MIKE HUCKABEE: DECISON TIME ON AMERICA-HATING SUPPORTERS

Blogger Larry Perrault has accused me of "vomit[ing]" on his spiritual mentor, Dr. Laurence White, pastor of Our Savior Lutheran (OSL) Church in Houston. It's true that I regard Dr. White as a purveyor of anti-American (and anti-Christian) rhetoric, the kind that drives mentally and spiritually deficient individuals (I've cited abortion site killers Paul Hill and Eric Rudolph) to violence.

As to White's relentless anti-Americanism, I've cited the preacher's own words in his disturbing speech/essay called "God and Caesar," where he compares America to Nazi Germany. He says:

[In the early years of the Third Reich] ". . . most Christians looked the other way while innocent people were slaughtered and a nation was led down the path to destruction. I would submit to you this evening that we [in America] find ourselves in a similar predicament today. "

White adds: "Once again the innocents are being slaughtered, the country is being led down the path to destruction, and Christians, by and large, are looking the other way. America finds itself today in the midst of a moral catastrophe. We have cast aside the most basic standards of human decency. We have broken marriages and fractured families.

He continues: "Our youth are losing their way and often their lives in a maze of alcohol and drugs. We live in the midst of a culture that mistakes lust for love and tolerates the vilest perversions as acceptable alternate lifestyles while pestilence stalks the land. Our public schools have become facilitators for fornication and procurers for the abortionists knife."

White also says: "America has sown the wind of immorality and we are reaping the whirlwind of destruction and death. We have degenerated into a nation rolling in luxury, reveling in excess, rollicking in pleasure, revolting in morals, and rotting in sin. Personal responsibility, duty and honor have been abandoned in our mindless pursuit of instant gratification for our every desire."

This is more than a preacher jeremiad. Frankly, it sounds like a call for violent revolution.

Here's the link to "God and Caesar," which I urge you to read in its entirety: http://mtio.com/articles/bissar55.htm

Just prior to the Ames (Iowa) Straw Poll, Mike Huckabee disassociated himself from an evanglical Protestant supporter (Rev. Ride) who made anti-Catholic statements. It would seem to be the time for him to do the same with Dr. White and Larry Perrault (who blogs at: http://larryperrault.blogspot.com/

I've compared Dr. White's thoroughgoing blast at America with Osama bin Laden's similar attacks on the U.S. and Western culture. Substitute Islam for evangelical religiosity and the two men basically are saying the same thing about our society. They are calling for its overthrow.

Mike Huckabee's blog reprinted Dr. White's recent condemnation American politics, complete with an ethusiastic endorsement from the omnipresent Larry Perrault. You can read these strange documents on Mike's blog at: http://www.mikehuckabee.com/index.cfm?FuseAction=Blogs.View&Blog_id=478. Note that White compares the current situation in America with the "holocaust." Essentially, the letter says it would be preferable to elect Hillary Clinton rather than one of the candidates from "the Republican establishment."

Here's what Larry Perrault said in an accompanying letter mainly attacking me for criticizing White's apocalyptic rhetoric and distaste for America: "Just look at the [White] letter and consider that America is well entrenched into a mortal social sickness." (Note: It turns out that the "social sickness" refers to the fact that most Americans don't agree with Larry Perrault and Laurence White.)

Understand that Perrault is condemning a society where four-out-of-five people identify themselves as Christians. It is the most Christian -- and the most charitable -- society on earth.

What White and Perrault are criticizing basically is that most Americans practice a form of Christianity that's anathema to them. Their condemnations of society exemplify smugness, sanctimony, and spiritual arrogance.

The vast majority of Mike Huckabee's supporters are decent, god-fearing individuals, and they're certainly people who love their country. They certainly have issues with the tawdry elements of American popular culture, but they also recognize that this is an extremely diverse, pluralistic society -- not a theocracy.

Candidate Huckabee has a decision to make: Is he a serious presidential canidate, or is he basically the captive of a small number of extremists in the evangelical movement? From all evidence, Mike is a patriot, not someone with a deep hatred of this nation. He doesn't need overheated supporters like Dr. Ride, or Dr. White, or Larry Perrault.

Stephen R. Maloney

NOTE; IN RECENT WEEKS, I'VE PROPOSED AN AMENDMENT THAT CONGRESS AND THE STATES PROBABLY WOULD PASS. IT WOULD REDUCE THE ANNUAL NUMBER OF ABORTIONS IN AMERICA BY ROUGHLY 200,000 -- PERHAPS MANY MORE OVER TIME. PEOPLE LIKE PERRAULT AND WHITE HAVE SHOWN NO INTEREST IN IT. I FEAR THAT'S BECAUSE THEY LIKE BEING "PRO-LIFE . . . FOR THE SAKE OF BEING PRO-LIFE." THESE ARE THE PEOPLE MIKE HUCKABEE WAS ADDRESSING WHEN HE SAID, "LIFE BEGINS AT CONCEPTION, BUT IT DOESN'T END AT BIRTH."

SOME EVANGELICALS -- VERY FEW IN NUMBER -- APPEAR TO BE MAKING A CAREER OUT TALKING THE PRO-LIFE MESSAGE WITHOUT ACTUALLY DOING ANYTHING TO REDUCE ABORTIONS AND INCREASE ADOPTIONS.

Note 2: If you go the Our Savior Lutheran Church website, you will notice Dr. White preaching to what appears to be an all-white (or nearly all-white) congregation in a comfortable middle-class section of Houston. That causes a problem, becuase it means the preacher (and his flock) are unlikely to have much understanding of the vastly different world inhabited by most of humanity, especially the women who end up having abortions. I'll write about that next.


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Excerpt from next blog piece (quotes from Elizabeth George's superb novel What Came Before He Shot Her:

(Multiracial Dix D'Court, a kind and loving man, to his multiracial girlfriend Kendra, who lives in depressed area of London with three children basically dropped off at her doorstep): "You ever think about how God works?"

Her response: "Man, I tell you: No God I'm familiar with has ever lived in this part of town."

[God supposedly does live in Rev. White's part of Houston, and that's why he will never understand Kendra or her children. ]

At one point in the novel Kendra talks about her niece, "Ness," to a rather stiff white woman from Social Services. The white lady is talking about the need to get to the root-cause of Ness's problems (truancy, drug overuse, constant indulgence in sex. and an attempted mugging -- all at age 15).

Here's what Kendra, who deserves an award as surrogate mother of the year, is thinking: " . . . She asked Fabia Bender [the social worker] a logical question. How much more than a dead father and an institutionalized mother was necessary to the understanding of Ness's fury? And what did an understanding her fury have to do with keeping her from ruining her life? Because, Kendra Campbell told the social worker, some serious life-ruining was what Ness Campbell had in mind. She saw her existence as destroyed already, so she'd decided to go along for the ride."

[I submit that people like Laurence White have probably never once listened carefully to person like Kendra Campbell or Ness. By the way, Jesus apparently communicated with such people regularly.]