More On Rick Santorum's View On Slavery

What is it about the wingnuts and Slavery?



First we had Michele Bachmann. According to Rich Lizza's piece in the New Yorker:

In “Christianity and the Constitution,” the book she worked on with Eidsmoe, her law-school mentor, he argues that John Jay, Alexander Hamilton, and John Adams “expressed their abhorrence for the institution” and explains that “many Christians opposed slavery even though they owned slaves.” They didn’t free their slaves, he writes, because of their benevolence. “It might be very difficult for a freed slave to make a living in that economy; under such circumstances setting slaves free was both inhumane and irresponsible.”

I mean The Bible does allow for slavery, doesn't it? - Just not cruel slavery (Leviticus 25:44-46):

If you want slaves, buy them from other nations or from the foreigners who live in your own country, and make them your property. You can own them, and even leave them to your children when you die, but do not make slaves of your own people or be cruel to them.

So as long as you don't whip them or anything, slavery's OK, I guess. Responsible thing to do, even, since setting them free in a bad economy would only make things really bad for them.



That's freedom and slavery for Michele Bachmann, winner of the Iowa straw poll for the Republican Nomination for the President of the United States.



Then there's Rick Santorum, one of the losers. Thinkprogress has video of our favorite ex-Senator discussing freedom:





Their transcript:

Our founders said [our] rights were given to us to pursue life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Does anyone here believe that first inalienable right is as whole as it was at the time of our founding? It isn’t. Does anyone believe that our freedom is as whole as it was at the time of our founders? It is not. [bold in original]

From the top of the field to the bottom: for the GOP, slavery was no big deal. Not even worth mentioning when cheering on the great traditions of America.



I guess the GOP doesn't count human slavery as the affront to human freedom that it so obviously is.

More On Dominionism

I take Tony Norman's column as a start - this specifically:

The first time I ever heard of the Christian Reconstruction movement, now known as Dominionism, I thought it was a gag.



Who in their right mind wanted to live in a world where the Old Testament civil and ceremonial laws would become the template for local and national politics? It was a profoundly dark theology even by the standards of the dour Calvinism I considered reasonable at the time.



According to the tenets of Christian Reconstruction, it was up to Christians to bring the whole world into submission to Jesus Christ. Once that was accomplished (with God's help, of course), the Old Testament laws that guided ancient Israel would be dusted off and applied to civil societies across the globe, including America.

He then goes on to outline some of the scarier parts of this scary stuff and ends not with a whimper but with a bang:

Today, two of the leading Republican presidential candidates, Texas Gov. Rick Perry and Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann, reportedly have ties to the Dominionist movement. The press has got to get up to speed on the movement's ideas before either a President Bachmann or a President Perry are in a position to drag Jesus feet first out of heaven, again.

Allow me to do my part.



Michelle Goldberg over at The Daily Beast has more on Dominionism:

Dominionism derives from a small fringe sect called Christian Reconstructionism, founded by a Calvinist theologian named R. J. Rushdoony in the 1960s. Christian Reconstructionism openly advocates replacing American law with the strictures of the Old Testament, replete with the death penalty for homosexuality, abortion, and even apostasy. The appeal of Christian Reconstructionism is, obviously, limited, and mainstream Christian right figures like Ralph Reed have denounced it.

Rushdoony was a piece of work. As Frank Schaefer points out:

Rushdoony (whom I met and talked with several times) believed that interracial marriage, which he referred to as "unequal yoking," should be made illegal. He also opposed "enforced integration," referred to Southern slavery as "benevolent," and said that "some people are by nature slaves." Rushdoony was also a Holocaust denier.



And yet his home school materials are a mainstay of the right-wing evangelical home school movement to this day. In Rushdoony's 1973 book, The Institutes of Biblical Law, he says that fundamentalist Christians must "take control of governments and impose strict biblical law" on America and then the world.

