Deborah Lipp

Tom has been obsessively blogging about wingnuts in sheep’s clothing.

Dobsonite theocrat Ron Luce takes great pains to project an image of good old non-political evangelism in his teen ministry; he seems to be succeeding. The Catholic Church sponsors a media campaign designed to project an image of moderation for the anti-choice side. Welcome to the future. Christian authoritarians are becoming less like Fred Phelps and more like Ron Luce and Monika Rodman. The public face is friendly and non-threatening; the reality is Vision America and Operation Rescue.

I have long noticed this tendency of certain far-right Christians to put on a false front in order to seduce the masses. This is the essential tactic of “Jews for Jesus,” they say they’re Jewish rather than Christian in order to more easily convert Jews, not because it’s in some essential way the truth. They believe in Jesus, therefore they’re Christian, ba-da-bing.

My dear friend, who is a devout Mormon, points out that this is against the teachings of Christ. He tells his followers not to “hide [their] light under a bushel.” If you’re Christian, you’re supposed to say so.

This is one of Jesus’s better ideas. “I am what I am, if you don’t like it, bite me” is more or less my philosophy, and a damn sight better than painting a false front.

One of the favorite tactics of anti-Wiccan wingnuts (and they’re all anti-Wiccan if they bother to pay attention to Wicca at all) is to say that we’re really, secretly, Satan-worshipers. (And I will here say “Satan-worshiper” rather than “Satanist” because most “Satanists” do not, in fact, worship Satan. Which is confusing. But immaterial.) You see, we just say we’re nature-worshipers who believe in love, pleasure, and joy. Really, secretly, we worship Satan.

In his whackjob book Wicca: Satan’s Little White Lie, nutbag William Schnoebelen says that Wicca is really very nice until after you get your third degree initiation. Then they spring the bad news on you: Sorry, kids, you’re really worshiping Satan. Deal with it.

Other than the fact that this is false, stupid, and bizarre, I’ve always wondered why it would work. If someone had said that to me at my third degree, I’d have said “Bag this, mofo” and walked on out. (I’d have put my clothes on first.) If you’re attracting people interested in nature worship, and you’re training them in nature worship, why would they suddenly stop the nature worship, just because you said so?

So now I know. It’s because that’s what they do. The far right hide their “light” under a bushel. They pull out the big guns only once you’re deep in. And what they train you in is obedience to authority, so that if the rules change, you have to change. We can see this schizophrenic obedience in the talking points blogosphere, where the wingnuts dutifully change their tune in lockstep with the administration. It’s WMD! No it was never WMD! Let’s go to Mars! What Mars? We never said Mars! Iraq is connected to al Qaida. No it’s not. Yes it is. We never said it was. Yes it is. Not.

They have made themselves so crazy with all the cognitive dissonance that they find it impossible to look at people like the Wicca and believe we’re just exactly what we say we are, warts and all. It’s all projection with these people. They see their lies reflected back at themselves, and assume they’re looking at us.