But one that I recall listening to was Janet Porter, and I remember her as quite crankish. But I had no idea just how far away from reality she is. Or I had forgotten. As this Mother Jones piece mentions, she was an acolyte of the late D James Kennedy, one of the right's more twisted evangelical cranks, and Porter herself has continued that legacy of what might be characterized as Christian hatred.":
"Porter has maintained that Obama represents an 'inhumane, sick, and sinister evil,' and she has warned that Democrats want to throw Christians in jail merely for practicing their faith. She's attributed Haiti's high poverty rate to the fact that the country is 'dedicated to Satan,' and she suggested that gay marriage caused Noah's Flood. And there's this: In a 2009 column for conservative news site WorldNetDaily, Porter asserted that President Barack Obama is a Soviet secret agent, groomed since birth to destroy the United States from within."The piece sees her as part of Huckabee's connection to the crazies on the right.
And speaking of the right and crazy, my friend Rusty noted this (also from MOJo) about the Tea Party's view of the Constitution.
Among other things, NCCS uses materials written by Skousen suggesting that Anglo-Saxons are descended from a lost tribe of Israel; Skousen claimed this meant the Constitution may have been inspired by God, who intended for America to be a Christian nation. The very same bogus history has been perpetuated by the white supremacist movement.
Very little of the eight-hour lesson I sat through included a discussion of how the Constitution affects average people, or how it's been changed over time to reflect the nation's progress—such as the amendments giving women the right to vote, ending slavery, and lowering the voting age. Instead, my fellow classmates and I learned about how the original Jamestown settlers were communists who starved to death because of their failure to embrace the sort of capitalism that the Constitution was clearly designed to promote. We were also told that national parks are unconstitutional, because the Constitution bars the federal government from buying land for anything but military installations and post offices.
4 comments:
As long as the idiots who believe that shit about our constitution or listen to that crazy lady remain at or under 27% of our voting population, I'll feel like I can continue to function here.
But when you see headlines like this, I get a little squeamish.
The Constitution clearly was influenced by Christianity...and the Enlightenment...and classical Greece...and English common law. Idiots.
Exactly, Steve. Which is kind of my point on Christianity's role in our history, period. It is there, and is an important part of our history. It is also there on the bad side, of course, but in addition to Christianity, we have a lot of other moral and philosophical traditions that have influenced and added to American life.
There is something incredibly arrogant about fundy Christians who want it all, and don't want to share anything about America.
Kind of off topic but not really: I came across this old John Scalzi post on defining Leviticans as those believers who are more interested in Leviticus than anything to do with Jesus. One of the money quotes:
"To suggest that a Christian is actually a Levitican is not to say he or she is false in faith -- rather, it is to suggest that their faith is elsewhere in the Bible, in the parts that are easy to understand: The rules, the regulations, all the things that are clear cut about what you can do and what you can't do to be right with God. Rules are far easier to follow than Christ's actual path, which needs humility and sacrifice and the ability to forgive, love and cherish even those who you oppose and who oppose and hate you. Any idiot can follow rules; indeed, there's a good argument to made that idiots can only follow rules."
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