In 1938, people assumed that once Adolf Hitler took the Sudetenland, he would stop there. Now, everybody knows that assumption was wrong, but we haven't learned from that history lesson.
Recently, voters in South Dakota passed a ban on almost all abortions, and Gov. Mike Rounds signed the ban into law March 6.
The goal of the religious right's backers of the law is obvious: Take it to the recently reshaped Supreme Court to challenge 1973's Roe v. Wade decision. In doing this, the religious right hopes to eventually ban abortion altogether.
But just as Hitler didn't stop with the Sudetenland, the religious right won't stop with abortion. If it manages to get the Supreme Court to overturn Roe v. Wade, what's next? Will it go after gay rights and try to get Lawrence v. Texas overturned? Will it allow state and local governments to use taxpayer dollars to construct and maintain plaques of the Ten Commandments?
Regardless of its next target, the religious right has one central goal: Remake the United States as a Christian theocracy. With two new conservative justices on the Supreme Court, that goal might become feasible.
This might sound like a slippery slope, but many prominent religious right leaders, such as Randall Terry, have suggested this - and the religious right commands enormous power within the Republican Party.
But I wonder if people in the religious right have ever considered what they might be doing to their fellow Christians.
By turning "moral values" into a political issue, they have convinced many mainstream Christians - and even non-Christian conservatives - to view abortion as homicide, to view legally sanctioned gay relationships as a threat to civilization and to view Intelligent Design as scientifically valid.
But if mainline Christians - and Republicans - don't stand up to Christian extremism, then extremists will come to represent the Christian religion as a whole, just as extremists already represent Islam to many non-Muslims.
The groups that Christian conservatives alienate with their reactionary agenda - gays, women, non-Christians and teenagers, among others - will view Christians in general as backward, intolerant, self-righteous bigots who are out of touch with reality and bent upon domination of American society.
And that's not farfetched to say - notice how popular Marilyn Manson became in the '90s by desecrating Bibles and denouncing Christianity as "fascism."
Many Christians might call that prejudice. But it's not prejudice; it's a backlash.
And it's only a fraction of what's coming if Christian conservatives continue trying to turn their "moral values" into laws.
Christians and Republicans who claim to dislike the religious right but sit on their hands as it hijacks the GOP, writes its vehement hatred of gays into state constitutions and threatens women's reproductive rights should remember the saying, "If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem."
That's what they are as long as they don't actively oppose the religious right and don't keep their distaste for abortion and homosexuality where they belong - within the confines of their churches.
After we allowed Hitler to take over the Sudetenland, he went after the rest of Czechoslovakia, then Poland, France and Russia.
If we allow the religious right to outlaw abortion, what - or whom - will it go after next? And who will be left to speak up for the people who complacently sat around and let it all happen?
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