Or at least so I hope. Context? Oh, sure. Right Wing Watch reports on major GOP Presidential candidates courting an organization which, frankly, sounds like it’s way off in left field.
Right field. Sorry.
But to get [the endorsement of Bob Vander Plaats, leader of The Family Leader, a social conservative group], candidates must cater to an activist far the right of mainstream voters. Not only does Vander Plaats want to remove from office or defund the courts of judges who find in favor of marriage equality, he believes that anything, like gay marriage, that “goes against the law of nature” is by definition unconstitutional . He argues that the government is an institution of God and therefor its purpose is “to promote righteousness” and to apply “God’s principles and precepts.” He once warned that God might withdraw his blessing from America because of a Wiccan prayer at the Iowa state capitol.
It’s a dispiriting simply to contemplate the lack of historical awareness exhibited by anyone at all who pays attention to someone who’s making these sorts of statements. I can’t help but note the symptoms of power-mongering in these statements:
- Defund those courts whose interpretation of the law clashes with yours: I am more important than the law, so when the law fails me, I remove its support. A failure to submit to the law is certainly a popular way to start a war; base it on religious precepts, and we’re all the way back to Henry VIII.
- Relying on “laws of nature”, which, outside of science, are notoriously slippery and open to convenient definitions designed to benefit those who define them. Once again, I am more important than any definition which doesn’t benefit me. (And believe me, as a science groupy, you don’t want to try this argument using the science version of the laws of nature … because those laws include cannibalism, lesbianism, and self-fertilization, amongst the more common-place behaviors.)
- Government is an institution of God … not this one. The United States system of government is, in fact, an emphatic rejection of the very notion. How do we know this? It’s irrefutable: Divine Monarchies, such as Henry VIII’s and any number of other monarchies, from England to Japan, were the system of government handed down from heaven. How do we know this? The same way Bob thinks he knows it. But he came late, and as we all know, God doesn’t make mistakes, so this must be Bob’s error. In fact, a reasonable citizen might suspect Bob is grasping for power again.
The thought that a substantial number of people pay attention this this guy, rather than to important issues of justice, is too discouraging to contemplate; so, if only in self-defense, I’ll suppose, both for myself and for the self-respect of our brothers in Iowa, that these Presidential candidates haven’t a scad of the sense their mothers should have gifted them with and are pursuing the votes of every last voter, rather than addressing issues such as honesty and sobriety in American politics.
(h/t Steve Benen @ MaddowBlog)
