Massive evidence of voting fraud surfaced in the mainstream media this week. Not in the form of rigged electronic voting machines, statistical anomalies between exit poll data and poll results, or boxes of unprocessed provisional votes mysteriously showing up in a Ohio cornfield. The rock-solid evidence came in the form of published comments like the following by Richard Land, quoted on beliefnet.com:
"The Bible says godly leadership is a sign of God's blessings and a lack of godly eadership is a sign of God's judgment."
This is the type of electoral analysis we've come to expect of the evangelical Christian movement since Ol' Grandpa Reagan spouted similar lines from behind the Presidential lectern. It has become so commonplace that many progressives and liberals have habitally taken to brushing off comments like this as the benign ravings of a malinformed zealot.
However, if you think about what Land's comment implies, you'll find that it's anything but benign.
It pits the entire concept of democracy against the idea of God's Will. It makes majority-rule democracy a sin, being competition to God's rule. And it makes voting fraud a divine imperative when, in the mind of the evangelical, the American electorate needs to be saved from its own inevitable tendencies to original sin.
A politically correct evangelical might say that the comment above only means that God motivates the majority of voters, Christians and heathens, to vote for "godly" leaders when they have led virtuous lives (as a reward), and for less "godly" leaders when they have led sinful lives (as punishment). They would point out that the idea of a Christian rejecting the kingmaking mechanism of democracy in America would not be in keeping with Christ's injunction to "render unto Caesar that which is Caesar's".
Of course, a little thought into the concept of a compassionate God puts the lie to the morally futile notion that God would smite an evil nation with evil rulers, creating an even more evil nation as a result. If Pavlov is God and men are dogs, it would be like punishing hungry mutts with starvataion and rewarding satiated purebreds with an endless smorgasbord. (Come to think of it, that pretty much describes the social condition the evangelical vote has helped to create in America.)
The main "sin" on the evangelical community's collective mind these days is abortion. It's difficult to fully come to terms with the crazymaking mindset the Roe vs. Wade ruling has created for the average evangelical Christian. If the nation you live in condones what you consider as the murder of innocent blood, how do you stand against it while "rendering unto Caesar that which is Caesar's"? What is Caesar's take in the question of abortion? Wasn't Caesar in the business of shedding innocent blood - specifically, Christ's? It's not only the fear of God that is engaged in this situation, but basic, hardwired maternal and paternal instincts. When primal instincts of fear and motherhood go against esoteric democratic philosophies in the evangelical mind, which do you think will eventually win out?
If you're an evangelical Christian, and you aren't ready to start bombing abortion clinics and shooting doctors, and you want to do something effective that will help you sleep at night without nightmares about lethal surgical procedures performed on defenseless fetuses, what do you do? You rig elections. You become a poll worker and link up with likeminded people, likely from your own church, to devise devious ways to make America a more "godly" place. If those heathens knew about the eternal torment and divine retribution you were saving them from, they would surely thank you for it.
How far would evangelicals go to subvert democracy for salvation? Consider this quote from Paul Weyrich, one of the first evangelicals to get seriously involved in the idea of telling Caesar what he gets rendered (again quoted in beliefnet.com):
"God gave this President and this President's Party one more chance ... God heard the fervent prayers of millions of values voters to keep His hand on America one more time despite our national sins of denying the right to life, despite ignoring the Biblical injunction against acts which are 'an abomination unto the Lord' and despite the blatant attempt to remove God from the public square."
When I read this, the first question that came to mind was "One more chance to avoid what?" The Four Horsemen? But what I was told in Sunday school about the Book of Revelation is that it is a prophecy of what will, not might, happen. If the Four Horsemen don't show up along with the Harlot and the 666 Beast, how will the faithful get to the Rapture Payoff? Given that, to the addled evangelical, God is Pavlov and us heathens are saddled with original sin, wouldn't a "godly" Christian want to provoke God's cleansing wrath on America's den of iniquity? Aren't we due for a second Flood?
What will God's Perfect Political Storm look like?
This is the crazymaking mindstate of the evangelical Christian today. On one hand, they want to hold off the approach of the Four Horsemen so that they can feel the warm glow of watching yet another heathen being yanked back into the fold by their own threat-based neural programming, while keeping their own lives as misery-free as possible. They want to delay the Horsemen's arrival until they shuffle off the moral coils, because the best place to ride out the Apocalypse is on "the other side", blessed by their earthly efforts of saving others but not encumbered by the sufferings of a mortal body. On the other hand, they know that there is only one Final Solution to the problem of original sin and the Realm of Caesar, and that is God's Wrath, of which the evangelical is a duly deputized operative of.
From this description of the God fearing, democracy-hating mindset of evangelical Christianity, you can see that it is a cash crop of political power waiting to be harvested. Give the addled evangelical a well-funded system of covert voter suppression and disenfranchisement, with a bag of tricks developed over a century of Jim Crow tactics, and you have a voting bloc ready at any time to betray its own vote and everyone else's. They will do everything in their power to devise rigged election results that falsely portray an American majority ready to vote away its rights and the original sin of democracy itself, and follow a divinely appointed ruler as God's just reward to a faithful nation.
But in the real world, it is only the latest psychological scam of the new Fascist Order - the corporatist elite. The Rapture is nearly complete, and chosen have already been removed to safe, Caribbean havens to watch - on satellite T.V. - the hapless evangelicals as they declare civil war against the last remnants of their own civil rights and the heathens who ignorantly provoke God's Wrath.
The only way to save democracy from the evangelical/corporatist vote against democracy is to ensure a voting system where every vote is counted and verified. Defending democracy can only be done by defending the voting system as the only mechanism of legitimizing leaders. Nothing can be allowed to prevent the counting of the vote, not ours or anyone else's allegiance to parties, politics, or candidates. Any one who disagrees with this is immediately in emnity against democracy itself, and therefore an enemy of the America our Founding Fathers intended and our forefathers died for.
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