After an election night filled with far-right victories, it’s hard to dub any single winner the most extreme. But Michael Peroutka, newly elected to the Anne Arundel County Council in Maryland, would have to be in anyone’s top five. Peroutka is a radical Christian Reconstructionist and southern secessionist. He says “so-called civil rights laws” are not valid because “there is no such thing as a civil right.” He says promoting evolution “is an act of disloyalty to America.” He says of Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy, “The reason he hates God is because he thinks he is God.” He thinks gay people are out to “recruit your children” into their “deathstyle.”
Remarkably for someone who has just become an elected official in Maryland, Peroutka argues that since state legislators have passed laws like marriage equality that “violate God’s law,” the Maryland General Assembly is “no longer a valid legislative body” and none of the laws that it has passed are “legally valid and legally enforceable.”
It’s pretty easy for legislators to violate Peroutka’s view of God’s law. He has a clear view of the role of government:
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 was the 2004 presidential nominee of the Constitution Party, whose platform says its goal “is to restore American jurisprudence to its Biblical foundations and to limit the federal government to its Constitutional boundaries.” Just a year ago, before Peroutka became a Republican to run for the council seat, he was urging Tea Party activists “to disengage themselves from the Republican Party and their brand of worthless, Godless, unprincipled conservatism.” Peroutka’s Institute on the Constitution has given Tea Party activists training on his view of the biblical basis of the Constitution.
Peroutka argued last year that the reason the U.S. is not following God’s law on marriage and other issues is because when the Union won the Civil War – in his words “The War Between the States” – people began looking to government rather than God as the foundation of their rights. When local media began focusing on Peroutka’s connections to the racist, secessionist League of the South – he served on its board and was a featured speaker at its June 2013 conference on “Southern Independence: Antidote to Tyranny” – he resigned, feigning surprise at racist material on the group’s website, though even then he told reporters, “I don’t have any problem with the organization.”
Anne Arundel County Maryland, one of the wealthiest counties in the country, is home to the state capital of Annapolis.
