Semper Fidelis>
Dick G
**********
Posted on 05/22/2010 7:12:43 AM PDT by Christian_Capitalist
May 21, 2010
8:02AM
Rand Paul: We Wouldn't Need Laws If Everyone Were Christian
Post by Sarah Posner
Appearing on The Brody File, Rand Paul, who believes that portions of the 1964 Civil Rights Act need "further discussion" and may violate private business owners' First Amendment rights, said that we wouldn't really need laws in this country if everyone were a good Christian:
Although Paul attends a mainline Protestant church, in his comments one might hear an echo of Christian Reconstructionism. RD contributor Julie Ingersoll, an expert on Christian Reconstructionism, once described it to me this way: "Reconstructionists claim to have an entirely integrated, logically defensible Christian worldview. Reconstructionism addresses everything you have to think about." In other words, as a society we should follow (preferably) Biblical Law, and dispense with all but a small handful of civil laws.
The younger Paul may not be an ardent Christian Reconstructionist -- he may not even realize its influence on his views -- but his father, Congressman Ron Paul, used to employ one of Christian Reconstrutionism's leading thinkers, Gary North, on his staff. North is the son-in-law of the founder of Christian Reconstructionism, R.J. Rushdoony.
Howard Phillips, the former Nixon administration official who founded the Conservative Caucus and Constitution Party (formerly the U.S. Taxpayers Party) and co-founded the powerful Council for National Policy, claims Rushdoony as his mentor. Phillips once observed, "Much of the energy in the home school movement, the Christian school movement, the right-to-life movement, and in the return of Christians to the political world, is directly traceable to Dr. Rushdoony's work." James Dobson, who offered a last-minute endorsement of Paul, had voted for Phillips in 1996 as "protest vote" against the GOP. Ron Paul spoke at the Constitution Party's fundraiser in 2009, as did John Birch Society president John McManus.
Reconstructionists share the worldview of the John Birch Society, which as Adele Stan reported, has enthusiastically praised Paul's victory over Republican Trey Grayson. (In 1963 -- the year Rand Paul was born and, he claimed on Rachel Maddow's show, he would have marched with Martin Luther King, Jr. -- the John Birch Society insisted that proposed civil rights laws were "in flagrant violation of the 10th amendment," and threatened individual freedom.) On the 40th anniversary of the Civil Rights Act, in 2004, the elder Paul stated on the floor of the House, "The Civil Rights Act of 1964 not only violated the Constitution and reduced individual liberty; it also failed to achieve its stated goals of promoting racial harmony and a color-blind society." (h/t Rachel Maddow's twitter feed).
Many Christian Reconstructionists believe certain forms of slavery are biblical. As I wrote in a post last month, the resurgence of the JBS (it was a co-sponsor of this year's Conservative Political Action Conference) alongside Christian Reconstructionism signals a resurgence of the sort of mish-mash of states' rights and individual liberty arguments made by libertarians and tea partiers -- in Paul's case, federal civil rights laws are portrayed as some sort of government invasion of liberty -- in which civil rights protections are flipped on their head and portrayed as antithetical to (white people's) freedom.
Diana Butler Bass, who dissected Virginia Governor (then candidate) Bob McDonnell's thesis as a piece of Christian Reconstructionist thinking, told me after McDonnell omitted mention of slavery from his proclamation of Confederate History Month:
Others have deftly shown what's historically wrong with Paul's claims. As Blair L. M. Kelley wrote at Salon, Paul's arguments "echo the arguments made for segregation in his state before the turn of the 20th century," when, in Kentucky, a state senator "proposed a new law requiring railroads 'to furnish separate coaches or cars for the travel or transportation of the white and colored passengers.'"
At TAPPED, Adam Serwer unpacked Paul's feeble defense of his stance (claiming that he finds racism "abhorrent" and would have marched with King):
Black people had been living in the "leave it to the states" nightmare since Reconstruction, during which the war-weary North abandoned black people to the terrible lawlessness of a vengeful South. Civil-rights movement leaders were fighting for the federal government to secure their rights against the arbitrary tyranny of the political powers in the Southern states, which maintained their hold on local government through coercion and violence.
Paul seems to think that good Christians don't need civil laws (or civil rights laws, for that matter) for them to do the right thing. But it's crucial to ascertain what that "right thing" really is.
What, the author’s extreme bias against people of faith?
Rand Paul is an extremest? However, Obama is a Socialist-Marxist Union community organizer..liar and cheat and that’s okay. Give me an American, Libertarian any day. I mostly disagree with Sarah....
What everybody seems to be missing is that when one defends freedom of association and property rights, liberal automatically assume that you hate black people. In other words if you say that people have the right to deal with and only with those that they choose, the liberals ugly soul hears “black”. Apparently the only reason not to like somebody, to them, is their color. Projection.
Am re-reading; and slowly. . .
(You quote John Adams)
“Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”
AMEN bro!
But he IS a Communist
Right. Liberals seem to assume that the average white American secretly hates blacks and is just itching to do some discriminatin’ against them if only given the chance. But maybe that view of things says more about their own social circles, than the great unwashed Middle America they seek to “fix”.
If this were so; we would not have Leftists/Progressives i.e. today's Democrats.
this hit piece written by a Posner - is the writer related to that other paragon of hate - the Michael Posner who is an undersecretary of state and apologized to the chi coms about arizona’s immigration law?
I’m not sure. I wondered that myself, but hadn’t tried to Google up any relation just yet.
Maybe another Soros capo? The MSM have the long knives out for Paul!
Excellent QUOTE!
She’s just another Christian hater. A real whack job I might add.
She wrote a book attacking Christian fundamentalists. The ones who fight in wars to defend her right to bash them.
People get so upset when someone says something that 20 years ago would have been considered self evident.
It’s not a trivial point. Their anger over their disorders not being accepted by society causes them to lash out at the most visible targets of their internal rage. Most of the contributors to a web site like this hail from the group of people suffering from internal conflicts over sexual perversion and guilt over abortion. More and more these days the euthanasia crowd are also burying their guilt and pain by attacking the voices of morality.
They are doing it by expanding the purview of government over everything. All Christians should be libertarian. Give God the maximum freedom to work in this world. He isn’t satisfied with 1 hour a week in a tiny sanctuary.
Semper Fidelis>
Dick G
**********
And yet she's editor of an online "Religion" magazine. Of sorts.
It wouldn't terribly surprise me if she considers herself a "liberal Christian".
FACT: Not all christians, are christians..
You're right, it's not a trivial point. I guess I just felt impolitic in pointing it out.
But I don't object to you doing so, and I understand (and largely agree) with your points
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