Stealth Wingnuts

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.

We need to keep up with them. We need to keep getting better about identifying these people, about making their hidden agendas public, about exposing them for the scary wingnuts they really are.

The other thing we need to do is to learn from them. We embrace values and ideas that should appeal to the broadest possible range of Americans, and yet most of our agenda isn't even on the table. Wingnuts are making their extreme ideas sound reasonable, and we can't even make moderate policies appeal to moderates. We need to get better and smarter about this. We need to transform public opinion from the ground up. This is the great project for liberals--bigger than any election or court nominee or legislation. This is the one we need to win.

[That's all, folks]