Preachers of Hate.

There is a battle raging right now for the soul of this country. Will we be a democracy that's dedicated to liberty, equality, individual rights, and the separation of church and state, or are we headed down the icy slope toward theocracy?

This question demands asking in the wake of the October murders of Matthew Shepard and Dr. Barnett Slepian and the ongoing violence against homosexuals and abortion providers.

More than 500 people attended a rally here in Madison, Wisconsin, to protest the murder of Shepard, the young man in Wyoming who was pistol-whipped, hung up on a fence for hours, and left to die because he was gay. One after another, people took the megaphone to decry this horrible act of violence, to recount their own experiences of being harassed, or to tell of a friend or loved one who had been beaten by bigots. Speaker after speaker understood that there are powerful religious and political forces in this country that are dead-set on depriving gays, lesbians, bisexuals, and transgendered people of their inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Conservative evangelicals and politicians have fomented this violence. Pat Robertson, James Dobson, Lou Sheldon, Gary Bauer, Pat Buchanan, Trent Lott, John Ashford, and Jesse Helms--they are the ones who incubated the murderers of Matthew Shepard.

And even after this terrible crime, there were still those who preached from the prayerbook of hate. "It should be remembered that the new saint of the gay movement was a twenty-two-year-old man engaged in sexual perversion who was apparently cruising a bar for the purpose of finding a partner or two to commit vile acts which also violate the laws of nature's god," said the Reverend Ralph Ovadal of Wisconsin Christians United.

This is the epitome of theological callousness. And that same kind of callousness greeted the assassination of Dr. Slepian.

It was Friday night, and Dr. Barnett Slepian had just returned from synagogue, where he attended a yahrzeit service commemorating the death of his father, The New York Times reported. While standing in the kitchen of his home, while enjoying domestic tranquility with his wife and one of his sons, Dr. Barnett Slepian was shot dead.

Dr. Slepian's murder bore all the markings of a political crime, carried out by a fanatical adherent to the "pro-life" cause who refuses to obey the law of the land, refuses to respect women's constitutional right to privacy, refuses to respect the sanctity of the patient-doctor relationship, refuses to respect doctors' rights even to live, and insists on imposing his religious beliefs on the rest of us.

The rhetoric of the anti-abortion forces justifies this kind of violence. When they go around saying that abortion is murder, and that doctors are baby killers, and when they shove pictures of the bloodied fetuses in people's faces to show how cruel and inhumane the doctors are, it is not surprising that some of their more belligerent members will take it upon themselves to kill the "baby killers."

Some members of the "pro-life" movement actually applauded the murder of Dr. Slepian. The Reverend Donald Spitz, founder of Pro-Life Virginia, called the killer of Dr. Slepian "a hero." Spitz said, "We as Christians have a responsibility to protect the innocent from being murdered. Whoever shot the shot protected the children."

Spitz was not the only one articulating this ugliness. Slepian "got what was coming to him," one person put it in an e-mail message to The Progressive.

Religious fundamentalism is morphing into religious vigilantism before our very eyes.

These fanatics want to kill off enough doctors and scare away many more so that the reproductive health care needs of women can no longer be met. These fanatics want to make life unbearable for gays and lesbians.

"Militant anti-abortion activists," warns Clarkson, "are increasingly making common cause with neo-Nazi groups on matters ranging from abortion and homosexuality to the `New World Order.'"

The scale of the violence is staggering. "Over the past two decades, there have been seven murders, at least sixteen attempted murders, more than 200 bombings and arsons, 750 death threats and bomb threats, and hundreds of acts of vandalism, intimidation, stalking, and burglary of abortion providers across the country," writes Frederick Clarkson in a recent commentary. Clarkson is the author of a book called Eternal Hostility: The Struggle Between Theocracy and Democracy (Common Courage Press, 1997).

The most recent threat occurred on October 30, when "five abortion clinics in three states received letters claiming to contain deadly anthrax, forcing the evacuation of an Indianapolis clinic and sending at least twenty-nine people to hospitals" for precautionary purposes, the A.P. reported.

In 1997, there was a "67 percent increase in bomb threats and bombings to the gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered community," reports the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force. "There were 2,445 reported episodes of anti-gay harassment and violence in fourteen U.S. cities."

