The Guardian asks experts what the new president will mean for America’s faithful. Michelle Goldberg warns of the radical religious right’s potential for violence:
Yet if the religious right is splintered and adrift, its most radical elements could become more dangerous than ever. During the election, some Republicans argued that, should Obama become president, we would see renewed terrorist attacks on the United States. They might have been right, though not in the sense they intended. The 1990s saw a deadly series of right wing domestic terrorist assaults––the Oklahoma City bombing, the bombing of the 1996 Olympics, the murders of several gynaecologists who performed abortions, and many bombings, arson and acid attacks on women’s health clinics. As the LA Times reported last year, such violence fell off precipitously during the Bush presidency, for a number of reasons.
[…]Shut out once again, it’s not unlikely that a few on the fringe will once again turn to violence. Indeed, the very economic angst that has rendered the religious right broadly irrelevant may help radicalise a tiny minority of alienated and humiliated people casting about for someone to blame. In the last few months, I’ve spoken to several people who work at health clinics that perform abortions, and they’ve told me they’re beefing up their security to prepare for that possibility.
For liberals, one of the terrifying things about the Bush years was watching people and ideas that had once occupied a weird reactionary underground suddenly move into the centre of American life. Now, those who believe that evolution is a sinister hoax, or that the second coming is imminent and should perhaps be helped along, or that gay people are a threat to the republic and a menace to children, or that legal abortion is a reprise of the Holocaust, will no longer be able to exercise much political power. The most zealous will find another way to be heard.
Read her full response here, and find other responses to this week’s question here.