Too Right for America

Slog has been tracking Seattle megachurch pastor Ken Hutcherson for a while now, particularly in regards to his homophobia and links to far-right Latvian homophobic groups. It turns out that the Lynnwood (North Seattle) Convention Center will be hosting a meeting later this month of a group calling themselves Watchmen on the Walls, a group consisting of Hutcherson and like-minded Latvian homophobes whose aims are to fight the "homosexual movement" and bring the USA into "full compliance with God's laws." Slog commenters have been arguing about whether to take protest action at this gathering, or even to do something such as inform the FBI that a terrorist group is meeting in Lynnwood to discuss how to wage war in the US.

But reading about Hutcherson's alignment with these far-right Latvian groups reminded me of something else. I couldn't help but think of Dinesh D'Souza aligning with anti-American Islamists in their condemnation of the West as immoral and decadent; essentially blaming the cultural left for 9/11. Hutcherson is doing much the same thing; alarmed at what he sees as immoral homosexual culture in the US, he is aligning with far-right Eastern European groups in an attempt to effect change in the States. This in turn reminded me of a third example, the socially conservative American Episcopalians who have aligned with far-right African Anglicans in order to gang up on what they see as an immoral American left within the Episcopal Church.

Three cases that are different in the details, but have one thing in common. They all feature far-right American social conservatives condemning mainstream American culture as decadent, immoral and too left-leaning and subsequently forming alliances or sympathies with foreign groups that are essentially anti-American.