On this date in both 2015, as well as 2016, “Crazy/Stupid Republican of the Day” profiled Jason Rapert, the Arkansas State Senate, serving District 35 there. We noted in that profile that while Rapert is a member of the Holy Ghost Ministry that does missionary work in Ghana and Uganda, the darker side of that group is that it has pushed for Uganda’s draconian laws to criminals homosexuality with a death sentence, and Rapert himself has praised Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni for the attempt purge on Uganda’s LGBT citizens. However, that’s not his only theocratic action… Jason Rapert has also tried passing bans on same sex marriage in Arkansas, as well as tried to pass an unconstitutional ban on abortion as early as when a fetal heartbeat is detected, at 12 weeks, and uses the Book of John to justify dropping nuclear weapons on all of Iraq and Syria to rid us of the “barbarians” in the region, while lamenting that the United States can’t be more like Saudi Arabia and handle gays more harshly. Rapert has also outed himself as a Birther, complaining about “minorities running the country” and suggested that President Obama had committed treason by allowing Ebola victims to be treated inside the United States under quarantine. His legislative stances also include support for Voter ID, drug testing welfare recipients, and putting concealed firearms in both churches and on college campuses. Rapert also declared war on Wikipedia in the past few months, publicly declaring any and all negative stories in the media listed against him as “false and libelous”, and responded to a constituent meeting him in public and asking him by policy by refusing to answer to a “smartypants” like them and fleeing in his truck. Rapert then got on social media and posted a vague threat for no constituent to ever approach him again, threatening, “Not smart to come up and harass somebody in a parking lot who’s carrying a handgun. Better be glad you decided to walk away.”
Ah, good democracy, where our elected leaders answer to simple questions from the populace by threatening to put a bullet in them. Wonderful. That’s exactly the sort of lesson I’m sure Holy Ghost Ministries has taught him to express fine Christian values. Speaking of that, you really have to wonder considering after all Jesus spoke about being kind to refugees (and growing up as one, himself), how Jason Rapert could ignore that message and call for all Muslims from being banned entry into the United States in November 2015. He justified that reaction by falsely claiming Islam calls for the death of anyone who refuses to be converted to their religion. Oh, but Rapert also voted for Arkansas’ HB 1228, their own “religious freedom law” to allow for his fellow Christians to legally discriminate against LGBT citizens, and chalk it up to their faith telling them to be intolerant, and their deeply held beliefs supposedly cannot be violated.
And Rapert’s still an all-around bigot, as he proved when he called for the removal of a black Arkansas judge who disagreed with the judge working on the Tamir Rice case, who felt that charges were not necessary against the law enforcement that gunned him down in two seconds. Rapert insisted Judge Wendell Griffin was not just writing “racially motivated hatred and anti-law enforcement remarks”, but imagined somehow that his comments were also “inappropriate sexual references” that he imagined where in Griffin’s comments. Of course, Rapert’s grudge with Griffin goes back some time, asking the church to also strip the judge of his title as a minister, and when former Arkansas Attorney General Dustin McDaniel weighed in to defend Griffin, Jason Rapert made the level-headed decision to tell McDonald he is an “abortion pimp”.
And since we last discussed Jason Rapert here at CSGOPOTD, he has not mellowed out much. Heck, we even missed the time he got on Facebook and advocated for using nuclear weapons against the Islamic State. Sure, there are only a few thousand of those Jihadists left, and it’s not like millions wouldn’t also die in the fallout if we just nuked them, right? Or that the multiple countries like Syria and Iraq that they’re operating in, or their allies wouldn’t be pissed at us for that?
Look, we’ve pretty well established that Jason Rapert is a fanatical ***hole in our previous posts about him. But just when you think you’ve seen the worst he has to offer, he proves you wrong. Rapert was at the 2016 RNC to support Donald Trump, because of course he was. And Jason Rapert was really mad at the “Never Trump” Republicans present, who were rallying behind Sen. Ted Cruz for refusing to endorse Trump. And so it was that Jason Rapert clashed with future CSGOPOTD Lori Saine, accusing her of not being a “good Christian” because she would not support Trump.
We repeat, he attacked her for not being a “good Christian” because she would not support a racist, sexist, thrice married billionaire who boasts about committing sexual assault, denies feeling the need to ask God for forgiveness for anything, impugns the honor of our veterans and the families of our fallen soldiers, lies about his charitable giving, covets wealth above all else, and has not just appeared on the cover of pornographic magazines, but in multiple pornographic films.
So… yeah, while we might not think highly of Lori Saine, we’ll pick her as the lesser of two evils in that exchange.
Back to Rapert… we discussed the time he threatened a constituent that they were lucky he didn’t pull out his gun and shoot him for approaching him, right? Well, Jason Rapert doesn’t like any sort of criticism, so when one of his other constituents, Nate Sullinger, criticized him for not understanding there’s a separation of church and state, Rapert thought the proper way to respond was to begin to declare himself a victim, and that the man was “attacking his faith”, before posting the logo for his local hot dog vending company and saying he “abhors God”. Which for those playing at home, is a false narrative and a way to get Kool-Aid drinking conservatives to boycott a business based on a lie. Rapert isn’t backing down, either, claiming that Sullinger’s original statement amounted to (wait for it…) “hate speech” against him as a Christian. Then again, Rapert’s enough of a pearl-clutching loon that I suppose we’re lucky he didn’t tell his followers that Sullinger was “exposing children to weiners” so they’d get torches and pitchforks for real.
Jason Rapert’s Arkansas State Senate seat is up in 2018, and it can’t come fast enough to give voters in his district a chance to get this maniac out of office.