Sunday, December 9, 2012

An American (Taliban)'s Heritage

A story from a few days out is that entirely-sane-why-are-you-asking Sen. Jim DeMint (R--Seriously-quit-asking) is leaving the Senate to be a high muckety-muck at the Heritage Foundation.  There seems to be much hullabaloo on the right about whether this new non-governmental mucketiness is good or bad for the conservative movement.  I have no idea about that, since I think anything short of an anti-psychotic administered forcefully to the buttocks of the Republican party strikes me as bad for the conservative movement.

However,  this bit in The New Yorker jumped out at me (via Balloon Juice):

Last year, he indicated that his belief in small government is rooted in the theory that there is a fixed and limited amount of space that can be occupied by the government and the deity combined.  The size of the public sector and the size of the Almighty are inversely proportional to each other.  It's an iron law, a zero-sum game: "I've said it often and I believe it--the bigger government gets, the smaller God gets."

This is the succinct summation of what motivates the American theocratic movement (or the "American Taliban", as the DailyKos so pithily sneers): unless God is the driving force of government, government is the enemy of God.

I understand the current speculation that DeMint is off to Heritage to level up to the role of Republican kingmaker, and maybe that will prove to be more dangerous in the long run to our secular government, but for the short term, not having such a fundamentally un-American voice on the floor of our Senate can be nothing but a relief.

And on a side note, He's not much of an Almighty if he can be shrunk as easily as a cotton shirt by the mundane proceedings of a representative democracy, is He?  If I were a religious nut, I'd devote a smidge of hullabaloo to that little theological pickle first.

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