The last time witchcraft figured prominently on the US political scene, I travelled to Salem, Massachusetts, to meet local witches who were outraged at being mocked in an ad released by that state’s Republican candidate for governor. Salem is the “witchcraft capital of America” – home to the Witches Education Bureau and specialist vendors of spell supplies, as well as a soul-crushing multitude of tacky Halloween-themed trinket shops – and I went with my journalist’s smirk fixed firmly in place. It ended up slightly dislodged, though.
The Salem witches seemed far nicer people than most, albeit with a funny aesthetic and a predilection for spelling “magic” with a K. They were liberals to a woman (and occasional man). They made witty asides about how flying broomsticks would be useful in rush-hour traffic. True, they had some dodgy beliefs, but it would have taken more rationalist indignance than I could muster, then or now, to characterise those beliefs as harmful. They weren’t global warming denialists, or MMR-vaccine rejectors, or abortion-rights opponents. They just wore slightly too much pentagram-shaped jewellery, and probably spent an unwise proportion of their disposable income on crystals.
It would, therefore, surely be rather ironic if Christine O’Donnell — the victorious Delaware Tea Party Senate candidate who is a staunch anti-choicer and climate-change sceptic, opposes all tax increases on principle, has said masturbation is equivalent to adultery, thinks America is a “socialist economy”, and argues that condoms don’t help stop the spread of Aids — were finally to be dismissed as unacceptably eccentric because she once went on a date with a witch. (A male witch, we must assume, since O’Donnell’s publicly stated opinion on The Gays is that “they’re getting away with nudity! They’re getting away with lasciviousness!”)
“[I] dabbled into witchcraft,” O’Donnell says in a 1999 clip from the TV show Politically Incorrect. “One of my first dates with a witch was on a satanic altar, and I didn’t know it. I mean, there’s a little blood there, and stuff like that. We went to a movie, and then we had a little midnight picnic on a satanic altar.” After the clip emerged, she abruptly cancelled two appearances on high-profile Sunday talkshows.
You can’t really blame Bill Maher, Politically Incorrect’s liberal former host, for delighting in releasing the clip last Friday, nor Democrats for joyously piling on. The real danger of the revelation for O’Donnell, of course, is not that most people think being involved in witchcraft is ridiculous, but that some rightwing Christians think it’s evil. The news thus threatens to further destabilise the increasingly tenuous coalition of libertarians, social conservatives and fantasists that constitutes the Tea Party, not to mention the tenuous coalition of Tea Partiers and traditionalists that constitutes the Republican party.
drive from www.guardian.co.uk