This is terrorism. It is akin to the lynchings and cross-burnings during and after Reconstruction. And it has no place in our democracy.

On our side, though, we must be careful not to label all of our opponents as bigots or fanatics or neo-Nazis. It is just not that simple.

Most people who are anti-abortion did not condone the murder of Dr. Slepian. And most people who oppose homosexuality did not condone the murder of Matthew Shepard.

If we fail to distinguish the followers from the fanatics, we're not going to convince anybody. We need to make our case on the merits. And the merits are unassailable.

Gays and lesbians have as much right as any other Americans to walk around freely, without fear of discrimination, persecution, or death. The Fourth Amendment does not guarantee "the right of heterosexuals to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects"; it guarantees that right to all the people. The equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment does not apply only to heterosexuals; it applies to "any person" in "any state."

Many good, moral people are troubled by abortion. But what anti-abortion activists don't understand is that women will still be getting abortions even if they are illegal. They did before Roe v. Wade, and they will do so again if Roe is ever overturned. The only differences will be whether they get safe, clean abortions, or whether they get dangerous, dirty ones. It should not be up to the state to tell women, who may be risking their lives, whether they can have an abortion or not. The demand that women be forced to carry to term, no matter what, is a gross infringement on their liberty and privacy rights.

But we can argue the merits until the shingles fall off the roof, and we won't change everybody's mind. That's fine. That's democracy. But the opposite of democracy is to wage terrorist attacks after losing an argument. And that, today, is what some on the far right are doing.

As the century closes, gays and lesbians, along with doctors who perform abortions, are on the front lines of the freedom struggle. Matthew Shepard and Dr. Barnett Slepian are martyrs in this struggle, just as Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner were when they were gunned down in Mississippi, just as the four black girls--Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robertson, Addie Mae Collins, and Denise McNair--were when they were killed in the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham.

But for this freedom struggle to triumph, all of us must organize peacefully against the forces on the right who want to turn this democracy of ours into a theocracy of theirs.

What Budget Deal?

Many Republicans keep yelping about the budget deal, but how come more progressives aren't squawking, too? After all, the Pentagon budget has gone up $9 billion to a whopping $280 billion--an increase over inflation that puts the total near Cold War levels nine years after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The United States is still spending about $30 billion a year to wage nuclear war. The CIA's allowance is at record heights. And Congress just added $90 million so Colombia can buy six helicopters to kill more of its own citizens.

Then there's the $18 billion to the International Monetary Fund (IMF). The Democrats, much more than the Republicans, pushed this one through, even though the IMF acts as an extortion agent for Western banks and corporations at the same time that it sends the majority of people in Third World countries deeper into poverty.

And what about civil liberties? Congress approved roving wiretaps so the FBI can listen in on all the phones that any suspect uses (Janet Reno was behind this one.)

On the environment, the news is equally bad. There were "numerous, monstrous anti-environmental riders in that bill," said a coalition of leading environmental groups. The bill doubled the amount of timber that can be cut on three national forests in California, denied funding for the removal of dams on the Elwha River in Washington, which will hamper restoration of endangered salmon, and delayed regulations on mining.

Newt Gingrich bragged about preventing the District of Columbia from distributing clean needles to drug addicts.

Now that's something to crow about: causing mare people to contract the AIDS virus.

Trent Lott, for his part, pushed through the "auto salvage bill," which should go by the name of the Lott Lemon Law because it allows car dealers to rebuild and sell wrecked cars without telling consumers.

Sure, there were a few good things in the budget, like money for more teachers, some more subsidized housing, and heating subsidies.

But these are pittances. What good are more teachers when there's no place for them to teach? Many of our schools are crumbling. The walls are cracking, the ceilings are falling down, classes are being held out in the halls.

The General Accounting Office says we need at least $112 billion just to refurbish existing schools, to say nothing of building new ones. Yet Congress didn't allocate a single dime for school repairs.

All in all, this was a budget that could easily have passed in the days of Ronald Reagan and George Bush.

Where is the peace dividend? Where is the prosperity dividend?

For two decades, while the budget deficit went sky high, we were told that we couldn't afford to invest in education, or cover health care for forty-three million Americans, or provide food for the twenty million Americans who have to go to soup kitchens, or help the 20 percent of American children who grow up in poverty.

But now we can--and we're doing next to nothing.