Political Cortex: Brain Food for the Body Politic

Armey, the former Texas congressman and House majority leader, argued in the Outlook section of this past Sunday's Washington Post that Republicans face an "electoral rout" because they stopped being the party of limited government, allowed spending to spin "out of control," and concentrated on such issues as flag burning, Terry Schiavo and same-sex marriage.

On the Web site of FreedomWorks, the organization he now heads, Armey pins much of the blame on Dobson, the founder and chairman of Focus on the Family, and other "self-appointed Christian leaders."

Calling them "thugs" and "bullies" in recent interviews, Armey says that "Dobson and his gang" have split the conservative Christian movement into two camps: those who want to "practice their faith independent of heavy-handed government" and "big government sympathizers who want to impose their version of 'righteousness' on others."

Dobson calls him "a bitter man," and horrors: a consultant for the ACLU!  Armey says it's a "lie".

Of course, Armey has nothing to say about the K Street project and the culture of corruption fostered by his protege and successor as majority leader Tom DeLay in cahoots with the likes of Jack Abramoff, Grover Norquist, and Ralph Reed.  And I don't recall Armey denouncing the religious right and its leaders when he was benefitting from their organizational strength and support as GOP House Majority Leader. And maybe I have missed something, but I don't recall Armey or his organization ever taking a stand against the gay marriage bans or opposing federal intervention in the Terri Schiavo case. And I saw nothing on Armey's web site to indicate any interest in these matters before.  But if they were so bad for the GOP, for faith and for freedom, as Army now claims, where was Armey when his party, his country and indeed faith and freedom needed him?

Given how uninterested he has been in the past, it seems unlikely that Armey's outfit will ever play any role in thwarting the theocratic initiatives of the religious right. Rather, they may, if it suits them, try to ride the tide of political fashion and oppotuntism where they find it, as they did before.

Nevertheless, the battle for Inside the Beltway opinion is on. Dick Armey, as a conservative movement elder statesman, has the standing and little to lose, in taking on Dobson and his cohort.

Here is a more of what Armey said in his article:

Christians face a temptation to power when we are fortunate enough to have a majority of support in Congress. But government can never advance a faith that is freely given, and it is corrosive to even try. Just look at Europe, where decades of nanny-state activism -- including taxpayer support for churches and for religious political parties-- have severely eroded the faith. In America today, too many of our Christian leaders fail to recognize the temptation to power and the danger it holds for our society and our faith.

And so America's Christian conservative movement is confronted with this divide: small government advocates who want to practice their faith independent of heavy-handed government versus big government sympathizers who want to impose their version of "righteousness" on others through the hammer of law.

His organization Freedom Works, and its related Foundation, has a large, Washington-based staff, that is developing a more traditional business, libertarian but nevertheless "Christian" style politics political organizational infrastructure in the states. Its issues are familiar business libertarian positions, such as the "flat tax" and opposition to the "death tax," but it also falls into the corporate conspiracy theory in it opposition to acting on global warming:

Efforts to regulate carbon dioxide are an attempt by the global Left to gain control of the U.S. economy.

Meanwhile, Dick Armey offers as one of his "proudest moments in Congress:

I am a devout Christian. I am a so-called "values voter." As a member of Congress and as Majority Leader, I believe I faithfully served our values. One of my proudest moments in Congress was beating the Democrats' attempts to meddle in the affairs of families that had chosen to opt out of secular government education by home-schooling their children. I took on the entire political establishment, but we only won because thousands of Christian home-schoolers demanded that Congress keep its nose out of their decision to raise and educate their children as they saw fit.

On its face, this may seem like a clearly libertarian notion. Freedom to opt out of "government schools." It is part and parcel of the broad attack on public education with the goal of privatization, very often by tapping the public trough to subsidize for profit corporations and highly sectarian religioius organizations.  Whatever the intentions of Armey's group, Armey's embrace of unfettered homeschooling may be a policy with unintended consequences. In this instance such a consequence would be that the Christian homeschool movement is home to the training of several generations of theocratic revolutionaries. Children who are being trained that America was once a Christian nation, and that it must be restored by all means necessary. If the movement succeeds, in the ways epitomized for example by the Christian home schoolers in the film Jesus Camp -- they will make James Dobson look like a liberal.  I do not mean to suggest that all home schoolers or all Christian homeschoolers are geing trained to be revolutionary theocrats. Nor am I saying that home schooling per se, is necessarily a bad thing.

But the sanctimonious Mr. Armey, once an ally of Dr. Dobson, has helped to empower the anti-libertarian, theocratic movement of the future.  

Prominent home schooling advocate Chris Klicka writes in his book The Right Choice: The Incredible Failure of Public Education and the Rising Hope of Home Schooling:  

"Sending our children to public school violates nearly every Biblical principle... it is tantamount to sending our children to be trained by the enemy."

He claims that public schools are Satan's choice."  

"The differences I am talking about," he adds, "have resulted in wars and martyrdom in the not too distant past."

It is tempting to take some satisfaction as the hard core business libertarians, struggle over the definition of Christian government with the theocratic wing of the GOP. However, it is not at all clear to me, that war of words between Armey and Dobson, jockeying for position in the post election enviroment,  really suggests anything all that much different than what we see today.

Time will tell.

Of course, you can look forward to predictions of the demise or decline of the religious right. They are always in fashion in the punditocracy. But the punditocracy has not been right yet.  Mabye they will get lucky this time.