When Glenn Beck vilifies “social justice” as a “perversion of the Gospel” and slanders churches and pastors as “Nazis” for pursuing it, he too is trespassing a bright line. The Fox News personality—who rants and weeps like the late Joseph McCarthy, a fellow alcoholic—urges his listeners to run away from any congregation where social justice is preached. He instructs them to denounce any pastor who even mentions the term. He even held up pictures of a swastika and a hammer and sickle to somehow demonstrate that “social justice” is a code phrase whose hidden meaning is identical to Nazism and communism.
Poor Beck evidently does not realize that his own Mormon church is deeply committed to the social justice teachings of the Gospels—or that the Catholics, Protestants, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists and adherents of other faiths in this country all share similar values on that question. By attacking them, in his megalomania and ignorance, he has ripped into an ethical tradition that unites our country.
The best historical parallel to these extremist trespasses can be found back in the 1950s, when McCarthy, the John Birch Society and other elements of the far right were riding high. What brought them down were their excesses: in McCarthy’s case, when he and his staff sought to implicate the United States Army in the communist conspiracy; and in the case of the Birchers, when they proclaimed that President Dwight Eisenhower and the Supreme Court, among other august persons and institutions, were wittingly aiding the communists.
Our current crop of crazies is approaching that point of no return—and if we are fortunate, they will keep going.
Joe Conason writes for The New York Observer
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