Pat Hayes has a com­pre­hen­sive essay up at Red State Rab­ble: Kansas Isn’t Kansas Any­more Toto. He man­ages to tie the author­i­tar­i­an­ism I’ve been chat­ting about recent­ly to a deep change in Kansas, and how he sees him­self as a Kansan. 

In the end, he issues a chal­lenge to the state (in my words here): if you don’t want even your own native sons to think you’re back­wards and author­i­tar­i­an, vote against the dis­crim­i­na­tion amendment.

After point­ing out the way author­i­tar­i­an con­ser­v­a­tives abuse psy­chol­o­gy and sci­ence to scape­goat gays, he says this, which is the most suc­cinct expres­sion of the author­i­tar­i­an worldview:

What I find almost amus­ing about the gay mar­riage debate, and I empha­size the word almost, is that the Chris­t­ian con­ser­v­a­tives make vir­tu­al­ly all of their argu­ments based on the assump­tion that “every­one” is a Chris­t­ian who believes that the Bible is the source of absolute truth and law, and that some­how their reli­gion and morals trump all others.

I actu­al­ly think this is gen­er­ous to them. I don’t think they believe that Pat, Tom Jef­fer­son (both proud deists), or Gand­hi are tra­di­tion­al Chris­tians and should, there­fore, be sub­ject to Chris­t­ian read­ings of Bib­li­cal law. No, no, no. Author­i­tar­i­ans think that it’s enough that they are Chris­t­ian; they jus­ti­fy their impo­si­tion on every­one else not with some appeal to com­mon moral­i­ty, but by appeal­ing to the moral­i­ty of a select few.

Appar­ent­ly, polit­i­cal sci­en­tists use the phrase selec­torate to refer to the deci­sion mak­ers in a dic­ta­tor­ship. That sounds pret­ty apt.

Update: The essay is by Jason Miller, of Thomas Paine’s cor­ner. Jason and Pat are both cool and good writ­ers. Props to both.