Huck's theocracy demand

My, my. It seems that Huckabee thinks that the U.S. constitution has to be changed to agree with his view of what God requires. I've said before that he is a Dominionist, and here he admits it up front in a Presidential debate. All Hail the American Theocracy!

From his debate as reported by MSNBC in which he discussed at length two topics which regularly are discussed in his stump speech, but not with this degree of specificity. I'll skip his discussion of illegal immigration, but here is his discussion on "Christian values in which he is

... elaborating on his belief that the constitution needs to be amended.

"[Some of my opponents] do not want to change the Constitution, but 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 is to amend the Constitution so it's in God's standards rather than try to change God's standards," Huckabee said, referring to the need for a constitutional human life amendment and an amendment defining marriage as between a man and a woman.

He offers no secular reason for those amendments at all. He simply asserts that the basic law of America needs to be changed to meet the greater "Standards" of his God. The only apparent reason is that he reads the Bible (or his God whispers uniquely into his ear, who knows?)

History has clearly shown that what he proposes is a really, really bad idea.

It has been shown, over and over, that church government it bad government. Anyone who watches the recent Kate Blanchard film "Elizabeth" will recall that it starts in 16th century England with Queen Mary burning three people to death because they dared worship God the wrong way. The climax of the film was when Elizabeth sent people to kill or imprison a whole series of Lords whose crime was to try to assassinate Queen Elizabeth at the request of the Pope. The events portrayed in the film were not fiction.

Europe did not learn from Elizabeth's tolerance of religions other than the Church of England. The Thirty Years War was fought between 1618 and 1648 over much of Germany and parts of Italy and the Low Countries causing extensive death from war, famine and disease for no better reason than to determine which of several ways of worshiping God would monopolize each nation through its government. Theocracies fight wars over God.

The English were not immune to the call of theocratic war in the 17th century. They fought the English Civil War. The war was fought between the armies of the Catholic monarch and the Protestant Parliament and ended when King Charles I was decapitated, his son exiled, and the monarchy was replaced first by the English Commonwealth, then by the Protectorate under Cromwell. The Civil Wars were also about the power of the Parliament to restrict the actions of the Monarch, and established that the King could not "govern without the consent of Parliament." That made the Parliament into the equal partner with the King, something that became even more significant when Parliament overthrew King James II (because he was trying to force England back into the Catholic Church) and replaced him with the Protestant William of Orange.

Two centuries of wars and civil wars were fought over whether the monarch could enforce his religion on his people, and conquer others in the name of religion. Those two centuries have all the English-speaking peoples the tradition that 1. Religious leaders could not use the powers of government to enforce their religious doctrine and 2. the People of the nation were sovereign over the executive (King or President) through the democratically elected Parliament or Congress and the enforced Rule of Law in which no man was above the law.

Huckabee and the American Dominionists (as well as George bush) do not accept either lesson 1. or 2. Should Huckabee actually gain power nationally the result will be a police state that resembles Iran or Saudi Arabia. That's what Huckabee means when he says the Constitution should be changed to bring it in line with "God's values."

One of "God's values" - as expressed by Priests and Preachers - is that others should die or be imprisoned if they violate those people's religious pronouncements asserting "God's values." Huckabee is no better than any other theocrat. He doesn't belong in American government at any level.