By now you may have already heard of Scott Reid Esk, a local (to me) Tea Party activist now widely known for his support of stoning gays (and possibly lesbians) to death, not as part of a Klan-style lynch mob but after due process as a matter of routine legal procedure.
I don’t find it particularly surprising that someone who reads the Bible could come away with the idea that God approves of legally sanctioned killings for gays, witches, blasphemers, and rape victims, it is all in there. For me the more pressing question is how devout Biblical literalists can manage NOT to think like this. The list of Biblical death penalties is lengthy and disturbing; only stoning for adultery appears to have been explicitly overturned by Jesus himself but the authorship and authenticity of that particular passage is in some doubt.
While the reinstatement of harsh Biblical punishments would be a huge new lift for State governments, Esk has a different plan for the federal government, and that is to put civil servants in prison for trying to implement federal laws which he considers unconstitutional:
Scroll to around 3:35 for the part where the State of Oklahoma starts imprisoning people for implementing the Affordable Care Act. No, I am not making that up. Evidently, Mr. Esk is incredibly determined to see to it that broader health care coverage is not what your country can do for you.
What your country can do for you, in Esk’s world, is systematically murder gays for violating Biblical law and imprison bureaucrats for going beyond the (alleged) four corners of the Constitution. What do these two seemingly diverse positions have in common? Fanatical literalist originalism as an approach to the founding documents of both the Christian faith and the American republic. As much as I would like to believe that Esk’s approach to such sacralized texts is an idiosyncratic one-off, I’ve been to enough Oklahoma Conservative Political Action Committee (OCPAC) meetings to say definitively that this is not so. Rather, it is a core symptom of the most virulent strains of conservatism, whether religious or political.
If you’ve any thoughts on how to innoculate young minds against this sort of thinking, or if you would like to defend the vitality of originalism, please do leave a comment.
