Who are the "religious right"?

Hugh Hewitt has a great post about the rhetorical use of the term "religious right," which has become so sapped of content that it "allow[s] the audience to hear whatever it wants to hear."

Update: My post here addresses the issue of allowing one's religious/moral beliefs to inform one's political ideology:

In the midst of eviscerating an absurd review of the final Matrix movie, Lileks seizes on the reviewer's assertion that "[u]ltimately what they believe or we believe is inconsequential," and responds thus:

"Spoken like a man with no beliefs. Or, more accurately, spoken like someone who thinks that line above demonstrates some sort of intellectual sophistication lost on people who do the whole work-kids-church thing. Trust me, Harry – what someone believes is of great consequence. And if your society believes nothing it ends up making its last stand in the Temple of No Particular Belief System with the squiddies hammering on the door, possessed of a terrible certainty: they believe you should die."

As Crispin Sartwell points out in an excellent editorial about John Kerry's illogical position on abortion, all societies agree upon particular values, and all societies enact laws to impose those values: " . . .no human values, whether encoded into law or not, rest on science or reason or unanimous agreement. All human values rest on faith. . . . Moral insights are, ultimately, rationally indefensible, though we could not do without them. If we could not bring our faith to bear on law, we would have to separate the state not from the church but from all human values." Through the enactment of laws (among other things), liberal societies place limits on the openness and tolerance they value, and it is precisely in remaining willing to define those limits that "open" societies remain "open" -- and keep the "squiddies" out.