OK, These Folks Are Starting to Scare Me

Over the weekend, a cabal of religious fundamentalists and like-minded lawyers and "scholars" gathered in Washington to launch a campaign to reign in what they see as an out of control federal judiciary. According to the Washington Post, those in attendance included Roy "What Supremacy Clause?" Moore, Phyllis "The Eagle Forum Has Landed" Schlafly, and Alan "Illinois, Maryland, Whatever It Takes" Keyes. Loonies all, but loonies with clout.

In spite of the fact that "the world inhabited by most of those at the conference seems so at odds with empirical reality that one expects it to collapse around them," according to this Salon report, these folks are getting scary. Consider the topic of "Christian Reconstructionism," a theory that:

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. To be fair, [Howard]
Phillips [who recruited Jerry Falwell to start the Moral Majority] told me that
'just because a crime is capital doesn't mean you must impose the death penalty.
It means it's an option.' Public humiliation, he said, could sometimes be used
instead.

In their world, the Schiavo case really was a matter of murder (the husband put her in the coma) regarding a woman who was so lucid and reactive that she could have fed herself if not being held down by armed guards (presumably in rented SS costumes). I'm not kidding (see page 3 of the Salon piece).

And, of course, they hold to the fiction that the Constitution is rooted in the Bible. Exactly which book discusses the value of the separation of powers or a federal form of government? Hell, for that matter, most of the "government" in the Bible was theocratic dictatorships, outdated even by contemporary standards compared to the democratic and republican experiments of Greece and Rome.

It's hard in listening to these folks not to just point and laugh (which is what I did when I saw some of them on C-Span this weekend). But if the rest of us don't keep a close and serious eye on them, things might get out of hand.