Your view: Avoid labels

During the presidential campaign, I have been seeing something that I have found to be very disturbing. A significant number of social liberals (that includes educated people) compare President Bush, Justice Scalia and Pat Robertson to Hitler and the Nazis. They also include all Christians who are fundamentalist (those who interpret the Bible literally) in this group.

Several years ago, someone started a scale that everyone in politics follows today without question. On the extreme right are neo-Nazis, militia groups and, oddly enough, people who take the Bible literally. This is why liberal Ted Kennedy called Bush's judicial nominees "right-wing turkeys."

Anyone who believes the biblical teachings that abortion, sodomy and the like are morally wrong, and that the Christian religion should not be censored in the public arena, are in the same category as Nazis, according to this scale.

On the extreme left are communists and socialists. Everything else falls somewhere between. Did it ever occur to anyone that this scale, which every politician and educator uses, is simply wrong? I would like to bring up some important points:

1. Fundamentalist Christians have a radically different philosophical basis than Nazis. Bible literalists believe that man was created by God approximately 6,000 years or so ago and that all of the races are descended from that one being. They deny Darwinian evolution. They believe innocent life should be defended according to the teachings of Christ.

Anyone who has seriously studied Nazism knows that the philosophical basis of Nazism is a perverted form of Darwinian evolution. They believed the Aryan was most evolved and that the Jew was the least evolved, and most "ape like," with the other races on a scale in between. They used "natural selection" to justify their murder of "inferior" races. Many fundamentalist Christians were carted off to concentration camps for their beliefs. Social liberals are against anyone who believes that evidence against evolution should be required to be taught in public schools and call them Nazis and right-wing extremists.

The fact is, the social liberals, who are supposed to be on the left, are the ones who really share much more closely the Nazi philosophical basis, not the Bible-believing Christians!

2. Communism is supposed to be on the left and Nazism is supposed to be on the right, yet both are forms of socialism (Nazi means National Socialist workers Party). In both forms, the state is worshiped over God. Nazi Germany was very socialistic. A worker in Hitler's Germany could not leave his bench and go get another job any time he wanted to, just as it was in communist Russia.

We need to stop and think about the scale that we use in politics today. It is not right at all. And it is being used to demonize Bible-believing Christians. The next time you hear Ted Kennedy, Hillary Clinton or any other leading social liberal refer to evangelical Christians as the "extreme right-wing," I want you to remember what I have written here today.

If people will remember correctly, it was a Christian America who defeated Nazism. In the 1940s, abortion was illegal, laws against homosexuality were on the books, the Ten Commandments could be posted anywhere, people could pray anywhere they wanted, whether it had to do with a school or not, and schools could require Bible reading if they wanted to, and often did.

Instead of America looking like Nazi Germany, the way the liberals would have us to believe will happen if we return to our godly heritage. We crushed Nazi Germany with the Lord's help and guidance. In the years to come, look for the social liberals to continue to distort history and call God's people right-wingers and Nazis. It is all based on a faulty scale that some secular humanistic liberal, political science "experts" probably came up with years ago, and for some reason, we just blindly accept it like good little sheep without asking any questions.

Let's stop playing along. Wake up and correct this error.

Scott Coatney