You win a prize if you can read this whole blog. Dinner at my house.

With each passing day of summer, as I have more time to study what's happening in our country, I become more alarmed at the right-wing take-over of the government.

With the current make up of the districts in the house of representatives, it is estimated that the incumbents cannot lose in 380 of the 435 districts. Don't expect much to change in the fall elections, or ever.

Some years ago the Southern Baptist Convention was a happy little gathering of religious leaders from among the 14 million or so Southern Baptists spread across the country. They were all conservative, but the most conservative pastors of some of the larger most independent churches got together with the intention of shaping the convention so that it would serve their interests at the expense of the interests of all others.

In those days, no one knew who was going to be the next president of the convention. Representatives of the churches would caucus at the convention and nominate members who seemed worthy and after a few ballots, someone would get elected. This person shouldered the responsibility of nominating the "committee on committees." This committee then nominated everyone else. Although no one realized it, this was a critical flaw in the design of the political system of Baptists.

A few conservative leaders devised a plan to reshape the convention in their image. Their goal: elect the president every year for ten years. Since there had been practically no campaigning in the past, the first year was easy. They simply got people organized and recruited more delegates (messengers) than normal to all come and vote in lock step and they won. No one really noticed much.

Another flaw in the convention structure. Each participating church in the convention has the same number of votes: 10. If you have 7000 members or 17 members in your congregation, if you give 700,000 dollars to the convention or 7 dollars to the convention, you can send 10 messengers to the convention. The ultra conservatives, hereafter referred to as the fundies for their self described "fundamentalist" approach to the interpretation of scripture (you might also call this simply an ignorant approach to interpreting scripture), liked winning and got more organized the next year. The big fundie churches couldn't do it by themselves because they only got 10 votes. They began a huge "fear" campaign sending out newsletters and speakers to little tiny churches all around the area where the next convention would be. They warned of dotrinal hereseies at the seminaries and immoral behavior and beliefs of denominational employees. They started taking names of who was in Chapel and secretly tape recording seminary classes, searching for a doctrinal misstep. Though their claims were bogus along the lines of FOX "news" reporting, they did make ignorant people in small congregations afraid that the world was indeed unraveling.

Then they did a generous thing. They contacted the small churches who actually hardly ever sent delegates and said they'd pay the way for 10 messengers to come to the convention from those tiny churches. They recruited thousands of messengers, sent a charter bus to pick them up, payed for their hotel and meals and drove them down to the convention to vote for the fundie preznit. Surprisingly the convention went from 5 thousand in attendance yearly to 10 thousand. Their candidate won handily. Then the oddest thing, right after the vote for preznit, everyone left. They didn't stay around for the business of the convention, the buses took them home and the place was empty.

Moderately conservative members noticed. They were disturbed. They did a little organization of their own. Only a little though. Many thought it was unseemly to organize like political organizations. The newsletters, hate mongering, and scare tactics grew larger every year from the fundie side. They said that seminary professors didn't believe the Bible. But wait! I went to "The" seminary. I had the classes with those professors they mentioned. I heard them speak in chapel. I knew the fundies were lying.

One of my favorite of their dirty tricks came once the moderates began to come in force to vote for their candidates. The fundies had lots of oil money and they simply bought all the hotel rooms within a hundred miles of the convention. You could only get a room through them, and only if they were pretty certain how you would vote. Convention attendance swelled to 20,000 on the vote date, only to fall back to nothing an hour after the vote. After the vote it was a moderate convention because the fundies all went home.

What's the purpose of all this you ask? Over 10 years, with their preznit selecting the "committee on committees" which did all the nominating for trustees and boards of directors, they controlled each board. They fired seminary presidents and deans and replaced them with rightwing crazies who were yes men to the dozen or so fundie pastors who were actually running everything.

The Southern Baptist Convention totally changed. It was "taken over" by fundie leadership. The literature changed, the seminaries became "bible schools", professors were fired or quit in disgust. Moderate students began to go elsewhere. Moderate churches withdrew from the alliance and eventually formed the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship. CBF sort of runs like the old Southern Baptist Convention.

The lesson is: The conservatives found a flaw in the polity of the church that allowed a take over.

The exact same people have found a flaw in the constitution of the United States of America. Control the courts and you control everything. Don't allow congress to appoint nominees during Democratic administrations and then complain about the backlog of unfilled appointments during Republican administrations. You may think the opposite of this has been happening because that is what the GOP noise machine has reported in the press, but it's not the Democrats who stalled nominees, it was the Republicans, and the courts have been packed with GOP yes men.

Now if you have a problem with a law. Take it to court. When it gets to the top, it will go our way. Have a problem with an election? a treaty? Take it to court. We can't lose.

This time the moderates (and liberals) have no place to run. We can't form our own country. It's time to get organized and fight back.

I'm ready to march in the streets.