Somehow material from the British newspaper The Guardian, reporting actual public hangings in Iran, seems right wing. Read it for yourself and see. But is that because the story was invented or embellished to move propaganda, as inaccurate stories twisted and spun by the right often do?  Or because for leftists, it is practically forbidden to mention such stories for fear of well, sounding "right wing"? 

You and I didn't hang 30 people in Iran last month, two of them from a crane over a busy thoroughfare in Tehran.  Iran did.  And that is the truth of *that* fundamentalist government, which is an example going to this question: Given a further radical push to the right and into the courts, could American religious fundamentalism install a version of government as “terrifying” as Iran's? 

Perhaps hangings from cranes over Times Square won't be a hallmark, but what about federal prison-- or the death penalty-- for a woman who has an abortion? Or more recently, given the go-ahead from a President claiming God made him President in this time for just such purposes, proactive overseas invasions and “detainments”? Keeping tabs on the books you read, the calls you make, personal identifiable “data”?  

And what is it about humans in general that allows many to tolerate religions that push ever further into radical behavior? Even to an end where regardless of sect, martyrdom and murder in the name of spiritual fulfillment are acceptable? Torture as a justifiable good, even when "the bad" spring from religions carved of the same set of “Abrahamic” texts?

Are we in danger of American Evangelicals pushing government into ever widening cycles of extremism?  At what point does the non-believer become its victims?  Will we know when to stop their influence? 

Do we know how?