If you were one of the people clutching your pearls and shitting your pantsuits in a “How could this have happened?”-manner the day after the election — then you are probably not one of the creepy young evangelicals raised on a steady diet of mayonnaise sandwiches, communion wafers and bigotry that have been praying for a far right messiah (AKA “He Who Walks Behind the Rows”) for years.
In an essay for Autostraddle, Kieryn Darkwater, a writer who grew up as part of this creepy homeschooled crew, exposes the straight-up evil scheme of these “Christofascists” — and, yeah, it’s literally to infiltrate the government and take over the country in the name of Jesus. (That’s it. That’s the show.)
And it’s not just a long-shot pipe-dream of a legislative take-over — the Christofascists have already made some progress in their quest for biblical world domination. Whether it’s getting their well-groomed, bible-thumping progeny some facetime with state legislators, beating back education reform (at least, in cases of homeschooling) or that whole Tea Party thing — their child-rearing formula of shame, bigotry and fear has been scarily effective.
And they do it all by getting them while they’re young and encouraging them to honor and fear their loose interpretation of the constitution and purge our government of the non-believers (which somehow includes not just the godless-heathens but also Catholics, Jewish folk and anyone who doesn’t identify with their specific breed of far-right evangelical.)
As Darkwater writes:
“Self-proclaimed constitutional lawyer Michael Farris, the founder of HSLDA, and revisionist historian David Barton have spent years twisting their interpretation of the U.S. Constitution as some kind of God-breathed document into the minds of parents and their families who will just believe what they say because they’re “Good Christians.” They don’t necessarily practice critical thought, are dissuaded from looking at the Constitution themselves without a law degree and don’t bother to read history from all angles, relying only on the whitewashed Christian versions of the Constitution and our founding.”
Theoretically this has all been in the service of getting someone just like Mike Pence into office — even if they have to give the most ungodly of folks a pass at the top of the ticket. By getting their kids into politics (at least enough to vote and lobby far right) on the grassroots level and mobilizing them to eat, sleep and eventually (post-marriage) fuck with the goal of putting more church into our states, these crafty cult-y monsters have created a generation of progress-fearing, science-detesting voters who are committed to passing crazier and more rigid restrictions and who literally believe that they will be snatching the Nation’s soul from the fires of secular hell.
There’s tons of merit to getting kids hooked on civics while they’re young, but this indoctrination and systematic infiltration of the government all with the end-goal of demolishing individual liberties is a sign that we’re in the middle of a horror movie (or a menacing musical theatre number.)
