When the religious right portrays civil rights legal victories as rogue judges taking the law into their own hands, like they're currently doing (again) in Iowa, they diminish the judiciary. And when they try to have those judges removed from office for simply doing their job - letting the chits fall as they may, so long as the rule of law is upheld - they diminish our democracy.
Sometimes it seems as though the religious right isn't terribly interested in American democracy. They denounced the executive branch, the congress, the judiciary. They help Republicans portray the president as a socialist (which in American cultural parlance means "communist," which really means "soviet" - i.e., he's a third columnist hell-bent on destroying our nation). They help Republicans promote hate speech and threats against American judges. And rather than disagreeing with the decisions or democracy reaches, either via the courts or the legislature, they insist on portraying the entire system, and all the individuals in it, as corrupt and unworthy.
The bottom line is that many religious right leaders don't seem terribly happy with America, either structurally or substantively. They don't like our system of government, and they certainly don't like a number of our people. They don't like science, which America excels at. They don't like the education of children. They don't like health care. Other than guns and their version of God, they don't seem to "like" much of anything at all.
And the question arises as to how a religious movement, or political party, can prosper when so much of its core is based solely on who they've chosen to hate.
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