freeinfidel

Mike Huckabee’s failed bid for the Republican nomination might seem to consign him to the list of also-rans. Yet the fact that he was ever in the running has profound and dark implications for America’s future.

At the time of writing, Mike Huckabee’s bid for the Republican presidential nomination looks all but over. Many will breathe a sigh of relief, but that may be premature. The significance of Huckabee’s run for the most powerful job in the world is not that he lost, but that he was taken seriously. That should be a matter of deep concern to anyone who truly values freedom.

That’s because I firmly believe that Huckabee’s campaign was profoundly and alarmingly dishonest. While the public debates concerned the predictable topics of US electioneering - the economy, the Iraq war, terrorism and taxes - Huckabee was engaged in a different battle, one not much touched on in public forums but not entirely secret either. Huckabee’s ambition, I believe, is the establishment of a fundamentalist Christian theocracy in the US.

I’m not the first or only one to think this way. But discussion of Huckabee’s extremism has been largely confined to the blogosphere. Aspects of it have made it into the public prints, to a degree on the TV networks, but always limited to the ephemeral controversy surrounding one or two statements. There seems surprisingly little talk about the broader significance of what Huckabee is about.

Perhaps that’s because those bloggers who have written about the more sinister implications of Huckabee’s stance are easily dismissed as conspiracy theorists. Well, if that’s what I am, so be it.

If you trawl Huckabee’s campaign site and study his speeches and interviews, it would be easy to conclude that, while he is certainly deeply religious, the political implications of his beliefs are at most a tad controversial. What have set off alarm bells are just two statements, one made as far back as 1992. So why the fuss?

Let’s look at these statements.

The AIDS plague

In 1992, Huckabee was a candidate for the US Senate. Answering written questions submitted to him by the Associated Press (AP), he wrote:

“If the federal government is truly serious about doing something with the AIDS virus, we need to take steps that would isolate the carriers of this plague.

“It is difficult to understand the public policy towards AIDS. It is the first time in the history of civilization in which the carriers of a genuine plague have not been isolated from the general population, and in which this deadly disease for which there is no cure is being treated as a civil rights issue instead of the true health crisis it represents.”

That’s specifically about AIDS, but Huckabee himself joined the dots by stating, in the same document:

“I feel homosexuality is an aberrant, unnatural, and sinful lifestyle, and we now know it can pose a dangerous public health risk.”

So we are in no real doubt about who these plague carriers are. Huckabee’s solution has echoes of the treatment of lepers in biblical times, which is where he wants to take the US. It’s important to note, too, that by 1992 it was common knowledge that AIDS could not be spread by casual contact.

The isolation of “the carriers of this plague” has other echoes too. Names such as Auschwitz, Belsen, Treblinka …

AP dug up and repeated these statements and they have garnered a fair bit of debate. Challenged on these words during the current nomination battle, Huckabee attempted to water them down a little but refused to retract them. Ultimately, it seems like a storm in a teacup - a slightly wacky statement, but hey, it was 16 years ago.

Bible vs Constitution

The other statement that has got people’s attention is more recent - said, in fact, to an audience in Michigan during the current nomination race:

“I have opponents in this race who do not want to change the Constitution. But I believe it’s a lot easier to change the Constitution than it would be to change the word of the living god. And that’s what we need to do - to amend the Constitution so it’s in God’s standards rather than try to change God’s standards so it lines up with some contemporary view.”

Replacing civil law with biblical law is a fundamental tennet of the Christian Reconstructionist movement. For example, Huckabee recently held a fundraiser at the Texas home of Dr Steven Hotze, a key figure among Christian Reconstructions and a notorious anti-choice and anti-gay activist, whose statements include:

“We affirm that the Bible is not only God’s statements to us regarding religion, salvation, eternity, and righteousness, but also the final measurement and depository of certain fundamental facts of reality and basic principles that God wants all mankind to know in the sphere of law, government, economics, business, education, arts and communication, medicine, psychology, and science. All theories and practices of these spheres of life are only true, right, and realistic to the degree that they agree with the Bible.”

When they talk about agreeing with the bible, they are very serious. Reconstructionists believe that the correct punishment for homosexuality, abortion (giving or receiving), adultery and other ‘crimes’ against Christianity is … death. These people are the US equivalent of the Taleban. If you want more information, I strongly recommend reading Michelle Goldberg’s Kingdom Coming: The rise of Christian Nationalism (available from Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk). Be prepared to be scared.

Christian Reconstructionism is a species of Dominionism - the belief that the Bible gives humans dominion over all the world and its resources (including animals, which means that conservation is unnecessary and maybe even ungodly). By extension, it gives its believers a warrant to impose their extremist beliefs on all others, and that no dissent may be tolerated. It is, in other words, a pure form of fascism.

