Faith-based Fascism

If you assume that the goal of the new "Religious Liberty Task Force" recently announced by Attorney General Jeff Sessions will be to find new and better ways to discriminate against the LGBT community, you probably are underestimating the Attorney General and the administration he serves.  Rest assured that the Task Force also will investigate new ways to justify restricting women's reproductive rights, expand federal funding for religious schools, and aggressively erode the separation of Church and State.

Political authoritarians and religious hierarchies enjoy a natural partnership.  Both are essentially conservative, demanding that followers  accept the immutable rules and mythologies they hand down.  Neither can tolerate opposition based on anything so heterodox as rational thought, and both perceive those from outside their networks of believers as threats to be resisted, repressed, and demonized.  Working together, they keep their followers unquestioning and compliant.

Such partnerships may be as old as human civilization, but there are plenty of contemporary examples.  Conservative Islam, either Sunni or Shi'a, dominates the autocracies of the Middle East.  The Orthodox parties in Israel recently cooperated with Netanyahu's Likud to enact legal changes that make Muslims and Druse second-class citizens.  In India, Modi's Hindu nationalists stay in power by persecuting Muslims, and the generals of Myanmar have solidified Buddhist support by doing the same.

Of course, the relationship that most resembles Tr*mp's alliance of interests with Evangelicals is Putin's alliance of interests with the Russian Orthodox Church; and in Russia, too, the effort to strengthen church-state solidarity began by attacking homosexuals.  Perhaps "moral" considerations motivate religious conservatives to endorse and facilitate authoritarian political leadership, but the process is inevitably corrupt.

Yemen

Is the enemy of my enemy, etc. etc... ?  Apparently not.

We have heard Yemen described as a proxy war between Saudi Arabia and Iran, and I suppose that's accurate enough a description.  We've also heard it described as an outgrowth of the classic Middle Eastern conflict between Sunni and Shi'a Islam.  That, I'm pretty sure, it is not.

The Houthi are adherents of the Zaydi sect, which is an offshoot of Shi'a Islam, but not nearly orthodox enough to satisfy the clerics who hold power in Iran.  Iranian Muslims supporting the Houthi because they're, sort of, Shiite, would be kind of like the Roman Catholic Church supporting Seventh Day Adventists because they're sort of...  well, you get it.

Move over to Iraq, and you find Sunni clients of the USofA fighting the Sunni zealots of Daesh, aka all those other names and acronyms tirelessly repeated in the American press.  Why are Sunni fighting Sunni?  Not because IS (aka etc. etc.) is especially naughty what with the beheadings and whatnot.  No, it's all about the usual, just as it was from the time of the Cheney invasions or even the CIA's 1953 overthrow of the democratically elected Mosaddegh government in Iran and installation of the Shah.

It's about the oil.

That's why Saleh could be fighting the Houthi one minute and supporting them the next.  That's why the Egyptian military, an equal opportunity oppressor of Islamists no matter what branch of Islam they spring from, is out there trying to restore Hadi to power.  That's why Americans, even some in government, are having such a hard time figuring out how and why anybody is putatively allied with anybody out there around the Persian Gulf.

Don't be confused.  Just follow the money.  Follow the oil.