About a month ago, I said that Republicans hate the law, and since then I’ve been pondering what the roots of that might be.  Sure, there’s the usual "Do you have any idea who I am?" entitlement that Important People and their kids have browbeaten cops with since the dawn of time, and there’s the obvious desire to win at all costs, but I believe there’s more to it than that.

There are at least two threads of conservative thought that inevitably foster hostility and disrespect for the rule of law – one from the corporate wing of the Republican party, and the other from the religious wing.

To corporate conservatives, the law is the ultimate form of regulation, which everybody knows stifles growth and efficiency and must be rolled back wherever possible.  Just as they claim that regulations tie corporations’ hands and cripple the economy, so too do they claim that laws tie the government’s hands and cripple America’s security by making it harder to spy, detain and torture.

But to hardcore religious conservatives, the law is simply irrelevant, because America is a Christian nation, and the Bible is the true source of all American law.  Consider Judge Roy Moore of Ten Commandments fame saying things like, "[Homosexuality is] abhorrent, immoral, detestable, a crime against nature, and a violation of the laws of nature and of nature’s God upon which this Nation and our laws are predicated," and "This is not a nation established on the principles of Buddha or Hinduism. Our faith is not Islam. What we follow is not the Koran but the Bible. This is a Christian nation."

And if Roy Moore seems too far out of the mainstream, we have Republican Presidential Candidate Mitt Romney saying, "Our greatness would not long endure without judges who respect the foundation of faith upon which our Constitution rests," and Other Republican Presidential Candidate Mike Huckabee saying, "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."

To the extent that the religious right views the Constitution as worthy of consideration, it is only as a poor approximation of God’s law, something that should be either perfected or ignored.  It is admittedly hard to square the Bible (or at least the New Testament) with the GOP’s love of war, torture, and social darwinism, but as long as the Republicans take a hard line against science, abortion, and Teh Gay, the fundamentalists seem perfectly happy to forget about peace and compassion.

The Bush administration marshals the corporate argument every day to argue for tax cuts, telecom immunity, warrantless wiretapping, and waterboarding, and against any kind of oversight or transparency, and it invokes the religious argument with Bush’s conviction that he’s on a mission from God and answering to a "higher father."  No matter what laws he breaks, he’s breaking them in service to God, so his crimes are all divinely justified.  Oh, and there’s also that whole packing-the-DOJ-with-Regent-University-grads thing.

The good news is that after 7+ years of carnage, the American people are more than ready for a government that has a healthy respect for the Constitution and the rule of law.  Hopefully they’ll deliver that message so loud and clear in November that even the most timorous Democrats can hear it.

(Thanks to Dave for his help with the religious right quotes)


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