The religious right and many conservatives have a hidden agenda beneath their wanting to balance the budget and cut funding for many government programs and services. If they can cut funding for those programs and groups they don't like, then they will be able to reduce those groups' power and influence, and then the right wing can put their own programs in place to force society into their mold. I cannot believe that the religious right would just cut government spending and not replace it with their own programs. They are not stupid and the temptation to do it is too great. Nor can I believe that they want less government, per se, but they surely want less of the current government practices and allegiances. Their rhetoric belies that they want a politically level playing field.

If many government programs are eliminated many alternative social agendas will also be thwarted. Education will be limited to basics. Access to a wide range of information will be restricted. The male head of the family will regain social control. Children will be indoctrinated, women will be subordinated, free thought will cease. Racism and bigotry will be allowed to fester and used for political manipulation. Big business will be allowed greater power and the environment will suffer. The religious right wants control, emanating from the ministry to the family, over society. They believe in divinely ordained male dominance, that they own their children who have no rights and should have sole control over their lives, and that their way is the only moral way to live. To them, even the mainstream populace are infidels to be shunned and not respected in the political process. They care little about the freedoms granted in our Bill of Rights. Ultimately, they would gut the Constitution and ordain a theological dictatorship in America.

On the ultra-right fringe, survivalists appear to want to totally withdraw from society, setting up isolated, extended families. They dont want government services or taxes nor would it seem the responsibility and duty of citizenship. What kind of justice are they seeking and would they meet out? Why have they lost faith in the larger social contract? Is it overreaction to government interference required of a complex society or is there something deeper in their psyches? Their beliefs that government is their enemy, that communists abound and an apocalyptic viewpoint are not sane. But for this to have originated they must have been either badly hurt by society or indoctrinated by those who have in isolation from other viewpoints. Or else this is insanity.

That they view other ethnic and social groups that hold different beliefs as subhuman or evil they live out an insecurity or inferiority-superiority complex. Many on the ultra right believe that the Nazi Holocaust never happened, apparently because they cannot believe that their heros and their philosophy could be guilty of perpetrating such a horrible crime. This could be a smoke screen by some of them who would be eager to carry out such progroms if they were to achieve political power. They may be hiding their true beliefs, knowing it would be bad press. When will society realize that this belief system is a social disease that must be quarantined and a cure sought? A civil society cannot allow these beliefs to take hold. They are not part of a rational discourse, but the ravings of madmen.

The religious right is myopic. It apparently cannot see and understand the complexity of modern society. It does not see the unpredictible, interconnecting web of our lives. It wants a secure, simple life that is impossible if we are to maintain a scientific and technological progress. Too many of them are anxiously awaiting the Second Coming and Armageddon and not focusing on solutions to problems here and now. Thus they can only offer old, biblical solutions that have little relevance to the new problems we are facing.

The religious right, many other conservatives and some liberals have long worried about the cultural and moral relativity preached by left wing influenced academics. When the argument of the left reaches the point that it states that superstition is as good and equal a view as science, we should all have cause to worry. One can be proven and works predictably, the other cannot. How can they be equal? This argument has been taken to a reductio ad absurdum. However, we do live in a universe in which there are absolutes and relativity. There is validity to cultural relativism, up to a point, but when it negates concepts of right and wrong and any notion of knowledge it denies all values and ideals. The right wing wants only absolutes. The left, it would seem, only wants relativity. Yet this revival of faith cannot be proven. On the surface, it is superstition. Faith in science, among other western cultural values, has failed and the irrational is raising its hydra heads.