If you're looking for a doctor steer clear of Paul Broun
by digby
Wow. This is one scary video:
Ed Kilgore writes:
Now as a practicing Christian, I’m more offended religiously than politically at Broun’s rant. The Bible, he says, is a “manufacturer’s handbook,” that shows “how to run our lives individually, how to run our families, how to run our churches…how to run all of public policy and everything in society.” What an astonishingly, depressingly unspiritual way to look at the Good Book; what an appallingly illiterate way of understanding it, particularly if you get that the only scriptures people like Broun want to use to control the lives of everyone in the world just happen to reinforce the kind of smug white conservative patriarchal world-view from a bygone era they consider ideal.
It’s saddening and maddening, worse yet because among the “amens” greeting Broun’s soul-deadening paen to religious and political authoritarianism there wasn’t one voice saying “Really?”
No kidding.
I'm not a religious person so I'll take the political side and say that this represents the line of thought that makes me extremely leery of conservative Christian involvement in politics. These people have an authoritarian streak that makes my skin crawl and I feel that I must fight them. And I can't help but resent the fact that creepy people like Sally Quinn extol this cretin's belief system while dismissing people like me as some sort of freak:
This is a religious country. Part of claiming your citizenship is claiming a belief in God, even if you are not Christian.. We’ve got the Creator in our Declaration of Independence. We’ve got “In God We Trust” on our coins. We’ve got “one nation under God” in our Pledge of Allegiance. And we say prayers in the Senate and the House of Representatives to God.
An atheist could never get elected dog catcher, much less president. (Democratic Rep. Pete Stark of California is a nontheist but doesn’t talk much about it).
But this lunatic, who Kilgore rightly points out has bastardized Christianity --- and science --- into some hideous, simple-minded freakshow, is just one of many elected members of the US congress who think this way. The rest of us are supposed to grant this nonsense extra respect because it's a religious view and therefore cannot be challenged. It's frustrating.
Oh, by the way, this man is allegedly a physician.
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