Back to Goldberg with more on Michele Bachmann:

For believers in Dominionism, rule by non-Christians is a sort of sacrilege—which explains, in part, the theological fury that has accompanied the election of our last two Democratic presidents. “Christians have an obligation, a mandate, a commission, a holy responsibility to reclaim the land for Jesus Christ—to have dominion in civil structures, just as in every other aspect of life and godliness,” wrote George Grant, the former executive director of Coral Ridge Ministries, which has since changed its name to Truth in Action Ministries. “But it is dominion we are after. Not just a voice ... It is dominion we are after. Not just equal time ... World conquest.”



Bachmann is close to Truth in Action Ministries; last year, she appeared in one of its documentaries, Socialism: A Clear and Present Danger. In it, she espoused the idea, common in Reconstructionist circles, that the government has no right to collect taxes in excess of 10 percent, the amount that believers are called to tithe to the church. On her state-senate-campaign website, she recommended a book co-authored by Grant titled Call of Duty: The Sterling Nobility of Robert E. Lee, which, as Lizza reported, depicted the civil war as a battle between the devout Christian South and the Godless North, and lauded slavery as a benevolent institution. “The unity and companionship that existed between the races in the South prior to the war was the fruit of a common faith,” the book said.

We wrote about the Lee biography here.



Does Goldberg have more on Rick Perry? She certainly does:

In elaborating Bachmann’s Dominionist history, though, it’s important to point out that she is not unique. Perry tends to be regarded as marginally more reasonable than Bachmann, but he is as closely associated with Dominionism as she is, though his links are to a different strain of the ideology.

How? She cites this piece in the Texas Observer by Forrest Wilder. Goldberg continues:

The Christian Reconstructionists tend to be skeptical of Pentecostalism, with its magic, prophesies, speaking in tongues, and wild ecstasies. Certainly, there are overlaps between the traditions—Oral Roberts, where Bachmann studied with Eidsmoe, was a Pentecostal school. But it’s only recently that one group of Pentecostals, the New Apostolic Reformation, has created its own distinct Dominionist movement. And members see Perry as their ticket to power.



“The New Apostles talk about taking dominion over American society in pastoral terms,” wrote Wilder in the Texas Observer. “They refer to the ‘Seven Mountains’ of society: family, religion, arts and entertainment, media, government, education, and business. These are the nerve centers of society that God (or his people) must control.” He quotes a sermon from Tom Schlueter, New Apostolic pastor close to Perry. “We’re going to infiltrate [the government], not run from it. I know why God’s doing what he’s doing ... He’s just simply saying, ‘Tom I’ve given you authority in a governmental authority, and I need you to infiltrate the governmental mountain.”



According to Wilder, members of the New Apostolic Reformation see Perry as their vehicle to claim the “mountain” of government. Some have told Perry that Texas is a “prophet state,” destined, with his leadership, to bring America back to God. The movement was deeply involved in The Response, the massive prayer rally that Perry hosted in Houston earlier this month. “Eight members of The Response ‘leadership team’ are affiliated with the New Apostolic Reformation movement,” wrote Wilder. “The long list of The Response’s official endorses—posted on the event’s website—reads like a Who’s Who of the apostolic-prophetic crowd, including movement founder C. Peter Wagner.”

While it's the Republican Party that's otherwise up in arms about Islamic Sharia law taking over the Constitution, isn't it funny (just SOO FUNNY) how they're not so upset about the Christians who want to do the same?

More On Michele Bachmann and Slavery

GOP front runner and Tea Party darling Michele Bachmann in the news these past coupla days regarding this Newsweek cover:



From the Washington Post blog:

As soon as Newsweek tweeted this week’s cover of the magazine, featuring a particuarly bad picture of presidential candidate Michele Bachmann, bloggers were up in arms.



NewsBusters argued that Newsweek intentionally chose a photo that made Bachmann look “crazy.” Slate asked whether the picture showed the magazine was “sexist.”

And so on. The charges and counter charges (and their defenses) will quarantine not a small amount of the news cycle. Which is a pity because there's another Bachmann story that might not get the air time it should because of it.



