David Michael Miller
For a smart guy, Republican presidential contender Ben Carson says some incredibly dumb things.
Carson has said he doesn’t accept evolution and thinks global climate change is “irrelevant.” He has also compared the Affordable Care Act to slavery. Not content to stop there, Carson added to his list of strange statements the other day by saying he didn’t think a Muslim should be allowed to be president. How anyone might legally prevent that from happening wasn’t made clear.
This is ridiculous in more ways than one, but let’s start with the reality that there’s no one who professes to be a Muslim running for president this time and, to my knowledge, there isn’t a Muslim politician who is even in the offing for the nation’s highest office.
There are, however, several fundamentalist Christians who want to be president, and some of them have a realistic chance of actually getting there. In fact, even Republican candidates who might not be fundamentalist Christians have to sound like one.
Every Republican candidate must ignore or question the reality of human-caused climate change, arguably the most serious challenge to the planet — you might say “God’s creation” — in our time.
If a candidate doesn’t say that he literally believes that God created the world in a week, he at least has to say that he’s not sure. If he doesn’t, like Carson, flatly reject evolution, then he has to be for “teaching the controversy” as if creationism was just another equally valid scientific theory. This is not only a threat to the integrity of public education, it makes us a laughingstock in the rest of the sane, modern world. See Gov. Scott Walker’s dodging of the evolution question in England earlier this year.
Every Republican candidate must attack Planned Parenthood in the strongest possible terms. Never mind that the organization prevents more abortions in one day than all Mike Huckabee’s fire and brimstone preaching has done over a lifetime. Never mind that only a tiny sliver of their budget goes to provide abortions or that none of the public money the organization gets goes for that service. These deeply religious candidates must ignore the facts or just lie about them, as Carly Fiorina did in the last debate.
The most extreme fundamentalist Christians in the group, Sen. Ted Cruz and Gov. Mike Huckabee, support public officials who would openly break the law and defy the U.S. Constitution and replace it with their personal reading of the Bible. Cruz and Huckabee showed up to pose for holy pictures with Kim Davis, the Kentucky county clerk who refused to issue marriage licenses to gay couples as the courts had ordered her to do.
Every one of these candidates has to profess to believe in the Bible, to read it regularly and to actually base public policy in 21st-century America on it. Governing ourselves based on an ancient text would be a bad idea even if the text were lucid. But the 800,000 words of the Bible are filled with contradictions and just plain weird and cruel stuff. Do you really think we should kill gays, stone children who misbehave or trade slaves? Do you really want to be governed by the word of a god who would ask one of his followers to throw his son to his death just to demonstrate how loyal he could be? The god who shows up in much of the Old Testament just isn’t a guy I’d want to know, much less have dictate how my modern government operates.
While requiring their candidates to ignore anything in the Bible — including much of the New Testament — that is about compassion, stewarding creation or helping the poor, fundamentalist Christians demand that their candidates oppose any regulations on gun ownership, support maintaining a brimming nuclear arsenal and oppose progressive taxation. It turns out that God takes all kinds of specific positions on current events, and it just so happens that every one of them lines up perfectly with the Club for Growth.
It isn’t the extremely remote chance of a Muslim president I worry about; it’s the very real threat of a Bible-thumping Christian one.
