Americans enjoy the widest exercise of religious liberties in the world because of our separation between church and state, which holds that government may not establish a religion, or favor any religion over any other. The radical religious right is not happy with this arrangement. They are fundamentalist Christians, and they want religion incorporated into government, as long as it is their religion.

Here is a small sampling of what is wrong with the philosophies and activities of the theocrats.

Political deception

The demagogues have duped a lot of good, well-meaning people. With their rhetoric of "traditional family values" they appeal a wide variety of people who don't see past the surface.

One example of this was the failed Contract with the American Family that the Republican party (overrun by religious zealots) adopted. It was laden with such proposals as using public tax moneys to subsidize private religious schools and allowing public (government-run) schools to conduct prayers. To justify these proposals, right-wing leaders claim that the founding fathers of the U.S. government intended the U.S. to be a Christian nation. They use quotations from the founding fathers to back up their claims, but many of the quotations have turned out to be either completely false or suspect and academically unverifiable. But accuracy doesn't matter because the sound bites have enough people convinced that a Christian nation would be a good thing; people who don't understand what's wrong with pushing one religion over others on captive school children.

The Christian Coalition claims to be a non-partisan religious group who is committed to ideas, not candidates. As a non-partisan religious group, they are entitled to a federal tax exemption. However, they are under investigation by the Federal Elections Commission for promoting specific candidates over others and acting more like a Political Action Committee (PAC) than an nonprofit religious group. They also distributed voter guides through local churches. The Internal Revenue Service (the taxing agency of the federal government) has determined that the voter guides were partisan political materials and is investigating churches who distributed the material and took part in other partisan political activity. Churches found in violation have had their federal tax exemption withdrawn.

Their social policies are exclusive rather than inclusive

The religious theocrats have aspirations for the make-up of society. They want everyone to be just like them. They are not tolerant of different religions, ideolgies, sexual orientations, and often races. Instead of valuing multiculturalism and diversity, they would like to promote their beliefs to the law of the land. Such legislation includes banning of school instruction discussing human sexuality, banning of materials in schools that suggest other cultures and heritages are as legitimate as those of white Europeans, criminalization of some consensual sexual acts, and legislation that states homosexuality is abnormal and therefore no protections can be afforded based on it. Everyone in America is free to believe what they want, but the right wing wants the law to enforce their beliefs on everyone else.

Censorship

They want to control what information you have access to based on their values! They do not want you to read "blasphemous" material. They do not want books explaining to young children that some families are headed by two mommies or two daddies. They have decided that you do not need to read these materials. They have a list of authors and titles they want removed from libraries because they don't think anyone should have access to the kinds of information contained in those works.