Bachmann's views on antebellum slavery. From Adam Swerver at the American Prospect:

Ryan Lizza's profile of Bachmann reveals that Bachmann's odd perspective on slavery isn't a series of gaffes, but rather "a world view." Lizza explains that Bachmann is a believer in a kind of Christian conservative reimagining of slavery, where "many Christians opposed slavery" but owned them anyway and didn't free them because "“it might be very difficult for a freed slave to make a living in that economy; under such circumstances setting slaves free was both inhumane and irresponsible.” How charitable of them!

Wait, there's more:

She is also a fan of Robert E. Lee biographer J. Steven Williams, (sic) whom Lizza describes as a "leading proponent of the theory that the South was an orthodox Christian nation unjustly attacked by the godless North." Wilkins "approvingly" cites Lee's conviction that abolition was premature because it was necessary for "the sanctifying effects of Christianity” to take their time “to work in the black race and fit its people for freedom.”

Actually it's J. Steven Wilkins but that's besides the point. What did have to say about antebellum slavery? You have to read it for yourself:

Slavery, as it operated in the pervasively Christian society which was the old South, was not an adversarial relationship founded upon racial animosity. In fact, it bred on the whole, not contempt, but, over time, mutual respect. This produced a mutual esteem of the sort that always results when men give themselves to a common cause. The credit for this startling reality must go to the Christian faith

And they're worrying about the photo making Bachmann look crazie?

Seriously?

I've gotten on conservative mailing lists before, but holy hell, how did I get on this one?!?

Bachmann: Obama has a lot of "choot-spa"

Yiddish Fail LOL Alert!

Presidential hopeful Michele Bachmann tries to say that President Obama has a lot of "chutzpah" with predictable results. (Apparently while a friend of Israel, she doesn't have any Jewish friends.)


(h/t to Think Progress)
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More On Bob Vander Plaatz's Pledge

There's been an update or two to The Iowa Pledge I wrote about on the 8th.

For those who don't know, a conservative group from Iowa called The Family Leader issued this "pledge" for all GOP candidates (and their supporters) to deal with. At the time of my writing that blog post, only Michele Bachmann had signed it.

And now there's two:

Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum was initially “taken aback” by a pro-marriage pledge that asks presidential candidates to promise personal fidelity to their spouses, but said he ultimately decided to sign it.

“When I first read it, I was taken aback by it. I can't argue that I wasn't,” the former Pennsylvania senator said in an interview airing Sunday on CNN’s “State of the Union.”

“But I understand why they're saying it, because it does undermine people's respect for the institution, respect for the people governing this country. If you can't be faithful to the people that you're closest to, then how can we count on you to be faithful to those of us who you represent?”

There was some other stuff in there, too, that Rick's pledged to support:

Other provisions in the pledge include promises to only appoint conservative judges, to remove anti-traditional marriage provisions in the tax code and opposition to any constitutional redefinition of marriage.

And some stuff he doesn't have to.

For instance when he signed the pledge, there was this language in it:

Slavery had a disastrous impact on African-American families, yet sadly a child born into slavery in 1860 was more likely to be raised by his mother and father in a two-parent household than was an AfricanAmerican baby born after the election of the USA‟s first African-American President.

Wasn't slavery great?? It kept African-American families together!

Until someone was sold, of course. Keeping families together is one thing, but property rights are property rights. And as Ron Paul said (in another context, of course) private business owners have an absolute right to decide what to do with their own property.

But I digress.

Luckily for Rick and Michele, there's been some changes to the pledge:

Responding to a growing controversy, an Iowa-based conservative group has removed a passage in a marriage pact signed by two GOP presidential candidates that suggested black families were in better shape during slavery.

“After careful deliberation and wise insight and input from valued colleagues we deeply respect, we agree that the statement referencing children born into slavery can be misconstrued, and such misconstruction can detract from the core message of the Marriage Vow: that ALL of us must work to strengthen and support families and marriages between one woman and one man," said Bob Vander Plaats, head of The Family Leader.

"We sincerely apologize for any negative feelings this has caused, and have removed the language from the vow, " added Vander Plaats, who is known as a king maker in Iowa.

