Thank you, Barbara Ehrenreich (LiveJournal feed: barbaras_blog), for breaking the only news story I've heard this election cycle to scare me more than John McCain's saber-rattling about Iraq: "Hillary's Nasty Pastorate," 3/19/08. See also Kathryn Joyce and Jeff Sharlet, "Hillary's Prayer: Hillary Clinton's Religion and Politics," Mother Jones, 9/1/07.

We're all scandalized, supposedly, by the fact that Barack Obama might not have stormed out of church in a huff when he heard the US accused of state sponsorship of terrorists (when, in fact, that is exactly what the US was doing, in Nicaragua, at the time). I have a better idea than that. How about we all go way beyond scandalized, and into knee-knocking terrified, when we find out that for 15 years now, Hillary Clinton's regular church services have been with a Dominionist group called The Fellowship Foundation, aka "the Family," aka "the Fellowship," a group of very wealthy and powerful fundamentalists whose goal is nothing less than the overthrow of the US constitution and its replacement with the King James Bible, lead by Doug Coe? According to Ehrenreich, for the last 7 years, since her election to the US Senate, she's been a member of the group's inner circle.

(See also Jeff Sharlet, "Jesus Plus Nothing: Undercover among America's secret theocrats," Harper's Magazine, March 2003, and the book that apparently broke the story on the Clinton/Dominionism connection, Jeff Sharlet, The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power, Harper Press: 2008.)

Nor is she shy about it; just overlooked by people who don't realize what it means when she praises guys like Doug Coe, or when she selectively quotes the Scriptures she does when she uses her alleged Christian faith as proof that she's more electable than Barack Obama or John McCain. People don't realize, heck I didn't even realize, that she isn't pandering, or kidding, or being any kind of ecumenical (let alone legitimately spiritual) Christian; she's talking very specifically about the explicitly Satanic counterfeit Christianity I wrote about at length in my 2004 series, "Christians in the Hand of an Angry God" (parts 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5) -- the so-called "Christianity" that elevates Republican Party expediency and the economics of Ayn Rand above the explicit teachings of Jesus Christ.

Her oft-stated admiration for Doug Coe goes a long way towards explaining what a so-called feminist was doing championing a bill that would allow anti-abortion cops to refuse to guard abortion clinics, allow right wing fundamentalist pharmacists to refuse to fill prescriptions for birth control pills. But then, in all her time in politics, I've never even heard of Hillary Clinton advocating for more rights, or better defense of the rights, of any American woman except for one. Hillary Clinton's "feminism," so far as it applies to American women, starts and stops at her stalwart, life-long defense of her god-given inalienable right to be President. Other women? She's always been too busy helping appoint Satanic Ritual Abuse prosecutors like Janet Reno to high positions of power, helping Wal-Mart defend itself against lawsuits by women who've proven that Wal-Mart is prejudiced against female applicants for managers' jobs, and holding weekly prayer meetings with anti-gay colleagues like Rick "man-on-dog" Santorum to even listen to what other women need or want, let alone care.

It's been suggested by some that Hillary Clinton's mentorship under Doug Coe and others from the religious right, like her years spent on the Wal-Mart board of directors, is not principled, but opportunistic. The best-case-scenario, one that some are arguing for without giving any evidence, without showing any reason to think they might be right, is that Hillary Clinton has spent her life sucking up to, and pretending to go along with, wealthy right-wingers in hopes of suckering them into complacency, that she's just biding her time until the glorious day when she can assume her rightful place as Ruler of the Free World, and then, oh, then, she'll show them (and us) her true liberal feminist stripes. 30 years ago, maybe that even was what she was thinking. But even if it's true, she's spent that whole 30 years marinating in the right-wing Republican and Christian Dominionist world-view. When she thinks about problems now, she thinks about them using their framework, describes them using their terms, evaluates them based on principles she's absorbed from them. One of the most important points Sara Robinson made in her excellent three-part series on the history of how conservatives out-maneuvered progressives and liberals to rule the country (Campaign for America's Future, "Learning from the Cultural Conservatives", parts 1, 2, and 3) is that from that movement's very beginning, they've known something very important: you don't have to tell a politician how to vote, if you control how they think.