Huckabee Seduced by Cop Killer’s Christianity?

[moobu2]

Seattle was still reeling from the cold blooded execution of a police officer on Halloween, when the news hit on Sunday that four more officers were dead. Monday, as I was trying to weave my way through a city swarming with blue cars and uniforms, and drenched with anxiety and grief, I couldn’t help wondering about how an erratic serial criminal like Maurice Clemmons ends up on the streets. And since Clemmons was released by Mike Huckabee, the Arkansas governor and presidential hopeful who has made fundamentalist religion the center of his politics, I couldn’t help wondering if religion played a part.
It turns out that, in fact, religion may have played several different roles in the tragedy, just as it did in the recent slaughter at Fort Hood. This time, though, Islam had nothing to do with it. At Fort Hood, fundamentalist Christianity created an adversarial, proselytizing, holy war atmosphere, while Islam released the trigger lock. In the Seattle killings, Christianity stands as the one theological ingredient in the lethal brew. It consumed the mind of the killer, who possibly had apocalyptic delusions. A Seattle Times headline today quoted his uncle: “He was all about money . . . suddenly, he was all about God.”

One of the challenges in identifying and responding effectively to religious delusions is that we all have been taught to turn off our critical faculties when people spout dogma. In Religulous, Bill Maher put an actor on the streets of London to recite the tenets of Scientology while pretending to be a London street crazy. He sounded . . . crazy. But when those same ideas are promoted by Tom Cruise, polite society smiles and nods, and no one makes a move to get him meds. The kind of clean slate that evangelicals and career criminals are looking for is, in my mind, a dangerous delusion.
When it comes to their own religion, moderate people of faith often defer publicly to even the wildest fellow believers. Most mainline Christians maintain downcast eyes while fundamentalists rant about demons and witchcraft and spiritual warfare. Mainstream Muslims are painfully quiet about terrorism in the name of God. The Rick Warrens and Joel Olsteens of the world go mute when the book of Psalms is used to invoke God as a celestial hit man against Mikey Weinstein (Military Religious Freedom Foundation) or Barack Obama. Christian Science lobbyists make straight-faced attempts to get “prayer treatments” paid for by any national health plan, and somehow lawmakers maintain straight faces.

Read the rest at exchristian.net.

[stopbush]

1. Yep. This is probably THE reason Huck pardoned this guy,

but the media won't go there. The fables surrounding Xianity MUST be preserved at all costs!

[Better Today]

2. I really don't understand why liberals are attacking Huckabee for doing

the right thing with this. At that time, just the comparative of the crime vs the punishment was enough for him to choose to reverse what we would all be screaming about being unfair if he was still in prison on such a trumped up sentence.

Please don't lower yourselves to behaving like RWers and attacking the person even when this situation shows the person behaved essentially as we believe they should have.

[frebrd]

3. K&R n/t

[Land Shark]

4. After reform along this line, somebody'll say "Not even God can get you out of an American prison"

Sure, remorse and rehabilitation can be faked if all it takes is a letter, but at the same time, overall parole is now so hard to come by that the greater danger is the creation of an inescapable American Gulag.

[DeSwiss]

5. While filled with much hyperbole.....

...not to mention not a few inaccuracies, however this article by Gene Lyons at Salon sums up the religious aspect in all this, quite well I think:

But let's start at the top, shall we? Although he posed as a conservative hard-liner, when it came to crime and punishment, the glib, self-deprecating Huckabee proved as softheaded and gullible as the woolliest sociology professor in the faculty lounge. During the former Baptist minister's decade as Arkansas governor, it appeared that no matter how heinous an inmate's crimes, all he had to do for a pardon was drop to his knees, praise Jesus and persuade some preacher known to Huckabee of his newfound holiness. "Everybody knows that Mike Huckabee makes up his mind what to do by what God tells him to do," said one minister who gained clemency for a prisoner serving 100 years for the strong-arm robbery of elderly neighbors.

Making the governor's personal acquaintance also seemed to help. Inmates competed to be assigned to do yard work at the Governor's Mansion. "If you do a good job raking the governor's leaves," Pulaski County (Little Rock) prosecutor Larry Jegley complained bitterly, "you can go free." Altogether, Huckabee commuted 163 inmates' sentences, including a dozen murderers. Several have already ended up back in prison. Indeed, given Huckabee's track record, Maurice Clemmons probably won't be the last to earn notoriety. We must pray that he ends up being the worst. Only a strong public outcry in 2004 prevented the governor from freeing a Lonoke County killer who'd beaten, raped and run over a pregnant woman with his car, only to get religion in the penitentiary.

The most notorious was Wayne DuMond, Arkansas' celebrity inmate of the '90s. Convicted in 1985 of raping a Forrest City cheerleader at knifepoint, DuMond was a glib psychopath who persuaded ideologically deranged crackpots who circulated Clinton administration "death lists" that he'd been framed. DuMond's victim, see, was a distant cousin of the then-president's. Articles appeared in places like the New York Post portraying him as a victim of the Satanic Clinton machine.

Becoming governor after Kenneth Starr deposed his predecessor, Jim Guy Tucker, Huckabee came into office publicly doubting DuMond's guilt and talking about a pardon. After the prosecutor and the victim herself courageously objected, Huckabee pulled some hugger-mugger with the parole board that ended up freeing Dumond -- the proud recipient of a "Dear Wayne" letter from the governor celebrating his release. In 2001, DuMond was arrested and subsequently convicted of the rape and murder of a Missouri woman. Huckabee's 2007 campaign bio titled, get this, "Character Makes a Difference," falsely claimed that DuMond died in prison awaiting trial. The man's worse than a hypocrite; he's a fool. Even so, establishment pundits pretty much gave Huckabee a pass. After all, he's so charming on television. Anyway, where, exactly, is Kansas City?

http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2009/12/02/huckabee_and_god_and_clemmons/index.html?source=rss&aim=/opinion/feature">link

- The only question now is, how long will it be before Faux Snooze let's him ease out the back door claiming he's pursuing "other opportunities" or has decided to "spend more time with his family?"

K&R

on edit: added link

[onager]

6. Then there's the Islamic equivalent...

At least in some Islamic countries, criminals can get their sentences lessened (or ended) by memorizing the Koran. I've lived in Saudi Arabia and Egypt, and heard about this in both countries.

In Saudi Arabia, the Minister of the Interior commissioned a study on the make-up of the Committee For The Preservation of Virtue and Suppression of Vice.

A/k/a the matowa, or Religious Police - the fanatics who go around beating people into mosques with camel sticks, or spray-painting the legs of women wearing short skirts.

The Minister found that many of the Religious Police were ex-cons, and many had been released from prison simply by memorizing the Koran.

In Saudi Arabia, I saw the Religious Police in action many times. I once saw them harass an elderly British couple for about half-an-hour in a restaurant. Reason: the couple did not want to sit in the "Family Section" of the restaurant, because of all the screaming kids. They just wanted a quiet, peaceful meal. The R.P. reminded them - forcefully - that all women must sit in the Family Section, regardless of age.

But one incident summed up the R.P. attitude perfectly for me. I went downtown on the "shopping bus" with a bunch of American, British, etc. women.

One of the women told a joke as arrived in downtown Jeddah, and we were laughing as we got off the bus.

A Religious Policeman, in very good English, yelled: "Stop that!"

We could not figure out what we had done wrong, until he added: "Women should not laugh in public!"