The most terrifying words in the English language are: I’m from the government and I’m here to help.
-Ronald Reagan

Oh…Ya Think, Ron….?

A government plan to use members of the clergy to quell dissent and objections to government orders during a time of national emergency has been revealed by a Shreveport, La., television station.

Sandy Davis, director of the Caddo-Bossier Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness, said there are several advantages, but primarily, “these clergy would already be known in the neighborhoods in which they’re helping to diffuse that situation.”

So government orders to abandon homes, turn over guns, leave livestock behind, or whatever would come to the minds of various officials during an “emergency,” would be easier for people to accept, the report indicated.

The report said one of the biggest tools the clergy members would use would be the Bible itself, specifically Romans 13, where Tuberville said the Bible states “the government’s established by the Lord, you know. And, that’s what we believe in the Christian faith. That’s what’s stated in the Scripture.”

Civil rights advocates have raised questions about the idea of using clergy in such a fashion, noting the balance clergy would have to maintain when asked to do what the government wants under color of their status as a religious leader.

A blogger for the Christian education site, Chalcedon noted that the training has been going on in secret for over a year already.

In case you’re wondering, Chalcedon is the Christian Reconstructionist organization founded by RJ Rushdoony himself. These folks believe in imposing biblical, as in Old Testament, law on the United States.

The grim irony here is that the above is taken from the right wing kook site, World Net Daily. Gosh…even the wingers are starting to get scared of the republicans now. Well folks…You Fucking Asked For It…! When they come with the local preacher to take your guns away from you, just hand them over quietly. After all, you voted for them, and then you looked the other way while they got busy shredding the Constitution because you always thought that it was only the darkies and the dirty hippies and the faggots and weirdos who had anything to worry and you couldn’t wait to see them all get what was coming to them.

Tom Tomorrow recently posted an ironic observation about Roger Simon of Pajamas Media, explaining why he’s such a committed warrior in the War against “Islamofascism”…staunch social liberal though he may (cough, cough…) be…

So, yes, I am a supporter of gay marriage and undoubtedly will remain so, since it is consistent with my values of long duration. And, yes, I will continue to agitate for it in my writing and elsewhere. But in return I call on my friends on the Left –- straight or gay -– to help defend that real source of liberalism the Enlightenment, because if we lose and fall under religious law, there not only will be no gay marriage, there will be no women’s rights, no freedom of the press, no basic human rights, not even – as in the case of Iran – any music.

As to that, Glen Greenwald observes…

Every now and then, it is worth noting that substantial portions of the right-wing political movement in the United States — the Pajamas Media/ right-wing-blogosphere / Fox News / Michelle Malkin / Rush Limbaugh listener strain — actually believe that Islamists are going to take over the U.S. and impose sharia law on all of us. And then we will have to be Muslims and “our women” will be forced into burkas and there will be no more music or gay bars or churches or blogs. This is an actual fear that they have — not a theoretical fear but one that is pressing, urgent, at the forefront of their worldview.

To which, Tom Tomorrow points out that the agenda of our own homebrew religious extremists doesn’t look too terribly different. Simon, he of the Moses Wine detective novels, is doing his level best to throw his country to the wolves over here, to save it from the wolves over there. And thanks to the likes of him, and all the other Roger Simons of America, now they’ve got their hands firmly around our democracy’s throat. Far out Moses…

Here’s the KSLA News 12 video, via YouTube. All together now…My country ’tis, of thee….

Hey Roger…don’t worry…it’s okay as long as it’s a Christian sharia law…

[Edited a tad…]