The Miseducation of Michele Bachman
by digby
Did it shock you as much as it did me to find out that Michele Bachman was a tax lawyer? The mind boggles. Sarah Posner delves into one of the famous Christian law schools that spawned many a right wing functionary, and the career of the Republican woman who would be president:
At the May “First Friday” lecture hosted by the Institute on the Constitution at the Heritage Community Church in Severn, Maryland, IOTC founder Michael Peroutka presented the evening’s guest speaker, attorney Herb Titus, with a “Patrick Henry Award” for “his tireless and fearless telling of God’s truth to power.” Titus (best known for his representation of former Judge Roy Moore in his failed quest to install a 2.6-ton Ten Commandments monument in the Alabama Supreme Court building) is one of the few lawyers in America who, Peroutka noted, truly “believes God is sovereign and therefore God’s law is the only law.” For Peroutka, the Constitution Party’s 2004 nominee for president, this was his usual spiel on God and the law.
In the late 1970s, Titus played an instrumental role in launching the law school at Oral Roberts University (ORU), from which GOP presidential hopeful Michele Bachmann graduated in 1986. Titus, who rejected his Harvard Law School education after reading the work of R.J. Rushdoony, the late founder of Christian Reconstructionism, was moved to exercise what he believes is a “dominion mandate” to “restore the Bible to legal education.” To teach, in other words, that Christianity is the basis of our law, that lawyers and judges should follow God’s law, and that the failure to do so is evidence of a “tyrannical,” leftist agenda.
Titus’ lecture, as well as the teachings of Reconstructionists, the Constitution Party, and the IOTC, provide a window into Bachmann’s legal education, and thus how her political career and rhetoric—so incomprehensible and absurd to many observers—was unmistakably shaped by it.
take the time to read the whole thing. This is the same creepy network of right wing Theocrats who are now sprinkled throughout the government bureaucracy and elected office. They have a lot of patience.
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