28 June 2017

The Iconoclast

What kind of nut would ram his car into Ten Commandments monuments in two different states? The answer seems to be a self-described born-again Christian who admits to psychotic episodes, during which he flirted with Satanism, and strongly believes in the separation of church and state. The man arrested this morning for destroying a freshly-installed monument outside the Arkansas state capitol is believed to be the same man who wrecked a monument in Oklahoma in October 2014. "[N]o one religion should the government represent," he reportedly says in a Facebook post prior to his latest exploit. Oklahoma was eventually compelled to remove the Commandments monument from its capitol, but Arkansas is required by state law to keep a monument near its capitol grounds. While the perpetrator's core idea is admirable in the abstract, it's probably inseparable in fact from a madness that may have reclaimed the poor fool. The depths of his previous madness are detailed in a letter he wrote to an Oklahoma newspaper in 2015. I was tempted to describe him as a non-lethal terrorist, but "vandal" is more appropriate, since the only life he appears to have threatened was his own. I can't sympathize with any believers who feel aggrieved by this attack, but at the same time this country doesn't need people like the attacker taking the Constitution into their own hands. We might well ask how much more sane all the other people are who lash out against the way the political winds are blowing.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

"... but at the same time this country doesn't need people like the attacker taking the Constitution into their own hands. "

Nor do we need a supreme court that feels it has the right to legislate, rather than advise. But we're stuck with that. Perhaps what this country needs are more lunatics taking the Constitution into their own hands until the government is forced to eliminate the vague language our founders framed our leading document in. The language of our Constitution is more than 250 years out of date and wasn't exacting to begin with. Not to mention the very social, political and economic climate that existed then is long gone. In short, what we need is a new Constitution that keeps the values and ideas of the current version, but is updated to take into account the vast differences between then and now.

Might I humbly propose, for example, under "freedom of religion" we list all religions whose very basis is antithetical to our Constitution and ban them.