How the West was Won

In the post-election washup there has been a strong meme that the US election was handed to George W because of the votes of the religious right in Ohio.

typical of this whinging mindset is the article by Phillip Adams in Tuesday's Australian (Fire and Brimstone on the Road to Armageddon)

This has been addressed in The Values-Vote Myth, but there are plenty in the commentariat willing to take on the subject of religion and politics.

From the Courier-Mail's Paul Gray's Religious Revival:

Religion had never been dead and buried at all, but had simply become invisible to a particular class of Westerners who no longer wished to see it – or at least, to see it as anything more than the common fantasy of the feeble-minded.

Through Mark Shea, the work of Jonah Goldberg of the National Review:

But what offends them so much about religion is that it is a source of authority outside — and prior to — politics. What has offended the Left since Marx, and American liberalism since Dewey, is the notion that moral authority should be derived from anyplace other than the state or "the people" (conveniently defined as citizens who vote liberal). Voting on values not sanctified by secular priests is how they define "ignorance."

And its echoed in the views of Ron Suskind "Mr Reality Based Community" (as opposed to my "Unreality-based commuinity over here) that used to be avialbale on the NY Times website but can be had by a look at the ABC's Lateline transcript:

A lot of it is about these sweeping issues, in some ways, Maxine, and I maybe could finish with this, is that if you really step back you see what's being debated in America are the very Enlightenment era principles upon which this country and other Western democracies are founded.They're being debated in this election.The questions, you know, now so fierce will end in some outcome and then action.Certainly George Bush is a man of action. He will act with whatever mandate he has and it may be a mandate from faith-based community. Same for John Kerry. That is what's being discussed in America now.The bedrock upon which Western democracy, liberal democracies like yours, ourselves, in Europe, are based.

Reminds me of a poster I saw on Protest Warrior: