Thursday, February 09, 2006

We're on a mission from God


Sam Brownback is a US Senator from Kansas. He is also a real piece of work--endowed with both a massive sense of self-regard and a real authoritarian streak. By all accounts, he plans on running for president in 2008. For some reason, he thought it was a good idea to sit down for an interview with Rolling Stone. The results are not pretty. Some excerpts:

Just six years ago, winning the evangelical vote required only a veneer of bland normalcy, nothing more than George Bush's vague assurance that Jesus was his favorite philosopher. Now, Brownback seeks something far more radical: not faith-based politics but faith in place of politics. In his dream America, the one he believes both the Bible and the Constitution promise, the state will simply wither away. In its place will be a country so suffused with God and the free market that the social fabric of the last hundred years -- schools, Social Security, welfare -- will be privatized or simply done away with. There will be no abortions; sex will be confined to heterosexual marriage. Men will lead families, mothers will tend children, and big business and the church will take care of all….

He tells a story about a chaplain who challenged a group of senators to reconsider their conception of democracy. "How many constituents do you have?" the chaplain asked. The senators answered: 4 million, 9 million, 12 million. "May I suggest," the chaplain replied, "that you have only one constituent?" Brownback pauses. That moment, he declares, changed his life. "This" -- being senator, running for president, waving the flag of a Christian nation -- "is about serving one constituent." He raises a hand and points above him….

The nation's leading evangelicals have already lined up behind Brownback, a feat in itself. A decade ago, evangelical support for a Catholic would have been unthinkable. Many evangelicals viewed the Pope as the Antichrist and the Roman Catholic Church as the Whore of Babylon. But Brownback is the beneficiary of a strategy known as co-belligerency -- a united front between conservative Catholics and evangelicals in the culture war.…


Senator Brownback thinks sex is icky:

Sex, in all its various forms, is at the center of Brownback's agenda. America, he believes, has divorced sexuality from what is sacred. "It's not that we think too much about sex," he says, "it's that we don't think enough of it." The senator would gladly roll back the sexual revolution altogether if he could, but he knows he can't, so instead he dreams of something better: a culture of "faith-based" eroticism in which premarital passion plays out not in flesh but in prayer.


He doesn’t like gays either:

During a recent broadcast Brownback explains that with the help of the VAT [Values Action Team}, he's working to defeat a measure that would stiffen penalties for violent attacks on gays and lesbians. Members of VAT help by mobilizing their flocks: An e-mail sent out by the Family Research Council warned that the hate-crime bill would lead, inexorably, to the criminalization of Christianity….

Sitting in his corner office in the Senate, Brownback returns to one of his favorite subjects: the scourge of homosexuality.… On Brownback's desk, adrift at the far end of the room, there's a Bible open to the Gospel of John. It doesn't bother Brownback that most Bible scholars challenge the idea that Scripture opposes homosexuality. "It's pretty clear," he says, "what we know in our hearts." This, he says, is "natural law," derived from observation of the world, but the logic is circular: It's wrong because he observes himself believing it's wrong. He has worldly proof, too. "You look at the social impact of the countries that have engaged in homosexual marriage." He shakes his head in sorrow, thinking of Sweden, which Christian conservatives believe has been made by "social engineering" into an outer ring of hell. "You'll know 'em by their fruits," Brownback says. He pauses, and an awkward silence fills the room. He was citing scripture -- Matthew 7:16 -- but he just called gay Swedes "fruits."


He belongs to a cultish group of other fundamentalist bigwigs who have lots of ideas:

They were striving, ultimately, for what Coe calls "Jesus plus nothing" -- a government led by Christ's will alone. In the future envisioned by Coe, everything -- sex and taxes, war and the price of oil -- will be decided upon not according to democracy or the church or even Scripture. The Bible itself is for the masses; in the Fellowship, Christ reveals a higher set of commands to the anointed few. It's a good old boy's club blessed by God….

The most bluntly theocratic effort, however, is the Constitution Restoration Act, …. If passed, it will strip the Supreme Court of the ability to even hear cases in which citizens protest faith-based abuses of power. Say the mayor of your town decides to declare Jesus lord and fire anyone who refuses to do so; or the principal of your local high school decides to read a fundamentalist prayer over the PA every morning; or the president declares the United States a Christian nation. Under the Constitution Restoration Act, that'll all be just fine….


