THE AMERICAN TALIBAN

Two days after the September 11 cataclysm, the Rev. Jerry Falwell laid down
his own prophetic interpretation of the attacks, revealing more than he
might have liked about his low view of the state of American life.

Appearing on Pat Robertson's "700 Club" television show, Falwell blamed the
excesses of American liberalism as exemplified by the ACLU, NOW, and
pro-choice, feminist and gay groups in general, for the growing distance
between God and America. Falwell argued that humanists working to
"secularize America" had provoked a disenchanted deity into retracting some
sort of heavenly anti-terrorist shield, thus enabling "the enemies of
America to give us probably what we deserved."

During the broadcast, host Robertson, a 1992 and 1996 Republican
presidential candidate, nervously concurred with Falwell's analysis. But
recognizing a brewing public relations debacle that could eclipse Falwell's
1999 jeremiad against PBS's innocuous Teletubbies, Robertson and Falwell
quickly began issuing clarifications and apologies for bad timing -- if not
necessarily for the underlying belief.

Several weeks later, in early October, a similar hell-and-brimstone call
for religious redemption coursed over the airwaves. It announced, among
other things, that "no one can deny the great sins of polytheism and (its
goal) to share with God in His sole right of sovereignty and making of the
law." Unlike the Revs. Falwell and Robertson, a besieged Osama bin Laden
saw no public relations' advantage in retracting any part of his Oct. 6
video declaration of war against the West.

The shared reasoning of America's and Islam's best known purveyors of
fundamentalist thought was ironic, scary and hardly coincidental. The
message of fundamentalism; Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Hindu or
what-have-you, is remarkably unified. It is paternalistic, sternly
moralistic, anti-feminist and a reaction against the secularism and
commercialism that is a signature of the modern world. There could not have
been a better metaphor for the violently clashing views of the secular and
the fundamental worlds than the fiery fall of New York's World Trade Center
twin towers.

But the September 11 attacks also revealed a difficult conundrum for the
Bush administration, the most conservative presidency in history, now
forced to deal with the contradiction of fighting the fundamentalist
mullahs abroad while supporting the fundamentalist Moral Majority at home.
So far, however, it has proven to be a largely untroubled straddle. How is
one to justify the deep satisfaction in the de-veiling of Afghan women at
the same time as advocating that the abortion rights of American women
disappear behind the veil of federal edict?

So far, with liberal Democrats more or less asleep in exposing this blitz,
the White House has gotten away with it by playing a clever game of
political "good cop/bad cop." It is a routine that has elevated first lady
Laura Bush into the public face of secular humanism, at least in terms of
the good news of the liberation of Afghan women from Taliban repression and
support for the widows and orphans of the World Trade Center attack.

And while the president stays above the fray in his role as
commander-in-chief, the nitty-gritty of the American fundamentalist agenda
is being brought alive by the current attorney general, John Ashcroft.
Ashcroft, President Bush's "bad cop" and his administration's gift to the
Christian right. Military tribunals, racial profiling, violations of
attorney-client secrecy and prolonged unreported detention aside (although
the Bush administration's assault on civil liberties can hardly be
considered an aside), Ashcroft is the spearhead of the effort to use
America's state of constitutional distraction to further the issues of
greatest concern to homeland-based fundamentalists. Among these are the
attempt to roll back abortion rights, bar human embryo stem-cell research,
challenge Oregon's assisted-suicide law, attack California's
medical-marijuana initiative and other laws that are seen as furthering the
liberal, secularist agenda.

The most striking feature about the Bush administration's double-barreled
assault on civil liberties and lifestyle is the post-attack Republican
conversion to robust federalism. So much for the state's rights agenda that
has been a supposed matter of faith in the modern GOP. The Bush
administration has discovered the wonders of such once feverishly protested
"liberal" means to power, such as presidential decree and federal
intervention, which were used to great effect in areas such as civil rights
and environmental protection.

Now, those same tools against which Republicans have fulminated for years,
and against which Bush campaigned, are driving the administration's
attempts to win such "sanctity of life" issues as medical research on human
embryos. This issue is well understood by American fundamentalists as a
Trojan Horse maneuver, such as the ban on so-called partial-birth
abortions, through which to achieve the most deeply held fundamentalist
desire; an end to legal abortion as guaranteed American women by Roe vs. Wade.

The Bush administration should be congratulated on its nearly flawless
intervention in Afghanistan. But nothing less than loud protests will do in
the face of the embrace of the American fundamentalist agenda at home under
the protective cover of fighting fundamentalism abroad.

The final irony is that like the Taliban in Afghanistan, the Bush
administration is very much a minority government. Handsomely outvoted in
the popular vote and the barest possible winner in the electoral count,
Bush should be very careful about mistaking popular support for the war
against terrorism as a mandate to institute the agenda of Falwell,
Robertson and their allies, members of what can, without blinking, be
called "the American Taliban. "