He [God] is using me, all the time, everywhere, to stand up for a biblical worldview in everything that I do and everywhere I am. He is training me, He is working with me.
– Tom DeLay, Pearland Texas, 2002
Former Representative, money-launderer and conspirator and NRA A+er, Tom DeLay, who was later ruled by a bunch of Republican judges to have just been misunderstood (how often do we hear this?), who thinks the Constitution was written by God, also thinks Republicans are going to win big in the midterms.
Seriously, well…okay, jokingly (I think), how much would it cost God to get DeLay to take up his cause? Given DeLay’s record, we have good reasons to ask that question.
Here’s the thing: DeLay says Americans are sick of “same-sex marriage and abortion” and fed up with politicians who have “pushed God out of the public sphere.” Where he gets these ideas is anyone’s guess, since there is absolutely zero evidence for it.
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Or is there?
“God has spoken to me,” DeLay told The New Yorker magazine in 2007. “I listen to God, and what I’ve heard is that I’m supposed to devote myself to rebuilding the conservative base of the Republican Party, and I think we shouldn’t be underestimated.”
Keep in mind now, this steaming tower of…um, well…”morality”…is the guy who, in 2005, Slate called “a bogeyman to the left for his outrageous rhetoric, strong-arm tactics, and shady dealings.” Well, suffice it to say DeLay is a Texas Republican. Any detailing of corruption becomes redundant at that point.
People are finally understanding that they have got to bring God back into the mix of politics and what’s going on in the civil government.
“I’m really seeing a spiritual revival, a constitutional revival” he says, never mind that the two are mutually incompatible, unless the Constitution was written by God, which it wasn’t. It was written by a bunch of men who, sadly, did not foresee people like Tom DeLay.
People may not know it or may not be able to articulate it [he can’t] but they have a sense of what is right and what is truth [he has a sense of neither] and they’re grabbing a hold of that and they’re running with it [see what I mean about articulate?] and I’m very excited about it.
More excited that you were about the Russian oil executives and their money? More excited than you were about abusing your power? More excited than you were about Jack Abramoff?
Oh my, you must be very excited then!
Take a listen courtesy of Right Wing Watch:
The thing is, none of what DeLay says is true. It is a classic case of a Republican argument proceeding from false premises. According to Gallup, “the American public has become more tolerant on a number of moral issues” and one of those issues, “gay or lesbian relations,” have a morally acceptable rating of 58 percent. Gallup tells us that “acceptance of gay and lesbian relations has swelled from 38% in 2002 to majority support since 2010.”
Sure, Republicans aren’t likely to approve – only 39 percent, but 60 percent of Independents and 71 percent of Democrats approve and Gallup reveals that even Republicans have become more accepting since Gallup began tracking these numbers in 2001. And Gallup previously reported that same-sex marriage support has reached a new high of 55 percent and that “nearly eight in 10 young adults favor gay marriage.”
This doesn’t sound like the morality sh*tstorm DeLay is predicting.
Abortion is a more contentious issue but hardly the slam-dunk DeLay thinks it is. With an acceptability rating of 42 percent, it falls into the “contentious” issues category according to Gallup, along with doctor-assisted suicide. Only 28 percent of Republicans approve of abortion, 41 percent of independents, and 59 percent of Democrats.
Maybe math is different in DeLay’s heavenly summer home where the Almighty discusses tactics with him.
By the way, one of the things republicans most enjoy, married men and women having an affair, has a moral acceptability rating only of 7 percent, showing Republicans really are hypocrites and largely lack a moral compass.
DeLay told The New Yorker in 2007,
I see this as a cleansing process, where you can return to your principles, which are order, justice, and freedom – the basic principles of the conservative movement. We have to redefine government based on conservative principles, we have to win the war against our culture, and we have to win the war on terror.
The culture war has been largely lost, and many Republicans have as much as admitted this is true. The times they are a changing and the GOP did not change with them, and a 13th century worldview just doesn’t cut it in the 21st. And the war on terror is not so much a war as a euphemism that has been largely abandoned as the gaping falsehood that it is. Sure, Bush liked it, but Bush is, like DeLay, a Texas Republican so, yeah…you know what that means.
It is bizarre to see this ethically-challenged individual claim to be steering America back onto a moral compass he cannot himself find, and were I him, I would certainly worry more about falling off the biblically-mandated edge of the earth’s disk thingie than about what people are doing in the First Amendment-guaranteed privacy of their bedrooms.
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.
