A wake-up call for the Sane Majority
  by Gene Lyons

Does it strike you as odd that persons calling themselves Christians are 
furious that the U.S. Supreme Court found executing juveniles 
unconstitutional? Do you find even odder that such individuals describe 
themselves, straight-faced, as adherents of the "culture of life"? Are 
you surprised to learn that people called conservatives would quote 
Joseph Stalin? Yes, that Joseph Stalin, the former Soviet dictator and 
mass murderer. And no, I am not making this up. It happened recently at 
a Washington conclave held by something called the Judeo-Christian 
Council for Constitutional Restoration. If not household names, many in 
attendance were familiar controversialists, representing right-wing 
groups like the Family Research Council, the American Conservative 
Union, etc. Catholic anti-feminist Phyllis Schlafly spoke, along with 
unsuccessful GOP Senate nominee Alan Keyes and Alabama’s Judge Roy
"Ten Commandments" Moore. House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, having fled the 
jurisdiction—er, left town to attend the pope’s funeral, addressed the 
group on TV. But the real headline-maker was Edwin Vieira, allegedly an 
expert in constitutional law. 

Vieira attacked the theological right’s latest whipping boy, Ronald 
Reagan-appointed Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy. True, Kennedy 
supplied the swing vote in Bush vs. Gore, the 5-4 decision that gave the 
2000 election to George W. Bush. But he also wrote recent majority 
opinions invalidating Texas’s anti-sodomy law and forbidding the 
execution of juveniles. 

In so doing, Vieira insisted, Kennedy upheld "Marxist, Leninist, satanic 
principles drawn from foreign law." 

And the solution? If not impeachment, Vieira said that his "bottom-line" 
solution for renegade judges was Stalin’s: "He had a slogan, and it worked 
very well for him, whenever he ran into difficulty: ‘No man, no problem.’" 

The audience reportedly didn’t gasp. They laughed. "‘No man, no problem,’" 
he repeated for emphasis. "This is not a structural problem we have. This 
is a problem of personnel." 

The Washington Post’s Dana Milbank supplied the full Stalin quote, which 
is quite famous: "Death solves all problems: No man, no problem." He 
speculated that Vieira couldn’t possibly be urging the killing of Supreme 
Court justices. But he put the remark in the context of recent threats by 
DeLay, who said that "the time will come for the men responsible for 
[Terri Schiavo’s death] to answer for their behavior," and Sen. John Cornyn, 
R Texas, who mused that unpopular judicial decisions could lead people to 
"engage in violence." 

Assuming Vieira’s not actively delusional, however, what would be the 
point of invoking one of the 20th century’s great monsters if not to 
sanction violence? The avowed goal of this outfit is "Christian 
Reconstructionism," the notion that the U.S. government derives its 
ultimate authority not from "the consent of the governed," as Jefferson 
wrote in the Declaration of Independence, but from the Bible as 
interpreted by Puritan divines. 

The U.S. Constitution forbids Congress from establishing an official 
faith. If these people get their way—and Sens. Richard Shelby, R-Ala., 
and Sam Brownback, RKan., a recent convert to Opus Dei, an authoritarian 
Catholic sect, have introduced a bill to strip federal courts of the 
power to rule on religious issues—an established church would be exactly 
what we’d get. 

What kind of church? Well, the late R. J. Rushdoony, spiritual father of 
Christian Reconstructionism, favored a Taliban-like, Old Testament moral 
code, with homosexuals, abortion doctors and women guilty of 
"unchastity" put to death. 

No, that’s not going to happen. Even so, such rhetoric should be a 
wake-up call to what it’s tempting to call the Sane Majority. "True 
Believers" are an enduring human type. Zealous theocrats afflict every 
society from Afghanistan to Arkansas. They always know the absolute 
truth and strive to inflict it on others. Their obsessions usually 
revolve around sex, like those zealots in Saudi Arabia’s religious 
police who prevented 15 teen-aged girls from fleeing a school fire 
because they were improperly dressed. For years now, the national 
discourse has been driven by persons whose moral/theological views are 
somewhere between childish and insane. Most others either tend toward 
partial agreement on "wedge issues" like gay marriage or are too polite 
in the ecumenical sense to argue. Instead, they wait quietly for the 
metaphorical pendulum to swing toward the center. Hence, politicians 
like DeLay and Bush never pay the price for consorting with extremists. 
It’s time to remind these jokers that regardless of how "devout" they 
claim to be, this is the United States of America and the rest of us are 
not obliged to pretend that their political opinions are sanctioned by 
God, nor even that they are sane. 


Free-lance columnist Gene Lyons is a Little Rock author and 
recipient of the National Magazine Award. 

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