Like a vampire from a schlocky drive-in horror movie, the Religious Right is often staked but never truly finished off. There is always another sequel. Pundits said the Religious Right would die after Falwell shut down the Moral Majority in 1989. Others said the election of President Bill Clinton in 1992 was a mortal blow. Still others opined that the movement was finished when the Christian Coalition began to lose influence about five years ago.
Shades of Scalia, anyone? From his opinion in Lamb's Chapel v. Center Moriches School District, 508 U.S. 384 (1993):
As to the Court's invocation of the Lemon test: Like some ghoul in a late night horror movie that repeatedly sits up in its grave and shuffles abroad, after being repeatedly killed and buried, Lemon stalks our Establishment Clause jurisprudence once again, frightening the little children and school attorneys of Center Moriches Union Free School District...Such a docile and useful monster is worth keeping around, at least in a somnolent state; one never knows when one might need him.
Good rhetoric makes strange bedfellows, I suppose.
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