These ideas seem mainly to involve all sorts of new regulations of personal behavior and few, if any, regulations of the more traditional kind:

His biggest financial backer is Koch Industries, an oil company that ranks among America's largest privately held companies. "The Koch folks," as they're known around the senator's office, are among the nation's worst polluters. In 2000, the company was slapped with the largest environmental civil penalty in U.S. history for illegally discharging 3 million gallons of crude oil in six states. That same year Koch was indicted for lying about its emissions of benzene, a chemical linked to leukemia, and dodged criminal charges in return for a $20 million settlement. Brownback has received nearly $100,000 from Koch and its employees, and during his neck-and-neck race in 1996, a mysterious shell company called Triad Management provided $410,000 for last-minute advertising on Brownback's behalf. A Senate investigative committee later determined that the money came from the two brothers who run Koch Industries.

Brownback has been a staunch opponent of environmental regulations that Koch finds annoying, fighting fuel-efficiency standards and the Kyoto Protocol on global warming. But for the senator, there's no real divide between the predatory economic interests of his corporate backers and his own moral passions. He received more money funneled through Jack Abramoff, the GOP lobbyist under investigation for bilking Indian tribes of more than $80 million, than all but four other senators -- and he blocked a casino that Abramoff's clients viewed as a competitor. But getting Brownback to vote against gambling doesn't take bribes; he would have done so regardless of the money.


Watergate felon Chuck Colson is Brownback’s idea of an intellectual:

Although Brownback converted to Catholicism in 2002 through Opus Dei, an ultraorthodox order that, like the Fellowship, specializes in cultivating the rich and powerful, the source of much of his religious and political thinking is Charles Colson, the former Nixon aide who served seven months in prison for his attempt to cover up Watergate. A "key figure," says Brownback, in the power structure of Christian Washington, Colson is widely acknowledged as the Christian right's leading intellectual. He is the architect behind faith-based initiatives, the negotiator who forged the Catholic-evangelical unity known as co-belligerency, and the man who drove sexual morality to the top of the movement's agenda….

Colson taught that abortion is only a "threshold" issue, a wedge with which to introduce fundamentalism into every question. The two men soon grew close, and began coordinating their efforts: Colson provides the strategy, and Brownback translates it into policy. "Sam has been at the meetings I called, and I've been at the meetings he called," Colson says….

And yet compassionate conservatism, as Colson conceives it and Brownback implements it, is strikingly similar to plain old authoritarian conservatism. In place of liberation, it offers as an ideal what Colson calls "biblical obedience" and what Brownback terms "submission." The concept is derived from Romans 13, the scripture by which Brownback and Colson understand their power as God-given: "Whosoever therefore resisteth the power, resisteth the ordinance of God: and they that resist shall receive to themselves damnation."

To Brownback, the verse is not dictatorial -- it's simply one of the demands of spiritual war, the "worldwide spiritual offensive" that the Fellowship declared a half-century ago…. Given to framing his own faith in terms of battles, he believes that secularists and Muslims are fighting a worldwide war against Christians -- sometimes in concert. "Religious freedom" is one of his top priorities, and securing it may require force. He's sponsored legislation that could lead to "regime change" in Iran, and has proposed sending combat troops to the Philippines, where Islamic rebels killed a Kansas missionary.

Brownback doesn't demand that everyone believe in his God -- only that they bow down before Him. Part holy warrior, part holy fool, he preaches an odd mix of theological naivete and diplomatic savvy. The faith he wields in the public square is blunt, heavy, unsubtle; brass knuckles of the spirit. But the religion of his heart is that of the woman whose example led him deep into orthodoxy: Mother Teresa -- it is a kiss for the dying. He sees no tension between his intolerance and his tenderness. Indeed, their successful reconciliation in his political self is the miracle at the heart of the new fundamentalism, the fusion of hellfire and Hallmark.


There is more, much more. Click on through.

Posted by jwb at 2:20 PM   

0 Comments:

Post a Comment
« home