“She comes from a wing of the evangelical movement [that] takes the Bible literally, and that includes the Old Testament that has passages about stoning gay people to death…”
(Really? Michele Bachmann wants to stone gays to death???)
Yes — at least, if you believe the words of author and religion “expert” Frank Schaeffer. He lodged this accusation on MSNBC yesterday afternoon — during an appearance to promote his new book (and attack Rep. Michele Bachmann as a religious kook).
Nobody really seemed outraged by this.
Schaeffer went on to accuse Bachmann of wanting to “produce a theocracy in the country where the Bible would be paramount and no longer the Constitution or the Bill of Rights,” and to say that evangelicals like Bachmann “actually hate the United States as it is.”
If this all sounds strangely familiar, it should. Schaeffer is parroting the people who believe President Obama wants to introduce Sharia Law into the U.S. (As Chris Matthews in a bizarro world might say, sometimes I think the critics of Michele Bachmann are just clearly unfair. When they say she doesn’t love this country, for example …)
Of course, the people who make those claims about Obama are condemned, while Schaeffer is given a platform to lodge his similarly baseless accusations against Bachmann.
The bigger question, of course, is whether this an isolated incident, or whether this may foreshadow an attempt to cast evangelical Protestant candidates as weirdos. If that’s the case, at least one observer may have seen it coming. Prior to the 2008 election, Romney supporter, author, and conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt warned that evangelicals should defend Romney against attacks on his religion, lest attacks on their faith be next.
After hearing him give a speech on the topic, one blogger summed up Hewitt’s argument, writing: “If we question whether [Romney] wears strange underwear, the next evangelical that runs will be asked if he really believes the Bible, and the next Catholic will be asked if he goes to confession. It will open the door to biased tests against religion for candidates.”
Regardless of whether or not this is a canary in the coal mine, it is fair to say the attacks on Bachmann’s religious faith are just as bigoted as the attacks on John F. Kennedy’s Catholicism or Mitt Romney’s Mormonism. Let’s hope this isn’t a harbinger of things to come.