I have not been able to get my mind around the republican hissy fit about Obama’s speech to school children until I read this post:, especially this part:
We laugh at the wingnuts pulling their kids out of school, and we point out that Obama’s speech is perhaps the most bland, inoffensive, apolitical thing he’s ever written. But that’s exactly what the wingnuts are afraid of. They can just imagine their kids sitting in a classroom, watching this man speak—a Democrat, a liberal, a “socialist” (so they’ve been taught), a black “racist” (so they’ve been taught)—and two things might occur to them. 1) Their classmates do not share their fear and hatred and 2) Obama is saying the same sort of things that anyone would say. In fact, the sheer normalcy of the situation is hard to deny, and kids who are eager to fit in with their peers are extremely unlikely to start insisting that up is down and this normal situation is scary and fucked up. And that might be the first step towards becoming a more open-minded, decent human being. No wonder their parents are scared.
Wingnuts, particularly the Christian right, have always seen the appealing normality of the “secular” culture as its main threat.
The best weapon the conservative movement has is the fear of the “other” and a promise to protect people from the “other”. Onece people start to see that the scary brown people or scary gay people are really just like everyone else with the same hopes and dreams, the need for protection from the other goes away as does the conservative reason for being.