The campaigns have done the CYA dance:

Rep. Michele Bachmann of Minnesota and former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum signed the two-page document entitled "The Marriage Vow - A Declaration of Dependence Upon Marriage and Family," on Thursday, but their campaigns emphasized that the "candidate vow" portion of the pledge that they put their stamps of approval on didn't mention slavery. Instead, it condemned gay marriage, abortion, infidelity and pornography.

Here's some meat from the pledge that's still in force. In that section of the pledge that outlines why marriage is in such deep trouble in Amurika, there's this:

Social protections, especially for women and children, have been evaporating as we have collectively “debased the currency” of marriage. This debasement continues as a function of adultery; “quickie divorce;” physical and verbal spousal abuse; non committal co-habitation; exemplary infidelity and “unwed cheating” among celebrities, sports figures and politicians; anti-scientific bias which holds, in complete absence of empirical proof, that non-heterosexual inclinations are genetically determined, irresistible and akin to innate traits like race, gender and eye color; as well as anti-scientific bias which holds, against all empirical evidence, that homosexual behavior in particular, and sexual promiscuity in general, optimizes individual or public health.

I am not sure about the "absence of all empirical proof" part, but let's for the sake of argument assume it's absolutely 100% correct (which it isn't, but let's just go with this for a second) and being gay is a choice, that it's not (as they say) hardwired into the brain.

What possible difference would that make?

For any given person, their sexuality is either a choice or it isn't. If it isn't, then no civilized society should condemn that person for merely being what they were born to be. If it's a choice then no civilized society should condemn that person for exercising his or her free will.

There's one republican who disagrees with the pledge:

Republican presidential candidate Gary Johnson thinks the pledge that an Iowa Christian conservative group is circulating is offensive because it condemn gays, single parents, divorcees, Muslims, women who choose to have abortions “and everyone else who doesn’t fit in a Norman Rockwell painting.”

And:

This ‘pledge’ is nothing short of a promise to discriminate against everyone who makes a personal choice that doesn’t fit into a particular definition of ‘virtue’.

Proof that not all conservatives got teh crazie.

Good to know.

Scenes From The (New) GOP

First there's the House Budget guy:

Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI), a leading advocate of shrinking entitlement spending and the architect of the plan to privatize Medicare, spent Wednesday evening sipping $350 wine with two like-minded conservative economists at the swanky Capitol Hill eatery Bistro Bis.

More on Ryan from TPM:

Susan Feinberg, an associate business professor at Rutgers, was at Bistro Bis celebrating her birthday with her husband that night. When she saw the label on the bottle of Jayer-Gilles 2004 Echezeaux Grand Cru Ryan's table had ordered, she quickly looked it up on the wine list and saw that it sold for an eye-popping $350, the most expensive wine in the house along with one other with the same pricetag.

Feinberg, an economist by training, was even more appalled when the table ordered a second bottle. She quickly did the math and figured out that the $700 in wine the trio consumed over the course of 90 minutes amounted to more than the entire weekly income of a couple making minimum wage.

"We were just stunned," said Feinberg, who e-mailed TPM about her encounter later the same evening. "I was an economist so I started doing the envelope calculations and quickly figured out that those two bottles of wine was more than two-income working family making minimum wage earned in a week."

The Federal Minimum Wage is $7.25/hour. Assuming a 40-hour workweek and two minimum wage earners, that's $580 before taxes.

But of course the Tea Party wing of the GOP wants to look at eliminating the minimum wage:

Republican Presidential candidate Michele Bachmann has soft-pedaled her opposition to the minimum wage law considerably since 2005, when she was quoted as saying, at a Minnesota State Senate hearing, “Literally, if we took away the minimum wage—if conceivably it was gone—we could potentially virtually wipe out unemployment completely because we would be able to offer jobs at whatever level.” Appearing on CBS’s (CBS) Face the Nation on June 26, Bachmann would say only that eliminating the minimum wage is “something that obviously Congress would have to look at” as a solution to high unemployment.

And then there's Senator Orrin Hatch who thinks the poor aren't doing enough to help out:

Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) voted against beginning debate on a measure that would have the Senate declare the rich should share the pain of debt reduction Thursday, a day after arguing that it's the poor and middle class who need to do more.

