Just plain scary

If this doesn’t terrify you, I don’t know what will:

What does the Religious Right need in the 2004 elections to achieve their political goals? President Bush needs to be re-elected, Republicans need to gain enough seats in the U.S. Senate to stop Democratic filibusters of Bush’s extreme judicial nominations, and 2-4 justices need to retire from the U.S. Supreme Court. Then the president, with consent from a Republican-controlled Senate, could give the country a Scalia Supreme Court. At that point it’s possible that the Religious Right could control all three branches of the United States government. As for the present, Senate Republicans are unable to rally the sixty votes required to end filibusters, many recent court decisions have upheld the principle of separation of church and state, and Democracy still has a fighting chance.

Then there’s this mission statement from the National Reform Association, which sounds almost exactly like it was lifted from the Taliban:

“The mission of the National Reform Association is to maintain and promote in our national life the Christian principles of civil government, which include, but are not limited to, the following:

“Jesus Christ is Lord in all aspects of life, including civil government.

“Jesus Christ is, therefore, the Ruler of Nations, and should be explicitly confessed as such in any constitutional documents. The civil ruler is to be a servant of God, he derives his authority from God and he is duty-bound to govern according to the expressed will of God.

“The civil government of our nation, its laws, institutions, and practices must therefore be conformed to the principles of Biblical law as revealed in the Old and New Testaments.”