From the Towleroad:
Mike Huckabee, the former Republican Arkansas governor who lost his
2008 presidential bid so he became a Fox News pundit instead, played a
little game of right-wing "blame the victim" yesterday when he flat out
said that a lack of religion in schools led to the horrific shooting deaths of 26 people, including 20 children, at Sandy Hook Elementary in Connecticut.
"We
ask why there is violence in our schools, but we have systematically
removed God from our schools Should we be so surprised that schools
would become a place of carnage?" he said on, yes, Fox News.
He
went on, "[W]e've made it a place where we don't want to talk about
eternity, life, what responsibility means, accountability -- that we're
not just going to have be accountable to the police if they catch us,
but one day we stand before, you know, a holy God in judgment… If we
don't believe that, then we don't fear that."
Huckabee's argument is a not-so-distant cousin from that of anti-gay, evangelical radio host Bryan Fischer of the American Family Association.
He suggested said yesterday that the kids killed didn't have sufficient
belief in God: "God is not going to go where he is not wanted."
This
is a particularly insidious brand of "blame of the victim" messaging,
one that's also particularly confusing: conservatives are known to blame
disasters like Hurricane Sandy on the gays, as if our hedonistic,
heathen ways unleash doom and destruction, known in right-wing Christian
circles as God's Wrath, onto the population at large, even God-fearing
citizens. Our mere presence threatens civilization because it's an
affront, and those who accept us are asking for it by turning their back
on God.
And here we have roughly the same argument being used to explain the
deaths of nearly two dozen innocent children who could have no deep
understanding of religion, faith or a creator.
You're damned if you do believe, you're damned if you don't, and
you're even damned if you're too young to know what "religion" even
means - according to Huckabee and his ilk, at least.
2 comments:
Huckabee is a moron. Nothing annoys me more than the need of wilfully stupid people to prove it, time and time again.
"eternity, life, what responsibility means, accountability" Yeah, I am so grateful that we talked about that in kindergarten. It made me the good person I am today!
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