"I hear how they're so caring for the poor and so forth," Hatch said in remarks on the Senate floor Wednesday, in reference to Democrats. "The poor need jobs! And they also need to share some of the responsibility."

Hatch's comments were aimed at a motion that passed 74 to 22 to start debating a non-binding resolution that says millionaires and billionaires should play a more meaningful role in reducing the nation's debt.

The point of all this?

Just to let you all know that this is the GOP these days. To all my Republican friends (and relatives), I'd like to ask a question: Do you really want to be associated with such mean spirited greed?

And we're not even talking about choice or marriage equality.

The Michele Bachmann History Channel

Song of the Day

Tom Petty to Michele Bachmann: Quit Playing 'American Girl'

UPDATE: A Thought: As she's got the spirit of a serial killer in her, maybe she can pick another song from "Silence of the Lambs" instead:


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See If YOU Can Figure Michele Bachmann Out

Give a listen about half way through at 1:20:


Chris Wallace is also confused. A transcript:

CW: Here's what you said in the New Hampshire Debate, let's put it up.

MB [at the debate]:I do support a Constitutional Amendment on...between a man and a woman but I would not be going into the states to overturn their state law.

CW: That's why I'm confused. If you support state rights, why do you also support a constitutional amendment that would prevent any state from recognizing same sex marriage?

MB: That's entirely consistent. The States have, under the 10th Amendment, the right to pass any law they like. Also federal officials, at the federal level, have the right to also put forth a constitutional amendment.

She then says that the issue will end up in the courts but she doesn't want judges who'll legislate from the bench.

Wallace tries again at about 2:30 and finally gets somewhere (I think):

CW: Do you want, say, it's a state issue and the states should be able to decide or would you like to see a constitutional amendment so that it's banned everywhere?

And she answers:

MB: It is, it is...both. It's important for your viewers to know that Federal law will trump state law.

And then after a lot of nothing from Bachmann, Wallace almost nails the jello to the wall at about 3:44:

CW: So briefly, you would support a constitutional amendment that would overturn the New York state law.

MB: Yes, I would. I would. That is not inconsistent because the states have the right under the 10th Amendment to do what they'd like to do but the federal government also has the right to pass a federal constitutional amendment.

As Jonathan Capehart points out:

So, Bachmann is fine with what New York did. That’s what states do, thanks to the 10th Amendment. They’re allowed to determine their own laws without interference from Washington. But in the next breath, Bachmann is also in favor of the federal government trumping a state law legalizing same-sex marriage by defining marriage as a union between one man and one woman through a constitutional amendment.

That didn’t make sense when Bachmann first made this argument at the New Hampshire debate two weeks ago. And it made no sense yesterday. You can be for a state’s right to determine the definition of marriage. You can be for an amendment banning same-sex marriage by etching discrimination into this nation’s founding document. But you can’t be both.

And you thought her John Wayne Gacy stuff was funny.

Michele Bachmann: John Wayne...John Wayne Gacy...Whatever

She sure does seem to have a problem with facts. Via Talking Points Memo:

In an interview with Fox News, Bachmann boasted: "But what I want them to know, just like John Wayne was from Waterloo, Iowa, that's the kind of spirit that I have, too."

As it turns out, John Wayne was from Winterset, Iowa. It was serial killer clown John Wayne Gacy who actually spent some time living in Waterloo, Iowa.

As for John Wayne's "spirit" that was decidedly racist. Via Wikipedia:

In an interview with Playboy magazine published on May 1, 1971, Wayne made several controversial remarks about race and class in the United States. The interview became a hot topic and many stores had trouble keeping the issue in stock.

[snip]

"There were great numbers of people who needed new land the Indians were selfishly trying to keep it for themselves"

[snip]

"I believe in white supremacy until blacks are educated to a point of responsibility. I don't believe in giving authority and positions of leadership and judgment to irresponsible people."

I'm going to spot her on this one and assume that this is just one more thing she doesn't know.
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Don't know much about history

Lil Ricky Santorum tries to one-up Michele Bachmann in the stupidity sweepstakes and succeeds.
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