To Know Them is to Fear Them

Shaun Mullen and Michael Stickings have already chimed in today on Mike Huckabee, so I won’t. What I will chime in on is the larger context in which people like Huckabee operate.

In short, they believe in the reconstruction of everything around them — from government to science to media — so those things fit their interpretation of their bible. Anything that is not thus reconstructed is not valid to them.

Andrew Sullivan zeroes in on this mentality today and concludes:

Once you have dedicated your life to fundamentalist religion, once you have insisted that nothing – let alone politics – can be independent of absolute Biblical judgment, documents like the Constitution are indeed secondary. They have to be amended to be brought into line with the authoritative truth. Nothing can interfere with that authority – nothing.

Do you think Sullivan is over-reacting? Do you think he’s exaggerating?

He’s not. I know. I was raised in a church environment that frequently accepted such principles and welcomed those who espoused them into our lives. After leaving that church and making my peace with the secular world, I am now terribly hesitant to go back — so much so that I refuse to ask my own parents what they think about proposals like re-shaping the Constitution to fit Biblical Law. I refuse to ask them because I’m afraid I already know their response: “What’s wrong with that? It doesn’t sound like such a bad idea to me. The Bible is God’s word, after all.”

As the immortal Charlie Brown might say: “AAAAAARGH!”