Meet Charlie Fuqua, candidate for the Arkansas State House of Representatives and another self-published writer like myself. I’m assuming he’s self-published, because I would hope that no self-respecting publisher would touch his book, God’s Law.
His e-book is, among other things, a call to return to a more “Biblical” approach to child rearing. To wit:
The maintenance of civil order in society rests on the foundation of family discipline. Therefore, a child who disrespects his parents must be permanently removed from society in a way that gives an example to all other children of the importance of respect for parents.
Yes, you read correctly, gentle readers. Mr. Fuqua has suggested that we take disobedient children, strap the little fuckers to gurneys, and pump potassium chloride into their arms. Unless, of course, he’s advocating a truly Old Testament approach and we’re just supposed to stone them to death at the city gates.
At least Fuqua isn’t being totally unreasonable about it.
Even so, the Scripture provides a safe guard to protect children from parents who would wrongly exercise the death penalty against them. Parents are required to bring their children to the gate of the city. The gate of the city was the place where the elders of the city met and made judicial pronouncements. In other words, the parents were required to take their children to a court of law and lay out their case before the proper judicial authority, and let the judicial authority determine if the child should be put to death.
Well, that’s a relief. Fuqua also points out that there is no actual instance of putting a child to death in the Bible, so this would be very rare. I think he was trying to be reassuring. Fortunately, the state Republican party had flatly condemned his desire to replace Dr. Spock with Dr. Mengele.
He’s not the only Arkansas Republican to stumble out of the 17th Century and into national hot water. Two other residents of the Razorback state, already members of the state House of Representatives, have gone on record suggesting that African-American slaves were better off in bondage over here than living at home with their own people. Apparently, the opportunity to become citizens of the Greatest Country Ever was adequate compensation for the minor inconveniences of forced servitude for them and their ancestors.
Loy Mauch wrote a series of letters to the editors of the Arkansas Democrat Gazette, calling Abraham Lincoln a “Northern War Criminal” and has given a least one speech praising John Wilkes Booth. He delivered this to a conference calling for the removal of Lincoln’s statue in Hot Springs. Mauch also belongs to the League of the South, which advocates a second Southern secession from the union.
Jon Hubbard also suggested that America’s immigration problems were creating a situation similar to Germany before the Nazis came to power, strongly hinting that the National Socialist solution, while highly regrettable, might ultimately prove necessary.
… the immigration issue, both legal and illegal … will lead to planned wars or extermination. Although now this seems to be barbaric and uncivilized, it will at some point become as necessary as eating and breathing.
Let us pause a moment while our minds collectively boggle.
I’m not sure which fact I find the most stunning.
- Three grown men in 2012, allegedly possessing sufficient mental faculties to dress themselves, hold these ideas in their heads.
- They thought it was a good idea to share these thoughts with others and apparently hoped they could persuade people to adopt their way of thinking.
- In two cases, the voters of a state legislative district sent these defective relics to their capitol as their representative.
Sadly, the chorus of cranial diarrhea from Southern social conservatives is not confined to Arkansas. Paul Broun, congressman from Georgia, has said that evolution and the Big Bang Theory are “lies straight from the pit of hell.” I wish I were paraphrasing.
His diatribe is old school “Young Earth Creationism,” which means he didn’t get the memo about “Intelligent Design,” the allegedly more credible suit of clothes that anti-evolutionism is wearing these days. It’s the same, discredited arguments with bigger words.
Three facts about Rep. Broun should alarm you.
- Broun is running for re-election unopposed.
- Broun is a senior member of the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology and the chairman of the Subcommittee on Investigations and Oversight.
- His colleague on that committee is our old friend, Todd “Legitimate Rape” Akin.
I misspoke. Those three facts should scare the living shit out of you.
In case you missed it, before he was the nation’s expert on rape, Akin also accused doctors of performing abortions on women who weren’t actually pregnant. You might ask, “Isn’t that a little like performing vasectomies on eunuchs?”
It’s exactly like performing vasectomies on eunuchs.
As I wrote the second chapter of Human X and the bulk of my upcoming second novel, I worried that I might be exaggerating the worst stereotypes of Southern social conservatives. These five gentlemen have rescued me by showing that reality will always outstrip fiction in the realm of the truly bizarre. Nothing in my imagination can match the secretions of their limited minds.