1974 – Watergate: the Supreme Court unanimously ruled that President Nixon had no authority to withhold subpoenaed White House tapes and ordered the tapes to be surrendered to the Watergate special prosecutor.
1983 – KC Royal George Brett has a game-winning home run against the Yankees nullified in the "Pine Tar Incident".
COINCIDENCE? I think NOT!
“When Biblical law conflicted with American law, Eidsmoe said, O.R.U. students were generally taught that ‘the first thing you should try to do is work through legal means and political means to get it changed.“
- michele bachmann
FROM THE CHURCH OF INEFFABLE STUPIDITY:
I confess. I was willfully, deliberately, and studiously ignorant of the people behind the phenomena that we have named Michele Bachmann. It is not that I don't care about creepy christian dominionists like Rushdoony ( I do, and even tried to read through his opus magnus stupidus, The Institutes of Biblical Law), but frankly, I was too shocked and awed by the pure spectacle of the GOP candidates to really dig into the powers behind any of them.
After reading Bruni's fascinating article, The Divine Ms. M.
I decided to dive into her past and learn about the christian nut jobs who made her what she is - a whirled crass ignoramus, dingbat, and half wit, although I believe my last term may give her too much credit by half.
First, about Rushdoony. Even the blissed Reverend Jerry Falwell (Ignorance is indeed bliss) found his positions and opinions too much to bear. The Heritage folks disowned any connections they had previously with this cretin. I guess his ideas are best summed up in this exchange. Rushdoony once called for laws "mandating the death penalty for homosexuals and drunkards." After the predictable fallout, Rushdoony responded with a letter to the editor stated that he was misquoted. He didn't intend to put drunkards to death.
Here are a few of Rushdoony's more brilliant insights. "The exousia on the woman’s head of 1 Cor 11:10 is a symbol, both of her authority and of her submission to authority; the mark placed on Cain represented God’s determination to withhold the penalty of capital punishment from the family authority structure."
Among the things he wanted to instill in America (biblical law replacing the Constitution as the sole source of all authority), he demanded "the denial of citizenship to eunuchs, the execution of blasphemers, and incorrigible juvenile delinquents," and the adoption of the entire Olde Testament as rigid, absolute, civil and criminal law.
Rushdoony had a great impact on a number of people, including John Eidsmoe, who used Michele Bachmann as a research assistant when he wrote " “Christianity and the Constitution”. The underlying theory of this book was that christian laws prevail over civil ones. If they come into conflict, the christian's task is to "work through legal means and political means to get it changed.“
That, in a nutjobshell, is the whole reason for being for Michele Bachmann. She isn't just trying to appeal to her base, the bible beating bastards who treasure irrational fairy tales over science, logic, or facts. She really means it.
Eidsmoe has his own blog, which makes for fascinating reading. When going through Arizona's Grand Ditch, he claims that 46% of Americans believe in the truth, that the world is less than 10,000 years old.
Each exhibit is labeled by age, and as one walks the Trail one observes 1.7-billion-year-old folds, then 1.2-billion-year-old mud cracks, 800-million-year-old algai reefs, and 270-million-year-old fossils. Thus, on a relatively short walk, one will have traversed about one and a half billion years.
AHA, you think. He accepts the science of physicks with out 14 billion year universe, and he accepts evolution! Not hardly.
But then, why must tolerance be only a one-way street? Should the Trail of Time — erected at the Canyon at my expense — communicate a message of exclusion to me? As a creationist, should I feel that I am not fully part of the community because I do not accept the uniformitarian and evolutionary conclusions written in stone on the Trail of Time and elsewhere throughout the Grand Canyon and practically all national parks? Because I reject the conclusion that the various layers of rock in the Grand Canyon were laid over hundreds of millions of years, should I conclude that I am not really welcome to hike its trails?
As in so many other areas, the courts often treat Establishment Clause cases with a double standard. But I need only gaze upon the magnificence of the Canyon to reassure myself that blind nature could never have formed such a wonder, but only the hand of God Himself.
In one of my many conversations while hiking the Bright Angel Trail, a man asked me, “Does the Bible say anything about the Grand Canyon?” I answered, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth,” and then noted that the Great Flood of Noah’s time explained the formation of the Canyon far better than a uniformitarian process.
As a creationist you don't feel welcome on a grand canyon trail? Simply because science is on display? Instead, you would rather force your archaic, laughable Fairy tales on the rest of us, and demand that we follow your path into ineffable stupidity?
