Huckabee Picks Up Another Endorsement: Left Behind Author Tim LaHaye
Mike Huckabee, the Republican presidential candidate and former Southern Baptist minister, is getting help from Tim LaHaye, the Christian conservative organizer and co-author of the apocalyptic “Left Behind” novels…. “America and our Judeo-Christian heritage are under attack by a force that is more destructive than any America has faced” since Hitler, Dr. LaHaye and his wife, Beverly, wrote in letters sent to lists of conservative Christians in Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina. “Defeating the radical jihadists will require renewed resolve and spiritual rearmament by the evangelical pastors in America.”
Let me just state for the record that these people scare the HELL out of me. I can accept their right to believe as they see fit, but the LaHayes (and their fellow jackbooted thugs) would happily trample the Constitution and the Bill of Rights in order to create an America in their own ignorant, uber-self-righteous image. These authoritarian religious zealots/nutjobs see evil and threats to Our Way of Life around every corner, and their solution to these perceived dangers is the creation of a dominionist theocracy with a strong, autocratic leader…sort of like the one already in the Oval Office, come to think about it.
Left out of the LaHaye’s foaming-at-the-mouth screed is a definition “radical jihadists”. Are they referring to radical Islamists who have sworn to destroy America? Or does their appellation also broadly include Liberals, atheists, Democrats, and anyone else who happens not to share their narrow, fear- and ignorance-driven apocalyptic theology? Given that the LaHayes no doubt view themselves and their fellow True Believers as the only true American patriots, it’s not exactly a stretch to imagine their dream of a Christian American in which the Christian version of Sharia is the law of the land.
These are the people that Mike Huckabee has chosen to cast his lot with. Call it the Christian version of selling your soul to the Devil, but Huckabee, in his quest for the Republican nomination, has hitched his star to a rabid, vocal minority of self-righteous zealots willing to destroy America in order to “save” it. Should Huckabee and his merry band of troglodytes ever managed to gain any traction in 2008, Heaven help us all…because the danger we’ll face will be clear and present…and very, very real.
Ironic, isn’t it? We’re heavily invested in fighting and defeating the Taliban in Afghanistan, and yet a very real and growing aggregation of Christian Taliban threatens our constitutionally-guaranteed liberties and freedoms right here in America. If you think I’m kidding, just listen to Tim and Beverly LaHaye and those who happen to believe as they do.
Here’s a lesson from history that apparently hasn’t been learned by these ignorant, unreconstructed zealots: When you begin to wonder who so many Germans acquiesced in the horrors of the Nazi years, you need look no farther than Tim & Beverly LaHaye and those dominionists who think as they do. You’ll find that the moral, philosophical, and ideological underpinnings are so disturbingly similar as to be virtually identical.
Those who don’t learn the lessons of history really ARE condemned to repeat it….
