other men out of economic necessity – close bonds between men are necessary for the functioning of the team, but bonds of sexual attachment threaten both the hierarchy of men, and the bond with the home. The Brokeback marriage haunts the ordinary world of the theocratic heartland of America. This difference – not between various forms of "conservatism" – is the difference that separates Gary Bauer from Ken Mehlman. Pedofoleya The proper scandal – over how the Republicans run Washington – has remarkably little in the way of staying power. The scandal of middle America, over Foley the sex predator can be blunted with the claim of consensuality. The third scandal – of the divide between the theocratic base and their plutocratic elites over the existence of homosexuality – rests on the very xenophobia which has fueled the right wing. The right wing has been active and aggressive, because its base sees all enemies as carriers of a plague. Outsiders mean death. This connection allowed Bush to lead the base where ever he wanted, because he could argue that the war was about killing he carriers of the infection. So long as he could join the two together, the xenophobia fueled bigotry would both keep the support of the military, and create a powerful political shock wave to be directed at anyone who opposed him. The only problem is that one of the powerful forms of xenophobia is sexual xenophobia – whether from race or orientation. This is because it plays on self-hatred, guilt and subterranean desires. The worst racial bigots, are those that crave the flesh of the other races. The worst anti-homosexual bigots are, like Foley, themselves homosexual. The absurdity of this connection has provided fodder for one of the best and most popular satire sites on the web and countless observations. However, until now, there seemed to be no amount of cognitive dissonance that the theocratic base would engage in to ignore the gayness of their own narratives and the people who made the Republican revolution possible. This is because they believed that it was the liberal homosexual secular humanist conspiracy. While the around the filter noise machine is trying to portray Foley in this manner, the revelations – of, for example consensual sex with a former page – drive the question back to Foley. No small part of this is the subtext of the text messages. Consider that there are 66 pages. Foley found willing partners in every class. As one friend of mine put it "you do the math, the concentration of young gay men in the Republican elite has to be pretty high." What has not been commented on in the "mainstream" is inescapable as a conclusion in the Christanist world – there would have to be a lot of gay Republicans for Mark Foley to fish in the page pool. There would have to be a fairly aggressive safety net to protect him while he was doing it. Thus, the Christianists are faced with a reality – that reality is that the Republican Party is as infected with the modern and post-modern age as the Democratic Party is. That reality is that the Republican Party promised to protect the country from the stain of sexual corruption, and instead covered it up. This leg of the scandal is what makes it stand up right, which gives it the effect of dribbling out revelations. The ethics scandal could be buried, the sex predator scandal explained away. But the two together form the third leg. The Republicans cannot escape the scandal, because the way to change the subject in the news stream for those who are marginally attached to the news stream, is to talk about violence against children and pedophilia – for example, the Colorado shootings or the Amish shootings, or Jon Benet Ramsey – three media interruptions from the last few months. However, such interruptions, while the change the subject from Iraq, Abramoff or the economy – do not change the subject from Mark Foley. In fact, the more the attempt is made to interrupt, the more it underlines the nightmare of both Middle America, and of Christianist theocratic America. The Three Faces of Satan The ability of the Republicans to govern as a 70% party with only about 45% support has been one of the most persistent features of the last decade of American politics. They impeached a President with only that level of support, and held Congress. They were able to control the House, Senate, Presidency and Supreme Court with that level of support. They squandered trillions of dollars. They borrowed all of what they squandered. They pushed for, and got, a war of aggression. They dismantled the Bill of Rights. All the while the Democratic Party was in cowering fear of the xenophobic wing of the Republican Party, and its ability to pour molten outrage in to the public discourse. This very power shook the Republican Party earlier this year as the anti-immigration wave built. It was a force which the traditional part of the Republican machine could not deal with, because it leveraged the xenophobia of the base in a way which was against the interests which fund the Republican Party. Patrick Buchanan could smell this, and was all over it. So could people like Rep. Musgrave. However, by a series of calculated symbolic gestures, the establishment managed to fund their Reagan Wall, and then not have to actually build it. The Foley scandal pierces the fragile veil, and turns the Republican party inward on itself. It creates a civil war among the jihadists of the right wing – it creates a rift between the foot soldiers, and the elites who they had, to date, served. Core to this is the indespensibility of both homosexual men and women to the Republican core, and the indespensibility of homo-erotic narratives in selling their policies – which is ultimately incompatible and incommensurable with using anti-homosexual xenophobia as the motivating engine of their coalition. The Republican Party elites are eating their own. And that is precisely what the base cannot stand. This is because the repressed homoerotic desire mixed with xenophobia - the permission to both act out sadistic forbidden desires and the permission to attack others for having them - is what got their base up out of bed and to the poles. Not tax cuts, not Medicare D. The xenophobia itself. Now that the base has begun to see the Republican leadership as alien, the writing is on the wall. And this leads to the other devastating reality for the Republicans. In order to hold on to the evangelicals, the Republican party must attempt to create a conspiracy theory where the Democrats were involved in Foley. They must get out in front and issue defamatory attacks, in hopes of convincing at least some evangelicals that this plot, like all others, comes from the Jewish-liberal-Homosexual conspiracy - it is no accident that they blame it on Soros, a man who, in point of fact, has enormous distaste for this sort of politics. As middle America sees the reactionary base as alien, it begins to unravel the entire Republican coalition of ex-urban xenophobes and suburban fear voters. For a long time, the suburbanites saw in the exurbanites a people like themselves - perhaps more devout and bible thumping - but afraid of the same things, and aligned against the dangers of the cities - crime, for example. Over the last few years, as the anti-science, anti-progress component of the exurbanites becomes more visible, their have been more and more wedge issues against the far right wing. Stem cells and Darwin to take two. And now this.
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