Glenn Beck dedicated much of his television program last night to interviewing Paul Blair, a radical right-wing activist who is now seeking a seat in the Oklahoma state Senate.
Blair, who was reportedly responsible for the recent legislation that sought to make it a felony to perform an abortion in the state, which was vetoed by Gov. Mary Fallin, echoed right-wing pseudo-historian David Barton when he claimed that the Bible provides guidance on how to establish elections and a constitutional republic.
"From a biblical perspective," he said, "Exodus 18 gives us the criteria by which we're supposed to evaluate candidates when Jethro, the father-in-law, said to Moses, 'Choose out from among you capable individuals that fear God, love truth and hate covetousness, teach them the law' — of course, they had a constitutional republic, quite frankly; they were 12 sovereign tribes working together as one and they weren't ruled by a king, they were ruled by the Torah, the Constitution. 'Teach them the law and have them be judges over tens, fifties, hundreds and thousands.' Quite frankly, that was the birth of republicanism, the republican form of government."
As we and others have noted before, the idea that Exodus 18 lays out the framework for voters on how to choose candidates for office is absurd as it was Moses who appointed these judges, not the people who chose them freely. On top of that, for Blair to claim that the Israelites "had a constitutional republic" is laughable considering that they were living in the desert under what was a literal theocracy that was being directly controlled by God, who ruled over them through Moses.
Religious Right activists are always insisting that they have no desire to impose any sort of theocracy on America because they deeply respect our constitutional republican form of government, but that is a little hard to swallow when they insist that an actual ancient theocracy was the ideal form of a constitutional republic.
