Last updated on July 17th, 2023 at 06:12 pm
How many strikes does the GOP get till its thoroughly discredited? Red State’s Erick Erickson wrote in the Independent Journal Review yesterday to ask, After Kim Davis, How Much Longer Until We Have Another Civil War? Nothing like a tendentious reading of current events predicting a civil war. After all, implicit in the question is that there will be a civil war.
When Kim Davis, the Rowan County, KY, clerk was hauled off to jail for refusing to give marriage licenses, a White House spokesman said no official is above the law. Hillary Clinton cheered on Twitter. The left went wild. “Where is your god now?” one person tweeted.
At least he is clear about the why: Our refusal to let the Kim Davises of the world impose their religion on the rest of us.
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This isn’t a question of states rights any more than was slavery, unless it is the right of states to impose a particular religion on everyone in the state. In this case, a bizarre, inbred abortion posing as Christianity minus all the…well, Christian stuff. (Like love, forgiveness, turning the other cheek, giving away your money, lifting up the poor and condemning the rich who have sold their souls to Satan.)
Here, though posing as an outraged Christian, instead of turning the other cheek and suffering a quiet and self-satisfied martyrdom, Erickson dredges up a bunch of examples he says prove left-wing hypocrisy. He throws in Hillary Clinton’s emails for good measure and even pulls up the old faked IRS scandal:
Hillary Clinton using a private email server is no big deal to the left. Every changing story is met with acceptance. The Democrats’ immigration plans have included trying to pull a fast one on a judge in Texas and the left applauded. The IRS can leak confidential donor lists of conservative groups and harass the same groups. Political opponents get awfully convenient “random” audits. Again and again, the left gets to ignore the laws it wishes to ignore while the right must comply.
He does everything, in fact, but argue against Marriage Equality.
He says in lieu of an argument, “Well, fine! If that’s the way you want it, you’ll have war instead!” You can almost hear him stomping his feet.
He makes a show of pulling up facts, but pointedly ignores Dick Cheney telling Newsmax’s Steve Malzberg, “It’s the law of the land and as a general proposition, it seems to me you’ve got to go forward with it.”
Instead, childishly, Erickson sounds like the brother who points to another kid and says “Well, he did it!”
As Liz Cheney then pointed out, “As my dad said, it is the law of the land. The court has ruled. And she’s not an employee of a church or synagogue, she’s a government employee. So, she has an obligation to uphold the law.”
What Erickson gives us is a swipe at the legitimacy of the Supreme Court and a defense of special rights for one particular religion by way of an attack, ironically, on “preferential treatment”:
On top of that, five Justices of the United States Supreme Court, who are some of the least representative of Americans, can invalidate the laws of a majority of states on a whim without actual legal reasoning. Because people want to be happy, the laws can be overturned.
When all these things happen, we have moved beyond a nation of laws to a nation of men. When we have a nation of men, power is everything, policy is fleeting, and laws are meaningless. People with enough money can get preferential treatment. The more powerful a person is, the more he can escape punishment. Eventually, some men can decide to grab power by any means necessary and, without laws that can withstand the sway of men, get a pass at unconstitutional means used to grab power. The constitution becomes a worthless relic.
I am certain he thinks he is on to something, but for sheer get-to-the-pointedness, this is epic fail. Any professor of mine would have thrown it out and told me to start again. It is really a rather feeble tirade, as it focuses on a general anti-government malaise rather than on Kim Johnson and her refusal to do her job.
At that point, the citizens will clash beyond the ballot box. We see that beginning with random killings of police and random killings by police. It will only get worse. No one should want it and no one, myself included, does want it. But how much longer until we have another civil war?
Our nation’s leaders have excelled at nothing so much as dividing and pitting American against American. When the President of the United States tells supporters that Republicans are the enemy and they should take guns to knife fights, we should not be surprised when they take him seriously. Besides, who will punish them? They perceive themselves to be on the winning team.
How much longer before the cold war of citizenry fed and flamed by Washington turns hot?
There is another unsupported assertion to close his already tendentious essay: that there is a cold war of citizenry against government. I understand that this is a conservative trope, that it lurked behind the corporate-funded Tea Party as much as it now exhibits itself in the rants of Donald Trump, the idea that government is the enemy.
But it isn’t government that is the enemy. It is inequality. Racial inequality, religious inequality, economic inequality. These are the driving forces of today’s demographics. The government isn’t the problem here: it isn’t the county trying to impose religion, but Kim Davis, who thinks one religion is more equal than all others. And that is the one thing Erick Erickson did not talk about.
Hrafnkell Haraldsson, a social liberal with leanings toward centrist politics has degrees in history and philosophy. His interests include, besides history and philosophy, human rights issues, freedom of choice, religion, and the precarious dichotomy of freedom of speech and intolerance. He brings a slightly different perspective to his writing, being that he is neither a follower of an Abrahamic faith nor an atheist but a polytheist, a modern-day Heathen who follows the customs and traditions of his Norse ancestors. He maintains his own blog, A Heathen’s Day, which deals with Heathen and Pagan matters, and Mos Maiorum Foundation www.mosmaiorum.org, dedicated to ethnic religion. He has also contributed to NewsJunkiePost, GodsOwnParty and Pagan+Politics.
