Rick Sanatorium’s Christian Sharia Fantasy

Rick Santorum has a fantasy — one of Christian ‘Sharia’ law. He shares this vision with Rick Perry, Newt Gingrich, and Ron Paul — though Paul adds a lemony twist of ‘state’s rights’ to the mix.

Michelle Bachmann, failed GOP candidate, also espoused this goal; in Sanatorium’s words, “We have civil laws, but our civil laws have to comport with the higher law.”

Sanatorium means, of course, that civil law must be in alignment with Biblical law. What does that mean? All of it?

This statement of his seems to indicate yes, all of it:

We have Judeo-Christian values that are based on biblical truth. … And those truths don’t change just because people’s attitudes may change.

In other words, contrary to what most American Christians believe, Santorum thinks that all Biblical law is immutable.

Nobody has asked Sanatorium if he thinks this means that rapists should be forced to marry their victims (Deuteronomy 22:29), or that adulterers (like Newt Gingrich) should be put to death (Leviticus 20:10), or if a woman should have her hand cut off if she intervenes in a fight between her husband and another man by grabbing the assailant’s ‘junk’ (Deuteronomy 25:11-12).

I don’t know about you, but I’d sure like to know the answer to those questions. All of it? Or just the parts certain voters like?

Let’s look at how a couple of more commonly-discussed issues play out, for Sanatorium, Scary Perry, Nut Gingrinch, and Wrong Paul:

Reproductive Rights:

Sanatorium‘s signed on to the Personhood USA pledge, agreeing that all abortion — including cases of rape and incest, and “intentional” abortion to save the life of the mother — is wrong, and vowing to fight it. Yes, just like Rick Perry, he prefers dead women to medical abortions. Newt Gingrich and Ron Paul have signed on to the pledge as well.

Personhood USA issued a press release about two weeks ago on the “life of the mother” issue, which said in part: “When the life of the mother is truly threatened by her pregnancy, if both lives cannot simultaneously be saved, then saving the mother’s life must be the primary aim. If through our careful treatment of the mother’s illness, the preborn patient inadvertently dies or is injured, this is tragic and, if unintentional, is not unethical and is consistent with the pro-life ethic. But the intentional killing of an unborn baby by abortion is never necessary.“ [Emphasis added.]

Please note that the one and only effective treatment of an ectopic pregnancy — in which the embryo implants outside the uterus, leading invariably to the termination of pregnancy (and injury to the mother ranging from sterilization to agonizing death) — is to terminate the pregnancy. That’s the treatment — remove the embryo. There’s no way for it to be “inadvertent”. Is Personhood USA full of it, saying that abortion is “never necessary”? Definitely. Unless they wish us to consider ectopic pregnancy “god’s will” and let it follow its ugly, damaging, and wholly unnecessary course.

How does such a position work in the real world? Let’s look at how the Catholic church really behaves:

In 2010, the Catholic Bishop Thomas Olmsted in Phoenix, Arizona stripped St. Joseph’s Hospital of its Catholic affiliation, because the hospital performed an abortion to save the life of a young mother of four. Said Olmsted at the time, “”No one has the right to directly kill an innocent life, no matter what stage of their existence. It is not better to save one life while murdering another. It is not better that the mother live the rest of her existence having had her child killed.”

It is good that Mr. Olmsted is qualified to decide for a family what is best for them, and that it is better for a man to lose his wife and four children their mother than an abortion be performed. (Never mind that the fetus would also have died with the mother, making the refusal of an abortion effectively the murder of the mother for no ‘gain’.)

Please note that, like Mr. Olmsted, both Rick Sanatorium and Newt Gingrinch are Catholic.

Ron Paul goes a step further than signing the Personhood USA pledge. He openly seeks to overturn Roe v. Wade and pass a Federal “Sanctity of Life Act” which defines life as beginning at conception. So much for his much-vaunted “states’ rights”, eh?

Same-Sex Marriage:

Sanatorium favors a Constitutional ban on same-sex marriage, thus annulling all existing same-sex marriages in the country. He has signed on to the “FAMiLY LEADER’s Marriage Vow” pledge, which requires candidates to vigorously fight “any redefinition of marriage” beyond one-man/one-woman; advocate for the Defense of Marriage Act; support a Constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage; and more.

