Far from the spotlight of Thad Cochran’s surprise defeat of his Tea Party challenger in Mississippi, radical Christian Reconstructionist and southern secessionist Michael Peroutka has apparently won the Republican primary for a county council seat in Maryland’s Anne Arundel County. As of early this morning, with all precincts reporting, the largely self-financing Peroutka had a 36-vote lead over his closest competitor in a five-way primary. But absentee ballots are still being counted, so Anne Arundel County voters could yet be spared a Peroutka general election candidacy.
We have a few things for county voters to think about.
As Miranda reported yesterday, Peroutka recently declared that, because the Maryland General Assembly has passed laws that “violate God’s law,” it is “no longer a valid legislative body” and as a result, none of the laws it has passed are “legally valid and legally enforceable.”
Peroutka feels that way about civil rights laws in general. In a conversation with right-wing talk show host Steve Deace last fall, Peroutka denounced civil unions and laws against anti-gay discrimination as unconstitutional, then added:
“I would include the so-called civil rights laws are not law, they never should’ve been passed, they’re not law now, they weren’t law then, they aren’t law now because there is no such thing as a civil right.”
Peroutka runs the Institute on the Constitution, which promotes Christian Reconstructionist ideology, and, as reported by journalist Sarah Posner, has trained local Tea Party groups with its 12-part course on the biblical basis of the Constitution. Peroutka embraces Christian Reconstructionists’ radically limited view of the role of government. He has written:
Since civil government is ordained by God in order to protect God-given rights, then the function of civil government is to obey God and to enforce God’s law – PERIOD.
It is not the role of civil government to house, feed, clothe, educate or give heath care to…ANYBODY!
Peroutka said much the same thing at Larry Klaymen’s failed revolutionary rally in Washington, D.C. earlier this year which was supposed to oust President Obama from office.
“There is a God. Our rights come from him. The purpose of civil government is to protect and defend God-given rights. This is the American view of law and government. It also happens to be the biblical view of law and government. America was founded upon the biblical view of law and government….”
That law, of course, includes Peroutka’s interpretation of Old Testament verses on homosexuality. He declared Michael Sam, the college football star who came out as gay this year, to be “publicly in violation of Leviticus 18:22” and declared that the celebratory kiss between Sam and his boyfriend during the NFL draft was the kind of “sewer filth” that caused him to get rid of cable TV. He has said that laws against anti-gay discrimination in the workplace are part of a broader agenda that will result in people being forced “to engage in the perversion.”
Peroutka also helps run a family foundation that recently contributed to the Creation Museum a million-dollar dinosaur fossil after considering re-burying it to keep it out of the hands of paleontologists who might use it to promote the theory of evolution. It sounds crazy until you remember that Peroutka believes “the promotion of evolution is an act of disloyalty to America.”
What I’m saying is that there is no way you could promote or believe in evolution and sing ‘God Bless America’ during the 7th inning stretch.”
“All men are created equal, they are not evolved equal, get it?” he adds. “So evolution is anti-American.”
All this extremism aside, it is not clear why Maryland Republicans would want to back his candidacy. Last fall, Peroutka expressed nothing but contempt for the Republican Party:
Anyone, including those who identify with the ‘Tea Party’, who loves America and desires real reform, would do well to disengage themselves from the Republican Party and their brand of worthless, Godless, unprincipled conservatism.”
