Just Don’t Call Them Theocrats Part XXIV
by digby
Here’s Sharron Angle on Sharia law in the United States.
One of the last questioners asked about “Muslims taking over the U.S.,” including a question about Angle’s stance on the proposed mosque near Ground Zero in New York.
“We’re talking about a militant terrorist situation, which I believe isn’t a widespread thing, but it is enough that we need to address, and we have been addressing it,” Angle said.
“Dearborn, Michigan, and Frankford, Texas are on American soil, and under Constitutional law. Not Sharia law. And I don’t know how that happened in the United States. It seems to me there is something fundamentally wrong with allowing a foreign system of law to even take hold in any municipality or government situation in our United States.”
First of all, is Sharia law really a foreign system of law? It’s a religious system of law, similar to the law that influences Sharron Angle — Christian Reconstructionism. The Las Vegas Sun reported this a couple of months ago:
Republican U.S. Senate candidate Sharron Angle describes her motivation for seeking elected office as a religious calling.Politics, including her bid to unseat Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, is God’s purpose for her life — one he has long been preparing her for, she says.“When God calls you, he also equips you and he doesn’t just say ‘Well, today you’re going to run against Harry Reid.’ There is a preparation,” she said during a recent interview on the Christian Broadcasting Network. “Moses had his preparatory time. Paul had his preparatory time. Even Jesus had his preparatory time, and so my preparation began on a school board.”Although those remarks triggered surprise and even outrage last week, people familiar with Angle’s career in public life understood.A Southern Baptist active in her church, Angle’s religious convictions have informed many of her positions throughout her years in politics. She believes abortion is a violation of God’s will and should be banned in all cases. She argued for the religious freedom of private and home schools. And she has said that public policy should support the “traditional” family structure as described in the Bible, in which one parent stays home with the children while the other works.Indeed, although many Americans view the separation of church and state as one of the keys to the nation’s success as a multicultural society, Angle believes that religion has an expansive role to play in government. And, she has repeatedly said anyone who opposes that based on the claim of separation of church and state misunderstands the Constitution’s ban on “establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”In this regard, Angle’s view of religion’s role in government parallels that of a religious political movement — Christian Reconstructionism — seeking to return American civil society to biblical law.[…]
To accomplish that, Reconstructionists interpret the separation of church and state doctrine as a constitutional wall protecting the church from the state. But unlike most interpretations of that doctrine, the Reconstructionists’ envisions a gaping one-way hole in the wall that allows Christian doctrine to infuse government. In other words, government must not interfere with Christians’ efforts to enact God’s law at home or at church and government itself should be run according to biblical law.
Just don’t call them theocrats.
Meanwhile, guess who’s jumped on the Jesus train along with Glenn Beck’s “Black Robed Regiment” mentor, to help Sharron get out the social conservative vote:
Four years ago, Rick Perry cultivated a network of conservative pastors – the Texas Restoration Project – to scare off Kay Bailey Hutchison in the primary and to help win reelection. The project has pretty much fallen off the political radar in Texas since then. This year, the energy on the right is from the tea party – which is focusing on fiscal themes, not the social issues of abortion and gay marriage . Now, the Texas-tinged event has emerged in a most unlikely place – Las Vegas. Next month, Christian historian David Barton of Aledo and the Rev. Laurence White of Houston are headlining a “Nevada Renewal Project” event in Las Vegas. Both were regulars at Texas Restoration events. The keynote speaker will be Newt Gingrich.
The Nevada event is nonpartisan, but appears aimed at helping Republican tea-party favorite Sharon Angle against Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid in one of the country’s hottest Senate races. Polls indicate the race is close. An email by American Family Association chief Tim Wildmon inviting pastors to the two-day event suggested which side it’s on: “At a time when Congress is buy trying to legislative defeat … the Nevada event is aimed at energizing pastors “to help them and their congregations engage in the battle.”
We know about Newtie and his three wives, but I believe he’s recently “converted” to catholicism so I assume he’s now in good standing among the Values Voters. “Christian historian” David Barton is also one of the leaders of this kooky theocratic fringe:
David Barton, Glenn Beck’s favorite history “professor,” is the creator and purveyor of a revisionist history of race in America that is rapidly gaining traction in conservative and Tea Party circles. That history, drawn in part from the writings of Christian Reconstructionists, recasts modern-day Republicans as the racially inclusive party, and modern-day Democrats as the racists supportive of slavery and post-Emancipation racist policies…
Beck fancies himself a contemporary King “reclaiming the civil rights movement,” exemplified by his pledge not to “sit in the back of the bus.” While he has been widely mocked for drawing this parallel, it’s less recognized, however, how he’s doing it on a foundation laid by David Barton and his revisionist history; which relies in part of the work of Reconstructionist R.J. Rushdoony.
Barton and Beck want to rewrite American history on race and slavery in order to whitewash (pardon the term) the founders’ implication in it and blame it and subsequent racism on the Democrats. But Barton’s rewriting of the history of the founding era and the civil rights movement alone doesn’t quite accomplish that. He has to lower the bar even more and make slavery itself seem like it wasn’t quite as bad as we might think. And for that, he turns to Stephen McDowell of the Reconstructionist-oriented Providence Foundation.
[…]
Barton’s Wallbuilders Web site promotes a collection of “resources on African American History.” Much of the material is written by Barton himself but one of the essays is McDowell’s, drawn almost entirely from Rushdoony’s work in the early 1960s.
McDowell’s discussion of slavery, written in 2003, comes from Rushdoony’s more familiar Institutes of Biblical Law. ..While criticizing American slavery as violating a number of biblical requirements, however, he did not view it as inherently immoral.
By promoting McDowell, and by extension Rushdoony, Barton promotes a “biblical worldview” in which slavery is in some circumstances acceptable. ..Rather the discussing slavery as a moral issue, McDowell argues it is tightly regulated, though not forbidden in the Bible, and that American Southern slavery was not “biblical” slavery because it was race-based and enforced. However, he also argues that there are two forms of biblically permissible, voluntary slavery: indentured servitude in which “servants were well treated and when released, given generous pay,” and slavery in which, in exchange for being taken care of, one might choose to remain a slave. Moreover, he maintains that the Bible permits two forms of involuntary slavery: “criminals” who could not make restitution for their crimes could be sold into slavery and “pagans,” who can be made permanent slaves. “Pagans,” in this view of the Bible, would be those not in “covenant” with the God of Israel, and by extension today, those who are not Christians (in a narrow, Reconstructionist-defined sense). McDowell is explicit that race-based kidnapping and enforced slavery are unbiblical. In fact, they are punishable by death, again all of this coming directly from the Institutes of Biblical Law.
Nothing extreme there.
I sincerely doubt that Sharron Angle is a scholar at the “Institutes of Biblical Law.” (Scholar is not a word I would easily apply to Angle in any context.) But she has been swimming in that tribal pond for a long time and has clearly absorbed the idea that there is basis for the idea that American law is properly guided by a particular form of Christian fundamentalism. He reasons for fearing Sharia law are not based on a reverence for the constitution, but rather a belief that it’s the wrong religion.
And the entire Republican party is (to a far greater degree than people want to admit) dependent on these very people being politically engaged. If you watched the Glenn Beck rally, which featured the Christian Reconstructionist David Barton on the stage with his “Black Robed regiment” of far right pastors, it’s fairly clear that this fully in the Tea Party mainstream. If they manage to elect their candidates, they are going to be influential.
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