In my earlier essay, I said that people's immediate reaction to tragedy was to say as many idiotic things in public as they can humanly muster. Of course, that's not always true. There are any number of people who can't wait for the bodies of the innocent to reach room temperature before using their untimely deaths to further some moronic political agenda.
The guns used were still smoking when liberals exploited the mass murder to further their point that no one should have guns, while conservatives used it to argue that everyone should. Because I'm a "glass-half-full" breed of cat, I'd like to point out that both sides managed to join together and exhibit a profound lack of humanity. Congratulations, everybody!
Most of the immediate reactions were stupid and offensive. Having said that, some were stupid and hilarious!
That beings me to Mike Huckabee, who has a long and storied history of saying stupid and hilarious things. In January of 2008, while he was running for president, Huckabee advocated rewriting the First Amendment to remove the Establishment Clause, saying "I believe it's a lot easier to change the Constitution than it would be to change the word of the living God. And that's what we need to do -- to amend the Constitution so it's in God's standards rather than try to change God's standards so it lines up with some contemporary view."
Not only is that crazy, it's short-sighted. If there is to be a government-established religion, one assumes that it would be done democratically. And since Catholics outnumber any other Christian denomination in the United States by a fairly wide margin, the odds are pretty good that it wouldn't be Baptist.
Of course, the governor subsequently back-tracked, saying that he would only amend the Constitution to do away with things that he disapproves of, like abortion and gay marriage. Y'know, because he favors a limited government.
Regardless of your views about either, the Ten Commandments and the Bill of Rights couldn't be more different documents. The Commandments are a list of "Thou shalt nots" whereas the Bill of Rights says that "The government shalt not." The Ten Commandments state that God is supreme, and the Bill of Rights presumes that the people are.
The first responders in Connecticut hadn't finished picking dead first graders up off of the floor Friday when he went on Fox News (and, really, where else would he go?) and said this
In fairness, I agree that new laws probably aren't going to prevent things like this from happening. I haven't looked into Connecticut statues, but I'm pretty sure that blasting away at elementary school children was already against the law there.
He lost me when he started spouting nonsense like this;
Anyone willing to check will probably find that God's record at stopping armed psychopaths is spotty, at best. We also know from considerable experience that when God starts talking to the mentally ill, very few positive things result from it. More often than not, it's God telling the deranged person in question to smite a few folks on his behalf.
Host Neil Cavuto, trying to make sense of the horrific events that have transpired, asked the religious commentator what he believes many will now wonder: “How could God let this happen?”
“It’s an interesting thing,” Huckabee said. “We ask why there’s violence in our schools but we’ve systematically removed God from our schools. Should we be so surprised that schools would become a place of carnage? Because we’ve made it a place where we do not want to talk about eternity, life, what responsibility means, accountability. That we’re not just going to have to be accountable to the police, if they catch us, but we stand one day before a holy God in judgment.”
He continued: “If we don’t believe that, then we don’t fear that. When people say, ‘Why did god let it happen?’ You know, God wasn’t armed. He didn’t go to the school. But God will be there in the form of a lot people with hugs and therapy and a lot of ways in which he will be involved in the aftermath.”
“Maybe we ought to let him in on the front end and we would not have to call him to show up when it’s all said and done at the back end,” he concluded.
I hate to be the one who keeps pointing this out, but Adam Lanza was not only nuts but, at 20 years old, he was far removed from the classroom.
People like Huckabee hilariously believe that one can "pray the gay away." Are they now also suggesting that you can "pray the cray away," as well? Again, there's no shortage of history regarding the relationship between religion and the mentally ill. And we know from considerable experience that the latter frequently uses the former to justify the horrors they inflict.
Look, if you believe that Jesus helps you live a better life, that's great! I support your right to believe pretty much whatever you want. Mike Huckabee and his ilk aren't about that. They want the government to facilitate the bringing of Jesus into people's lives through the schools, which is altogether something else.
It's also something that I find mystifying. Evangelical conservatives have a long list of things that they feel the public schools aren't doing properly. Is it really in their interest to add religion to that list? Are these people really comfortable with union members and career bureaucrats giving spiritual advice?
The same people who very properly feel that sex is something to be discussed within the family want the state - and always remember that public schools are an arm of the state - giving their children religious instruction. I can't help but think that won't work out as well as my evangelical pals think it will.
On the other hand, maybe Mike Huckabee knows about a new and improved, kickass, bulletproof Jesus that the rest of us aren't hip to yet. Like the Lord, Governor Huckabee works in mysterious ways.
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