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Edited on Mon Jul-30-07 11:24 AM by Pamela Troy
Speaking generally, I observe that while liberals delight in deceit, conservatives outgrew that amusement at age 6 and we've moved on to more productive activities.—(Andrew Schlafly, on Conservapedia’s main page discussion page.)
Back in 1996, Robert Boston’s book on Pat Robertson described the then recent upheavals at Pat Robertson’s Regent University surrounding the dismissal of its Law School Dean, Christian Reconstructionist Herbert W. Titus, and Regent Law School’s struggle for accreditation:
“Regent, then CBN University, was initially denied accreditation in 1987. The ABA cited several areas of concern, including fears that the school’s requirement that all faculty members sign a statement of faith may jeopardize academic freedom. The state of Virginia later agreed to allow law school graduates to take the bar exam in that state while the question of the institution’s accreditation status played out. Now, with provisional accreditation, Regent grads may take the bar." (Robert Boston, The Most Dangerous Man in America?: Pat Robertson and the Rise of the Christian Coalition 1996, Prometheus Press, Page 233)
Today, as an observes, an overhaul of Regent’s curriculum and admissions standards has improved the bar passage rate of Regent alumni from 60% to 67% (It ranked, according to Boston’s Book, dead last in passage of the Virginia Bar in 1996). Former Attorney General John Ashcroft is now co-teaching one of its courses. And the recent publicity resulting from the district attorney firing scandal is likely to serve less as a deterrent than an advertisement to parents and students who embrace Pat Robertson’s vision of Christian “regents” reshaping American: “One day, if we read the Bible correctly, we will rule and reign along with our sovereign, Jesus Christ,” Robertson had said, while describing Regent’s mission.
That goal for Regent Law School is closer than it was eleven years ago. In spite of being a Tier 4 law school – the lowest ranking possible – Regent can boast of alumni like 1999 graduate Monica Goodling. In spite of her lack of experience and credentials, Goodling was put in the position of assessing the performance of experienced and seasoned district attorneys where, as Jonathan Turley commented she acted as, “a political Kommissar within the administration.”
Goodling was only one of some 150 Regent graduates who were hired to work for the Federal Government. The quotes the Regent law newsletter’s description of how a 2004 graduate’s interview went at the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division in 2003:
Asked to name the Supreme Court decision from the past 20 years with which he most disagreed, he cited Lawrence v. Texas, the ruling striking down a law against sodomy because it violated gay people's civil rights.
"When one of the interviewers agreed and said that decision in Lawrence was 'maddening,' I knew I correctly answered the question," wrote the Regent graduate . The administration hired him for the Civil Rights Division's housing section -- the only employment offer he received after graduation, he said.
There is no way of predicting whether or not Conservapedia, at the moment the butt of glib and dismissive jokes, will follow the pattern of Regent University and become a hatchery for political commissars within a future conservative administration. It may, as Regent did, go through a few upheavals in which its central message is not so much changed as repackaged enough to provide its own future Justice Department hires. It may, on the other hand, be just another one of those Internet nine-day wonders, surfacing briefly and then vanishing.
What is certain is what Conservapedia reveals about a significant right-wing educational movement and the attitudes it attempts to instill in its students. What Andrew Schlafly and others like him are striving for is a generation of young people trained to regard Americans who disagree with them – liberals –as untrustworthy by definition. They are teaching students, not to objectively listen to and assess arguments, but to reflexively attack. Whether or not Conservapedia survives and succeeds, this attempt to stamp out the American concept of the “loyal opposition” will continue. A liberal American is not, the far right is telling its children, a fellow American who disagrees. A liberal American is a liar, an enemy to be ignored, insulted, and ultimately driven from public service.
It may seem far-fetched that this kind of simple-minded prejudice could become powerful enough in our diverse, open, and media saturated society to affect policy. The recent scandal surrounding the ideologically driven firing of eight district attorneys and the role Goodling played in it indicates that to some extent, it already has. A big part of schooling students in this bigotry involves carefully insulating them, educating them at home rather than allowing any “contaminating” contact with students or teachers who might be liberals, sending them to evangelical colleges, pointing them to online “educational” resources like Conservapedia where they will not be exposed to information that challenges Religious Right doctrine. The result can very well be a young adult who, after being starved for years of any information or experience outside the far right’s carefully controlled environment, truly believes that liberals as a group not only lie, but “delight in deceit.”
What kind of policies would someone who embraces such an attitude towards liberals promote? The efforts by not just Conservapedia, but other right-wingers, to rehabilitate the legacies of Joseph McCarthy and Augusto Pinochet provide some indication. Embrace McCarthy as a hero and McCarthyism as a valid tactic, and you embrace the blacklisting of Americans for their political beliefs, the politically motivated purging of teachers from public schools, the removal of “subversive books” from libraries.
Excuse the murders and tortures committed by the Pinochet regime on the grounds that a broadly defined “Marxism” equates to a plot to murder and torture, and you come dangerously close to criminalizing leftist or even liberal political beliefs. Many of the people who died during and after Pinochet’s coup were “guilty” of nothing more than acting on rights that liberal and leftist Americans take for granted. They were voicing support for a leftist politician, passing out leaflets, criticizing their government. Playing down their torture and murder as if such repression were a minor issue is –or should be – absolutely antithetical to anyone who embraces the ideals embodied in our Bill of Rights.
Liberals and moderates who attempt to laugh all of this off as beneath their notice, do so at their own peril. Current attempts to rehabilitate the likes of McCarthy and Pinochet are not taking place in a vacuum. We are hearing at the same time a steadily rising drumbeat from the right, in which liberalism is equated with communism, dissent is equated with disloyalty. The conflation of dissent with treason is no longer merely the province of the powerless fringes of the American right. It was not an anonymous blogger who sent a recent letter to Senator Hillary Clinton accusing her of “reinforc(ing) enemy propaganda” merely by asking questions about America’s withdrawal from Iraq. It was Pentagon official Eric S. Edelman.
So what is the proper response? The answer is not to engage in our own version of McCarthyism, to censor Conservapedia and silence its editors. It also doesn’t help much to vandalize the site with insults and obscenities. Nor is it sufficient to merely laugh at Conservapedia. The expression “silence is complicity” can be applied not just to silence in the fact of outrageous acts, but to silence in the face of outrageous lies.
We need to break that silence, show we care enough about truth to defend it. Consevapedia hides information, obfuscates, and misleads its students because it knows that, given the unvarnished facts, those students may not draw the conclusions the far right desires. The young victims of Conservapedia’s deceptive agenda need to read something from the other side beyond mockery and insults. They need to be simply and politely told the truth, with cites, notes, and references backing that truth up. Nobody can force people who think Conservapedia is a valid source of information to read the facts. But we abrogate our responsibility if we don’t insist on setting the facts straight when we encounter attempts to pervert them.
If Conservapedia itself were to disappear today, the lies it is nurturing, lies that predate its founding, would continue to be spread on the Internet, repeated on right wing websites as unassailable fact, and ultimately bleeding into mainstream political discussion offline. Liberals, moderates, and conservatives who care about reality must become both aggressive enough and well-informed enough to challenge these assertions wherever they appear. No matter how insignificant, how amusing fibs like “Hitler was a leftist” or “Lenin coined the term ‘concentration camp’” may seem, they will become dangerous if they are accepted as fact by enough people.
The truth about history, about science, about the very definition of “truth” always matters. It’s as simple and as important as that.
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