Sorry, Charlie.
Here's another beaut:
Many of us are seasoned veterans of the War on Christmas, the campaign to drive the recognition of Christmas out of the public square, replacing Jesus with Santa Claus, “Silent Night” with “Please, Santa Baby,” and the creche with Santa’s workshop.
Is there also a War on Easter? It’s less intense, but real nevertheless:
A war on EASTER? Tell me please, why do chocolate bunnies shit colored jelly beans?
Christians celebrate the Resurrection of Christ in the springtime for a very different reason — the Bible clearly teaches that Christ was crucified, died, was buried, and rose during the time of the Passover. But is it possible that God the Father planned for the events of Easter to take place in the springtime for a very special reason — that the rebirth of nature in spring is a perfect picture of the Resurrection?
- - -
What did God through Christ reconcile unto Himself? The world! Not just the human race, but rather the world! As God said to Adam after the Fall, “Cursed is the ground for thy sake.” (Genesis 3:17). Sin is like a cancer; it spreads from man to all creation. For “the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now” (Romans 8:22), awaiting the redemption through Christ.
This is one of the strongest arguments for Sunday worship. In six days God created the heavens and the earth and all that is therein, and He pronounced the good, and on the seventh day He rested. But the creation is bound in sin, infested with the cancer of sin. So God reconciled the world unto Himself through Christ, Who conquered sin, death, and the Devil on the Cross. His Resurrection on Easter Sunday marks the re-creation of the world, and we celebrate Sunday by worship.
In another lovely missive, Eidsmoe agrees that several of the more famous founding fathers may not have held christian beliefs, but counters that with this list of "facts":
Of the 55 delegates to the Constitutional Convention, at least 51 belonged to orthodox Christian churches and expressed clear Christian convictions. These include 28 Anglicans, 8 Presbyterians, 7 Congregationalists, 2 Dutch Reformed, 2 Lutherans, 2 Methodists, and 2 Roman Catholics.
The Bible accounts for fully 34% of all of the writings of leading American political thinkers from 1760-1805. In addition, the human authors they quoted were overwhelmingly Christian, including in order of frequency Baron Montesquieu (Roman Catholic), Sir William Blackstone (Anglican), and John Locke (essentially Protestant).
Most of the Founding Fathers gained their basic learning at home or in church schools, using the Bible and the thoroughly-Christian New England Primer as their principal texts. Those who pursued higher education were trained at Christian colleges; of the first 108 colleges founded in colonial America, 106 were founded to train pastors and to provide others with a thoroughly Christian education.
The average person in colonial New England (and only slightly less elsewhere) heard approximately 7,000 sermons during his lifetime, a total of about 15,000 hours of preaching (no, that’s not a misprint; sermons of two or more hours in length were standard fare in those days). The pastor was commonly the best-educated person in the community, and his sermons covered a wide variety of topics. Around election time, pastors commonly preached “election sermons” (often in a town hall for the entire community) in which they addressed the Christian duties of citizens and often commented on issues from a Biblical perspective.
I'm so glad he was there to witness all of that. In fact, in some states, religion was decreed. If you practiced another, less favored sect or cult, you could be arrested, even deported. The creation of places of higher education was considered one of the crowning points of the founding fathers. They knew that they had to rip the pliable minds of the innocents, and give them a real education, not some religious claptrap fed to them by some bible beater. Like Eidsmoe.
Once you read enough of his crap, one point comes to mind. He follows a lot of what Rushdoony preaches, or preached until his death in 2001. He simply teaches and preaches it with a far more pleasant wrapping, and a lovely lemon pine scent strong enough to cover up the bullshit that is contained within.
Even with a far more pleasing veneer than Rushdoony, Eidsmoe has ruffled some feathers. He called for secession of the Alabama, as though the wrong side had one our very (un)Civil War. Even the Wisconsin TeaBuggerers uninvited him when they learned the fool extent of his views. That hasn't stopped Eidsmoe, though. He continues to advise Bachmann, he teaches and preaches, and debates the ACLU whenever possible. He serves on a committee that supports putting the fifteen, no, Ten Commandments in public buildings and all schools. Worst of all? The absolutely scariest part? On top of his divinity and law school degrees, he graduated from Air Command & Staff College and the Air War College.
Holy Air Force, Batmann. If they all think like that in the Air Force, we have some serious trouble.