One of the things that happens in Returning, two years from now, is the Right manages to con enough states into calling for a Constitutional Convention. It's called to address a pair of non-problems, abortion and same-sex marriage, which the religious right tends to view as dangers to, well, something. Their power to dictate to the less religious, most likely. The more extreme one's religious leanings, the more one is inclined to force conformity on others "for their own good."
Naturally, once that Constitutional Convention is convened, it does exactly what any sensible person would expect. It throws out the existing Constitution and writes a new one. Those promoting what they call a "Convention of the States," which is a Constitutional Convention under a slightly less frightening name, claim that it could be limited to those amendments, or to whatever amendments the state legislatures decide need passed. That's a nice idea, but I can't help hoping people aren't really that gullible. There's no real power of enforcement. Particularly when you consider that any convention deciding to impose a new Constitution could easily include a clause prohibiting the prosecution of anyone involved in passing it.
In the book, the new Constitution does forbid abortion, under any circumstances, which pleases the religious right. Now, if a woman has an abortion it will have to be done in the proverbial back room, and the chances of the mother dying will shoot up dramatically. If they can't save the "baby," the religious right can at least feel somewhat mollified that the mother is likely to die as well. Divine punishment, they'll call it, as if sepsis is some sort of punishment and not just poor sanitation.
The new Constitution also gives the President the power to enact law by decree, with Congress only able to override if it can muster a 90% vote. This is something those who want government run "like a business" would love. The far right dislikes the idea of governance. They prefer to be ruled. Or, perhaps more accurately, they prefer to rule. The concept of democracy is utterly foreign to business. Company heads are subject only to the will of their board, and even then only if the CEO isn't the majority stockholder. If he is, then there's simply no way to get rid of him.
The Constitutional Convention in Returning also removes presidential term limits, though they do set the expiration date for those limits in 2025. They may be fictional idiots, but they're not dumb enough to give our current President any chances at staying in office for an unlimited time. (Personally, I think it likely he'll become a voluntary one-termer, now that he's starting to realize that he's in over his head, and that, shock of shocks, not everybody likes him. Learning that Congress, even one controlled by his party, isn't just going to do whatever he tells them to has apparently come as something of a shock as well.)
How did the Returning Convention come to pass such a Constitution? How did it manage get a convention called, for that matter? More of less through exactly what's happening now. They created a climate of fear and conned the legislatures into acting. It's probably impossible to overestimate the ability of people to act against their own best interests. After all, the new Constitution, as it turned out, didn't actually make same-sex marriage illegal. What it did do was make homosexual intercourse a crime and impose a Federal death penalty for violation. The law applied only to men, naturally. Women would merely be subjected to reeducation, because somehow God forgot to mention lesbians when he was telling people to kill gay men. (This is true, which is why, in Jewish law, gay male sex is considered a grave sin, technically subject to execution, while lesbian sex is considered only slightly less serious than a woman walking around with bare elbows.) Straight men usually don't give a damn what gay men do, but the "straight" men screaming about the "gay agenda," and gay threats to marriage almost never turn out to actually be straight. It's just that lobbying against gays makes them feel safer, because they see it as removing the temptation.
So the Returning Constitution simply handed all jurisdiction over marriage to the individual states. It didn't mean an end to gay marriage; imposing the death penalty for being gay took care of that. But it did get the religious right something it's been want to get back since 1967, the ability to legally limit who can marry whom based on race. The churches, most of them, were just fine with segregation, and mostly didn't have any problem with slavery, considering that the Bible, including the New Testament, says it's normal and part of God's plan. After the Civil War, most of the churches discovered that they'd always been anti-slavery, and after lying about it long enough people believed it. The truth is, except for Quakers and a few other small denominations, churches were always for preserving the status quo.
The current problem in the United States with Nazis (fuck this "alt-right" bullshit, these guys are Nazis) may be, at least in part, a result of our evolution not having caught up with our culture. We are still essentially tribal. We're far more likely to notice differences than similarities. The right thinks the left is crazy, the left thinks the right is crazy, and those of us in the middle tend to think they're both nut, and we're not all that sure about ourselves, either, but figure a middle road is most likely safer. The Nazis want to eliminate Jews from America, along with blacks and Muslims.
The truth is, Islam isn't the problem. Neither is Christianity. Or Judaism. Or Hinduism, or any other specific religion. The problem is religion itself. It may confer some benefits on an individual believer, but overall it serves only to provide another way of dividing people. There are thousands of religions, every one of them convinced it's the only real religion, and given the slightest chance ready to force all the others to conform.
If there were actually a god, a real one, not the imaginary ones espoused by modern faiths, it would be obvious, and none of this religious strife would exist. Let's get this clear. If there really was a God, then there would only be one religion, because he wouldn't have made all those contradictory revelations that serve only to set each group at the others' throats. If there's more than one religion, then there's either more than one god, or no god at all. None that interacts in any way with humanity, at least. There might be some slight chance of the sort of "start things going, then go away and let things do whatever they do" type of Deist god, but obviously there isn't one that interacts with people or, from time to time, he'd actually do it. Not whisper to the deluded, who then claim to be prophets, but regrow an arm, or bring a dead person back to life (after a day or two, not "restore" life to someone who wasn't actually quite dead). Jesus predicted he'd return before the last of his disciples died, and people are still waiting nearly 2,000 years later. And advances in the understanding of physics is making it more and more unlikely that creation actually needed a creator.
At the quantum level, creation from nothing seems to be not only not impossible, but ridiculously likely, and the only thing unusual about ours was that the original event somehow created more matter than anti-matter, leaving enough over to become the universe. That was unusual, but didn't require any divine intervention.
Alright, true, if you throw away God, people will find something else to kill each other over. It's just that it's harder to muster the same degree of fanaticism without the promise of eternal reward for or eternal punishment for your enemy. Realizing that you're simply going to die, and that will be the end of you, that no conscious essence will remain, is remarkably liberating. You didn't exist for nearly 14-billion years, and you won't exist for the next 14-billion, either. Why should you care? You didn't notice not existing before, and you won't notice it later.
I feel I could on for a while yet, but it's 5 o'clock in the morning, so I don't think I will.
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