Rick Perry has signed the same pledge, one deemed too extreme for Newt Gingrich and Ron Paul. Paul probably wouldn’t touch it because it encouraged the banning of pornography — and we know that his pothead supporters, frequently ignorant of any other position he holds (but captivated by the ‘rEVOLution’ nonsense), would never stand for being handed joints but then directed not to touch their own.

Maybe Gingrich was turned off by the requirement to remain faithful to his own spouse and respect the marriages of others; we know he has difficulty in that area. The passion his nation awakens in him . . .

But Gingrich isn’t shy of his anti-gay views; he campaigned in favor of California’s Proposition 8, stated during a late 2011 debate that he would support reinstating the Don’t Ask Don’t Tell policy, and is repeatedly on record supporting a Constitutional amendment to define marriage as one-man-one-woman.

Ron Paul is a bit more complicated on the same-sex marriage and gay rights issues. He supported the Don’t Ask Don’t Tell policy before he didn’t; he thinks the definition of marriage should be up to the states; he co-sponsored the Marriage Protection Act (failed, but intended to defend the Defense of Marriage Act from Federal suits); and he derided a Supreme Court decision which overturned state sodomy laws under the 14th Amendment — which applies the entire Bill of Rights to subdivisions of the US government (state, municipal, etc.).

Church-State Separation:

Each of these candidates has a horrific position on church-state separation. We’ve already covered Sanatorium‘s belief that civil law must comport with Biblical law, a position consistent with Dominionists everywhere.

Rick Perry sums it up himself nicely in his ‘Strong’ commercial:

I’m not ashamed to admit that I’m a Christian, but you don’t need to be in the pew every Sunday to know there’s something wrong in this country when gays can serve openly in the military but our kids can’t openly celebrate Christmas or pray in school.

As President, I’ll end Obama’s war on religion. And I’ll fight against liberal attacks on our religious heritage.

Faith made America strong. It can make her strong again.

I’m Rick Perry and I approve this message.

Newt Gingrich wants to send US Marshals to arrest Federal judges who “impose secularism” on America, and force the independent judiciary to answer to Congress. He also fears the day when the United States is “a secular atheist country, potentially one dominated by radical Islamists”.

But what about Ron Paul? Surely, he’d want to see each individual able to make his or her own decisions about belief or non-belief, right?

Let’s look to his 2003 “War on Religion” paper, shall we?

The notion of a rigid separation between church and state has no basis in either the text of the Constitution or the writings of our Founding Fathers. On the contrary, our Founders’ political views were strongly informed by their religious beliefs. Certainly the drafters of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, both replete with references to God, would be aghast at the federal government’s hostility to religion. The establishment clause of the First Amendment was simply intended to forbid the creation of an official state church like the Church of England, not to drive religion out of public life.

The Founding Fathers envisioned a robustly Christian yet religiously tolerant America, with churches serving as vital institutions that would eclipse the state in importance. … This is the real reason the collectivist Left hates religion: Churches as institutions compete with the state for the people’s allegiance, and many devout people put their faith in God before their faith in the state. Knowing this, the secularists wage an ongoing war against religion, chipping away bit by bit at our nation’s Christian heritage. (Emphasis added.)

Ron Paul, the renowned Constitutionalist, who claims that the Constitution is ‘replete with references to God’ . . . that is, with exactly none. But why let facts get in the way of ideology?

Where does this leave us?

Rick Sanatorium’s Catholicism makes for an interesting twist. I’m not sure what a Dominionist Catholic would want that’s different from a Dominionist Protestant; there are others discussing the matter, and I’m going to leave it to them. So far as I can tell, a Dominionist Catholic or Protestant is as bad for American liberty as a Dominionist Muslim or a Dominionist Mormon.

Rick Sanatorium is a Dominionist whack job; I think most readers here will agree. And most will lump Rick Perry into that group as well. This will keep either of them from being electable.

Gingrich and Paul, conversely, somehow get a pass on their religious right rhetoric. Why is that? Is it simply because they’re not getting the religious right voters?

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