Rand Paul Was The Featured Speaker At Theocratic Constitution Party 2009 Rally

[Emit]

~snip~

Amidst the hullaballoo over Republican Ran Paul's upset victory in the Kentucky GOP primary for US Senate, one of the few journalists to raise the issue of Paul's somewhat uncomfortable proximity to Christian Reconstructionism has been Alternet's Adele Stan, who observes that Rand Paul's father Ron Paul is personal friends with one of the bigger names in the Christian Reconstructionist movement, Howard Phillips, founder of the US Taxpayers Party - now re-branded as The Constitution Party. But there's direct evidence tying Ran(d) Paul to the Constitution Party, whose national platform declares,

"The goal of the Constitution Party is to restore American jurisprudence to its Biblical foundations...

The U.S. Constitution established a Republic rooted in Biblical law"

~snip~

So it isn't altogether surprising that Rand Paul could be found, in April 2009, at a rally held by a political party that's been heavily influenced by a movement whose founder, Rousas Rushdoony, advocated executing homosexuals by stoning, wanted to reimpose the institution of slavery, and maintained that the Sun rotated around the Earth.

In April 25, 2009, Ran(d) Paul was the featured guest speaker at The Constitution Party of Minnesota's "event of the year." I've found video of Rand Paul at an afternoon Minneapolis rally, so he was without a doubt in the vicinity.

~snip~

http://www.talk2action.org/story/2010/5/20/175036/669

[Kerrytravelers]

1. The perfect republican candidate.

I weep for this country when a guy like this is very close to the US Senate. Even when he loses, that is still to damn close to the US Senate for my liking.

[neverforget]

2. But I thought he belonged to the Church of Free Market Fundamentalism?

:shrug:

[ladjf]

3. That's what we need, a theocratic constitution. NOT! nt

[LiberalLoner]

4. I'm really afraid of these people. I have seen a growing fundamentalism in the military, especially

among high-ranking Air Force Officers, and honestly fear a military coup and dictatorship from these Dominionists. I truly think they are the greatest threat to our democracy right now - far greater than any foreign threat.

[WeDidIt]

5. Kick

:kick:

[Shallah Kali]

6. Bruce Wilson: More From The Biblical Stoning & Legalized Slavery Movement

http://www.talk2action.org/story/2008/1/25/01345/0733


In 1998, a controversy broke out over Christian reconstructionist advocacy for stoning as a legal penalty for a range of infractions listed in the Old Testament. This scandal is more timely now because, at the time the controversy erupted, a key adviser who was working to get Mike Huckabee re-elected as Arkansas Governor had also just started contributing articles to a leading reconstructionist website and presidential candidate Mike Huckabee has endorsed that man's latest (reconstructionist-linked) political endeavor.

{ for that timelier, newsier aspect of this story please see Huckabee Endorses His Christian Reconstructionist Arkansas Policy Adviser http://www.talk2action.org/story/2008/1/23/105453/278 . The following is merely an account of the minor 1998 flap over Biblical stoning. }

***

"For connoisseurs of surrealism on the American right, it's hard to beat an exchange that appeared about a decade ago in the Heritage Foundation magazine Policy Review. It started when two associates of the Rev. Jerry Falwell wrote an article which criticized Christian Reconstructionism, the influential movement led by theologian Rousas John (R.J.) Rushdoony, for advocating positions that even they as committed fundamentalists found "scary...."

On the website of the National Reform Association one can actually find an artifact, by Daniel Lance Herrick, titled Table of Death Penalty Laws in the Pentateuch which, explains the article introduction, "is a sidebar for Why Execute Murderers? which was published in the May - June, 2000 issue of The Christian Statesman."

Herrick's article contains a series of grid boxes that delineate various offenses, per the Old Testament, that are described in the Old Testament as punishable by stoning to death. the "crimes" demanding communal stoning to death according to Herrick are:

* Idol Worship
* Witchcraft
* Blasphemy
* Cursing the Lord
* Violating the Sabbath
* Enticing to Idolatry
* Women who marry but are not virgins
* Adultery

[Karenina]

7. Off to GP!

[Shallah Kali]

8. What's at stake is Ran Paul's association with a movement which says it wants to re-impose "Biblical

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2010/5/21/868465/-BREAKING:-Rand-Paul-Keynoted-Rally-For-Theocratic-Constitution-Party

What's at stake is Ran Paul's association with a movement which says it wants to re-impose "Biblical law" (or its interpretation of that).

snip


Within American jurisprudence there always has been and there always will be an uneasy tension between private property rights and the public, collective good. But Ran Paul's position seems radically skewed towards property. The flip side of Paul's "discrimination as free-speech" position is this - it logically implies, whether Paul has consciously thought it through or not, that some (or all, but that's for Ran Paul to say) human rights vanish on private property. Where does it end ?

It's crucial to understand how radical and regressive Ran Paul's views truly are - while Paul would surely disagree, his stance, which implies that when US citizens are on private land the property owner has the right, essentially, to strip away their human rights, evokes the notorious 1857 Dred Scott decision which, among other things "ruled that because slaves were not citizens, they could not sue in court. Lastly, the Court ruled that slaves—as chattel or private property—could not be taken away from their owners without due process."

Per the Dred Scott decision, slaves were not human beings with inalienable rights. They were commodities, objects that could be possessed, bought, and sold. According to Ran Paul's argument, private property owners can strip citizens of their rights, and there's already precedent - in Texas, under certain conditions land owners can legally use lethal force against trespassers. Why not simply make them into slaves ?

In his interview on the Maddow Show Ran Paul stated quite clearly his view that racism practiced by individuals or businesses is an expression of First Amendment free-speech rights and on that basis Paul opposes the provision of the Civil Rights act that bars private businesses from discriminatory practices. According to Ran Paul racist discrimination is a form of free speech.

But the classic Greensboro, North Carolina Woolworth's lunch counter sit-in case did not involve speech. It involved the segregationist practice of refusing to serve lunch to African Americans so bold as to sit on the "whites only" stools at the Woolworth lunch counter. Prior to the Woolworth sit-in, which touched off a wave of similar sit-ins across the segregated South, blacks buying lunch at the Greensboro Woolworth had to eat standing up.

In effect, segregationist practices, whether by government entities or by private businesses, relegated some citizens to second-class status. In the interview Ran Paul stated that he thought civil rights, and handicapped rights issues, could be addressed locally. But during the Civil Rights struggle the concerns of Civil Rights protesters were addressed locally - with riot batons, police dogs, and water cannons. It took federal legislation to overturn Jim Crow laws and segregationist policies, because local power structures in the South supported racist practices.

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2010/5/21/868465/-BREAKING:-Rand-Paul-Keynoted-Rally-For-Theocratic-Constitution-Party