Neil at 4Simpsons.com asks an excellent question:

If they think we’re so “radical,” why don’t they just use their faux majority to elect legislators to legalize partial-birth abortion and such?  Then they wouldn’t need judges to ignore their duties and make up their own laws. 

Thanks Neil!

Ignoring for the moment the confusion between interpreting the laws in line with the spirit of the Constitution and “ignor[ing] their duties and make[ing] up their own laws”…

Well, the answer is to reflect the question back to you.  If the religious right really had a lock on the sentiments of mainstream America…why would we have quotes from the leaders of your beloved movement feeling the need to say things like this:

"It's like guerrilla warfare. If you reveal your location, all it does is allow your opponent to improve his artillery bearings. It's better to move quietly, with stealth, under cover of night. You've got two choices: You can wear cammies and shimmy along on your belly, or you can put on a red coat and stand up for everyone to see. It comes down to whether you want to be the British army in the Revolutionary War or the Viet Cong. History tells us which tactic was more effective."--Ralph Reed Los Angeles Times, 3/22/92

Or these:

With the apathy that exists today, a small, well-organized minority can influence the selection of candidates to an astonishing degree.  –Pat Robertson in The Millenium

The apathy of other Americans can become a blessing and advantage to Christians who choose to get involved and fill the void of leadership. –America’s Providential History (A popular Christian homeschooling  textbook)

"We don't have to worry about convincing a majority of Americans to agree with us.  Most of them are staying home and watching Falcon Crest." ,"  --Guy Rodgers

As a tactic for a short-run defense of the independent Christian school movement, the appeal to religious liberty is legitimate. Everyone who is attempting to impose a world-and-life view on a majority (or on a ruling minority) always uses some version of the liberty doctrine to buy himself and his movement some time, some organizational freedom, and some power. . . . So let us be blunt about it: we must use the doctrine of religious liberty to gain independence for Christian schools until we train up a generation of people who know that there is no religious neutrality, no neutral law, no neutral education, and no neutral civil government. Then they will get busy in constructing a Bible-based social, political, and religious order which finally denies the religious liberty of the enemies of God. --- Gary North

Combined with direct mailings and telephone whisper campaigns perfected by Richard Viguerie, for example, the combination of cultivating voter apathy and then using “churches”, direct mail and other “alternative media” to motivate “the troops” has been very successful.  So successful that Viguerie couldn’t help but crow about it in a book;
America’s Right Turn.  He calls direct mail, church voter guides, and other “alternative media” “secret weapons”.

This is probably why it is so important for them to constantly beat the drums of impending doom with regard to government.  The constant sense that nothing good can come of government, that government can’t do anything right, that the world is going to hell in a handbasket, and only God can stop it, no effort of mere mortals can affect it.

How else do you account for the constant conservative serenade of how moral decline in our country has lead to the terrible crime and violence of our culture, despite the fact that violent crime has been on a decline since the early 1980’s and reached an all-time low in 2005?

There’s nothing you can do, the world is falling apart.  Come to Jesus, and for God’s sake make sure you have a conceal-and-carry permit.  The end is coming.  There’s nothing the government can do.  God and vigilante justice are the only answer.

(never mind that the greatest drop happened during the Clinton Presidency, a time when, presumably, American morals were most out of control, and continues through much of the Bush Presidency, when the “invading hordes of illegal immigrants” have supposedly been importing unprecedented social ills).

In 2005 the UN Development Program Report pegged the United States Literacy Rate at 99.9%

Which means that 99.9 out of every 100 Americans can read and understand the Townhall.com articles urging them to dismantle their “failing” school systems, rather than invest in fixing their few shortcomings.

 This is actually quite good when you add in the consideration that the skills required for “basic” literacy have continued to expand.  You need a progressively higher degree of literacy to be considered “basically” literate as time goes on.  For instance, my mother in-law gave her grammar-school readers to my children as a gift.   Given the formula provided by the teacher, my mother-in-law’s third-grade reader was at a beginning first –grade level by today’s standards.

 Having volunteered as a reading tutor for some of the remaining .1% I can tell you that the reasons many of them were unable to learn to read in school had little to do with the school system, and more to do with severe disabilities, crippling home-lives and moving around a lot due to economic instability.  Things that “conservatives” have continuously said are none of the governments business to address.  The Church, private charities faith-based initiatives are the only answers to such ills.

WHY is the extreme right so invested in this sense of failure, decay and hopelessness?  I suppose they want us to admit that “we are in bondage to sin and cannot free ourselves”.  There is nothing we can do on our own, nothing that we can do through our government, unless it is a “Godly” administration like the current one, in which case, there is also nothing for us to do. 

Just go to church and get your voter guide, or stay home and despair.

Screw that, get out and vote.  Register to vote.  If you can’t vote for a candidate you want, vote AGAINST a candidate you don’t want or just “throw your vote away” writing in Bill and/or Opus.  At least that sends a message that the votes are there to be won, by the party that fields the right candidates.