The Religious Right's "Judge Bus" continues to roll through Iowa and participants just keep coming up with wilder and wilder explanations of why three Supreme Court justices need to be removed from office, like Rep. Steve King claiming that if they aren't, pretty soon we'll have a society in which children will be taken away from parents and raised in warehouses to be vicious warriors ... or something:
Speaking exclusively with The Iowa Independent following Wednesday’s event, King reaffirmed those statements and expanded on why he believes the institution of marriage is so important.
“I think that if we can’t defend marriage, that it becomes very hard to defend life,” King said. “Marriage is the crucible by which we pour all of our values and pass them on to our children, and that is how the culture is renewed each time. So, if we lose marriage — for instance, if our children are raised in warehouses, so to speak. There have been civilizations that have tried to do that. The Spartans did that. They took the children away and taught them to be warriors. It’s a good way to defend a country, but not much of a way to run a civilization.
“So, I’m afraid if that happened — if we lose the marriage, we lose the home, we lose the nuclear family then we can’t teach our values. We won’t be able to teach our faith. We won’t be able to teach life. We won’t be able to teach our Constitutional values either. That’s why I’m afraid it’s going to be very, very difficult to defend life.”
And rest assured that this type of lunacy is not limited to the Judge Bus speakers, but appears to be shared by those attending their rallies as well:
Randy Crawford of Iowa City said he intends to vote for the removal of the justices because he is concerned about the judiciary overstepping its reach and also about the propensity of homosexuals within his community.
“My primary reason for being here is because I believe the Supreme Court should not be legislating from the bench. But I also believe that homosexuality is bad thing,” he said. “It used to be useful when we were cavemen and we needed people to guard the caves full of women and children. If I’m a guy out hunting, I want to leave someone back at the cave tending to my wife and kids, and I don’t want a normal guy having that kind of access to my wife and kids. So, in our evolution, you can see that there use to be a utility for homosexuality, but that was when we were cavemen and we aren’t cavemen anymore. So, homosexuality is obsolete.”
Although Crawford believes that homosexuality is no longer needed by modern mankind, he brushes off the idea that he automatically dislikes people who are gay. He says he believes that private lives are just that and that he took a “live and let live” attitude until he discovered something more sinister at work.
“If people want to behave like the homosexuals I knew in high school, college and so-forth then it isn’t a problem,” he said. “But you can see what happens when homosexuals get power — like in Iowa City. They are running rampant. They are doing vicious stuff. … Read Shakespeare’s Othello. Basically the homosexuals are like the Iago figure.”
Crawford said the “nasty homosexual network” in Iowa City is “like conspiracy and racketeering,” and ultimately, “the Iowa Supreme Court should not be running interference for rackets.”
So, according to these Religious Right activists, the reason these judges need to be voted out of office is because they are part of some Shakespearean evolutionary conspiracy to turn the nation's children in warehouse-rasied warriors.