Today I learned of a new American constituency, a group made up of types of people I knew existed but did not realize they actually had their own party/ . They’re called Reconstructionists, or more precisely Christian Reconstructionists and from what I read about them in this article in Mother Jones they make traditional Christian Fundamentalists look like bong smoking alums of Cal-Berkeley.
You’ll have to read the whole article to get the full effect, but here’s some excerpts to give you a hint:
Reconstructionists aren’t shy about what exactly it is they are
pursuing: “The long-term goal of Christians in politics should be to
gain exclusive control over the franchise,” Gary North, a top
Reconstruction theorist, wrote in his 1989 book, Political Polytheism: The Myth of Pluralism. “Those who refuse to submit publicly…must be denied citizenship.”
WITH HIS KHAKI PANTS and checkered shirts, Gary DeMar could be one of a
million guys meeting weekly in men’s groups at churches around the
country. Bright and articulate, he’s soft-spoken until he gets in front
of a crowd. His publishing house distributes hundreds of tracts, more
than 20 of them written by DeMar himself, with titles such as The Politically Incorrect Guides to Islam (and the Crusades), which promises “all the disturbing facts about Islam and its murderous hostility to the West,” and The Marketing of Evil,
which covers everything “from easy divorce and unrestricted
abortion-on-demand to extreme body piercing and teaching homosexuality
to grade-schoolers.”
…The Old Testament—with its 600 or so Mosaic laws—is the inflexible
guide for the society DeMar and other Reconstructionists envision.
Government posts would be reserved for the righteous, as long as they
are male. There would be thousands of executions a year, with stoning a
preferred method because it would turn the deaths into “community
projects,” as movement theologian North has noted. Sinners in line for
the death penalty would include women who commit adultery or lie about
their virginity, blasphemers, witches, children who strike their
parents, and gay men (lesbians, however, would be spared because no
specific reference to them can be found in the Books of Moses).
There’s much more where that came from and it’s down right scary. In fact when I read it the word "treason" kept dancing through my head. But I’ll take comfort in the fact that there are so many people in America who’d be stoned to death (mostly Republicans from Texas) if these jokers came to power that I can’t see them ever being successful.
When we moved here to the North Carolina Piedmont we were warned to expect ice storms on a fairly regular basis. We lucked out last winter and didn’t get any, but this year we had our first bout of ice fun. Last week we lost power from Thursday afternoon through late Friday morning so by dawn on Friday morning we were living in a refrigerator, which meant we didn’t sleep particularly well and then at about 6 a.m. Celeste and I were shot out of bed by the sound of a large pine falling across our neighbors fence and squishing their kids’ plastic play set.
I couldn’t go back to sleep so I went outside and started snapping pics all around our property. Here’s a link to a photo gallery of some of those pics (I was bored so you can believe I took a bunch).
Befuddled 