For a Dominionist or Christian Reconstructionist, the Bible (or, at least, a fundamentalist reading of it) underscores every thought, every action, every belief. It’s important to understand this when viewing Huckabee’s statements. To take a fairly random example, on his own site, he says:

“I believe that we are currently engaged in a world war. Radical Islamic fascists have declared war on our country and our way of life. They have sworn to annihilate each of us who believe in a free society, all in the name of a perversion of religion and an impersonal god.”

It will be news to no-one that Republicans see themselves as being engaged in a war with Islamic extremists. But there seems to me to be another subtext here. It reads as though Huckabee believes this to be specifically a religious war. Note the “perversion of religion”. These people clearly have the wrong god. This statement is also in the bullet list at the top of Huckabee’s page on foreign policy issues where it is summarised as:

“I believe that we are currently engaged in a world war. This war is not a conventional war, and these terrorists are not a conventional enemy.”

Those two sentences could have come straight from a End Times website, describing the final battle at Armageddon.
That may seem a partial and even perverted twist on his words, but I don’t think so. I believe these words are carefully chosen to send messages to fellow Dominionists, Reconstructionists and those passionate for the early arrival of god’s kingdom on Earth. Huckabee is clearly indicating that he is among their number.

(There’s more about how Huckabee’s religious beliefs influence political decisions at AlterNet.)

The wedge

There is another context here, too - one concerned with the strategy of the religious right. And this is where we see the real dishonesty of Huckabee’s campaign.

An out-and-out Christian Reconstructionist could not get elected. Most people rightly see them as extremist wackos. But that’s not to say they are not dangerous.

It may be tiresome, even hackneyed, to keep drawing analogies between right-wing Christians and Nazis, but the parallels are there. In the late 1920s and early 1930s, those who held the extreme, anti-semitic, genocidal beliefs of pure Nazism were very few. People often join political organisations because they agree with maybe one or two points of their platform - in the case of the Nazis, it may have been nationalism, the economy or fear of communism. The Nazis managed to grasp enough power to plunge Europe into a savage night for more than a decade, and yet at no time could you say that a majority of Germans agreed with or executed the full Nazi belief system. Minorities, even insane ones, can gain control.

And so Americans might vote for an overtly religious candidate because they feel a need for a greater role for faith in society, or because they are afraid of how they imagine society is declining. But they would be scared away by any talk of stoning homos in the town square.

Enter the wedge strategy.

Proponents of so-called ‘Intelligent Design’ (ID), which is neither intelligent nor evidence of design, have been deploying their so-called ‘wedge’ strategy for some years now. This ploy was revealed in a leaked document before the ID movement, led by the Discovery Institute (another dishonest title) fessed up.

Basically, it runs like this: first they tried inflicting creationism on the US education system. That backfired so badly the Supreme Court actually outlawed it. And so creationism was rebadged as ‘creation science’, a true oxymoron. That didn’t work either, so the creationists stopped mentioning god and religion and executed a quick search & replace, turning ‘creation’ into ‘design’. This is literally true in the case of ‘Of Pandas and People’, the non-science science book at the centre of the Dover case (see 40 Days and 40 Nights, Matthew Chapman’s humorous and humane report of the trial - available at Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk). The Dover trial saw ID revealed for what it is, a con trick in which creationists lie in an attempt to infiltrate their irrelevant propaganda into science classes. That failed too, largely, so now creationists are reduced to whining about ‘teach the controversy’.

And that’s where the wedge comes in. Outside of extremist religious cults, ID/creationism lacks all credibility. Sane people find it difficult to take it seriously. The creationists are desperate for a platform, for some semblance of respectability. The idea of ‘teach the controversy’ is, again, built on a lie. There is no controversy. The acceptance of the theories of evolution and natural selection are accepted overwhelmingly by scientists. But acting as though there is a controversy (which would involve, as we’ve seen, teachers lying to students) gives the creationists the platform, the credbility they need to push further.

This lie forces open a wound in mankind’s corpus of knowledge in which the creationists can turn their knife, until all progress, all genuine understanding bleeds away. Where once was lively debate and vigorous pursuit of knowledge will be only the dead hand of religion.

And so it is with Huckabee, it seems to me. For now, he is content to be seen as pious and conservative, while subtly indicating to fellow travellers that there is more to come.

Making the Constitution ‘more consistent’ or ‘in line’ with biblical law is the thin end of the wedge that leads to theocracy. Yet where is the debate about this on CNN or MSNBC? Huckabee gets to talk about yoking the American public with brutal, mediaeval legal concepts and there’s barely a ripple. Next time, the issue will be bigger, more dangerous - the outlawing of homosexuality, perhaps, or abortion. And at that time, some people might think, “wait a minute, let’s go back and discuss this whole biblical law thing.” But it will be too late. That debate is over. Huckabee weathered it by limiting it to an apparently innocuous level. When it comes up again, he can simply say, “hey, we’ve discussed that already, let’s move on”, and yet most people don’t even know the debate took place.

The wedge is well and truly inserted, and you know where.

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