Deconstructing Reconstructionists

Much ado has been made over the weekend about the gathering of the Faithful of the American Taliban- otherwise known as the Judeo-Christian Council for Constitutional Restoration- and it's call to Jeebus the Barbarian to deliver Judge George Greer "as the Apostle Paul said in First Corinthians 5, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, when you are gathered together, with the power of our Lord Jesus Christ, deliver such a one to Satan for the destruction of the flesh, that his spirit may be saved in the day of our Lord Jesus."

Michelle Goldberg posted a great article on Salon about it; Truthout has a commercial-free version for us heathen to appreciate without ads.

But it's educational to read about. I'm leaving out the particulars of the Schiavo case for you to read at the Truthout site- the disinformation of the religious right is a tired litany having nothing to do with the facts of the case, which is why not even Wrepublican judges would support them. Instead, let us focus on the background the American Taliban advocates:

The Judeo-Christian Council for Constitutional Restoration is a new coalition whose membership includes major figures in the religious right. Jerry Falwell, Phyllis Schlafly and Ray Flynn, the former U.S. ambassador to the Vatican, are among those sitting on its executive committee. During the conference, though, the JCCCR's public face was interim chairman Rick Scarborough, the former pastor of Texas' First Baptist Church of Pearland. Scarborough, a close ally of DeLay, now runs a group called Vision America, which is working to mobilize a network of "patriot pastors" for nationwide political action. He's also the author of a booklet titled "In Defense of…Mixing Church and State." It argues that the belief that the Constitution provides for separation of church and state is "a lie introduced by Satan and fostered by the courts. Unfortunately, it is embraced by the American public to our shame and disgrace, and that lie has led us to the edge of the abyss."

The sense that America is on the cusp of chaos was nearly universal at the conference, leading to calls for a radical restructuring of American government. On panel after panel, speakers -- including Michael Schwartz, Oklahoma Senator Tom Coburn's chief of staff -- demanded the impeachment of judges who disagree with the doctrine of Antonin Scalia-style strict constructionism. Several asserted the right of the president and Congress to disregard court decisions they think are unconstitutional. Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy was excoriated with the kind of venom the right once reserved for Hillary Clinton.

On a Friday panel titled Remedies to Judicial Tyranny, a constitutional lawyer named Edwin Vieira discussed Kennedy's majority opinion in Lawrence vs. Texas, which struck down that state's anti-sodomy law. Vieira accused Kennedy of relying on "Marxist, Leninist, Satanic principals drawn from foreign law" in his jurisprudence.

What to do about communist judges in thrall to Beelzebub? Vieira said, "Here again I draw on the wisdom of Stalin. We're talking about the greatest political figure of the 20th century…He had a slogan, and it worked very well for him whenever he ran into difficulty. 'No man, no problem.'"

The audience laughed, and Vieira repeated it. "'No man, no problem.' This is not a structural problem we have. This is a problem of personnel."

As Dana Milbank pointed out on Saturday in the Washington Post, the full Stalin quote is this: "Death solves all problems: no man, no problem." Milbank suggested that Kennedy would be wise to hire more bodyguards...

One conference speaker was Howard Phillips, the hulking former Nixon staffer who helped midwife the new right. Years ago, Phillips, along with Richard Viguerie and Paul Weyrich, recruited a little-known Baptist preacher named Jerry Falwell to start the Moral Majority. Though he was raised Jewish, Phillips is now an evangelical Christian who told me he was profoundly influenced by the late R.J. Rushdoony, the founder of Christian Reconstructionism. "Rushdoony had a tremendous impact on my thinking," Phillips said. As time goes on, he said, Rushdoony's influence is growing.

Christian Reconstructionism calls for a system that is both radically decentralized, with most government functions devolved to the county level, and socially totalitarian. It calls for the death penalty for homosexuals, abortion doctors and women guilty of "unchastity before marriage," among other moral crimes...

The conference attendees took their warfare metaphors seriously. They exist in a parallel reality, with its own history and its own news, and in that reality, the Schiavo case dwarfs the war in Iraq or the budget deficit in its import. The Terri Schiavo story that has so galvanized them isn't the same one shown on CNN or reported in the New York Times. Rather, it was an act of, as one conference participant called it, state-sponsored terrorism, designed to demonstrate the court's terrible power to take life at will...

"Our founding fathers," he said, "they were going to take the word of God, and God has given us in the Bible his word, and they said this book will always be true, and if there is ever a close call in policy, in leadership, in law, in society, if there's ever a question, we want to look to the source of absolute truth. That's why the Ten Commandments are so important. They were the original source of American law."

That version of history is taught at Christian schools like Jerry Falwell's Liberty University, Gibbs' alma mater. It is also a virtual fairy tale. The Constitution contains not a single mention of God, Christianity or the bible. As the historians Isaac Kramnick and R. Laurence Moore wrote in their book The Godless Constitution, such secularism wasn't lost on an earlier generation of Christian conservatives, who decried America's founding document as a sin against God.

They quote Reverend Timothy Dwight, president of Yale College, who said in 1812, "The nation has offended Providence. We formed our Constitution without any acknowledgement of God; without any recognition of His mercies to us, as a people, of His government or even of His existence. The [Constitutional] Convention, by which it was formed, never asked even once, His direction, or His blessings, upon their labours. Thus we commenced our national existence under the present system, without God."

If the Judeo-Christian Council for Constitutional Restoration has its way, that present system will soon be coming to an end.

Why imagine secret conspiracies trying to take over the world when these lunatics gather by the hundreds right out in the open and pray for it?