The ongoing panic and paranoia about the Fundamentalist Menace continues with Frank Schaeffer and liberal media outlets. On Thursday, he appeared on the Ed Schultz radio show with guest host and trial lawyer Mike Papantonio, who tried to freshen up the fright-wig dialogue by bringing up the assassination of Abe Lincoln: "The South got pulled into the Civil War over religious politics. They murdered Abraham Lincoln, the people that murdered Abraham Lincoln under that conspiracy. They were zealot nuts."
When they talked about Byron York's question to Michele Bachmann in the Iowa debate if she was "submissive" to her husband, Schaeffer compared conservative Christian Republicans such as Perry and Bachmann to "fundamentalist" Muslims and Hindus who murder in the name of their religion:
SCHAEFFER: It's worth stepping back for a minute because we see this all in terms of American politics, but let's look at the big strokes. Here we are in the 21st century and we are in a worldwide situation where if anything marks our present age besides economic problems, it's that the world that comes from science, knowledge, enlightenment, ideas is on a collision course with fundamentalist religion worldwide. There are fundamentalist Hindus murdering people because those people they find are not Hindu enough. There are fundamentalist Muslims murdering people all over the world, their own people more than anybody else, because they don't think they're fundamentalist enough ...
PAPANTONIO: And we think that can't happen here.
SCHAEFFER: No, and then here in America we have the rise of a reconstructionist, fundamentalist movement that's now being expressed from podiums by people running for president. They have literally taken over one of our parties because the Republican Party is now just simply an adjunct of the religious right ...
PAPANTONIO: No difference is there, there really is no difference, is there?
SCHAEFFER: There's no difference at all.
Some of this patter is similar to a previous Schaeffer interview with the same host back in June, where he proclaimed [seven minutes in] "You get this kind of anti-elitist, ornery pushback, where if the government says so, if scientists said so, then we have to have our own private facts. So that Sarah Palin kind of anti-elitism is really a response by a bunch of people who are supporting leaders who are not terribly educated. They are not well-read. They are against science. They are against learning. They are against secularism, and they're against this because they feel that the only way they are going to defend their values is going to have a kind of alternative reality."
Conservatives hate science and learning, and don't like to read. Schaeffer sounds like the arrogant mom telling her kid to heckle Rick Perry.
On that show, Papantonio replied, "It's the same thing you find in Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, wherever these fanatics are in charge." Schaeffer said "That's right."
