The Constitution Party?

If you’ve followed The Statesman over the last year, perhaps you’ve noticed the editorial page has been hijacked by the Constitution Party on campus.

With only 340,000 registered members nationwide, the Constitution Party is hardly a political heavyweight. But as the country’s biggest third party, it does have significant footing in smaller conservative and religious communities, like ours.

I welcome some contributions the Constitution Party has made to our political dialogue. For example, they have been outspoken against the occupation of Iraq, the Patriot Act, and the Bush administration’s fiscal recklessness. And while I’m hardly a strict Constitutionalist, I even agree the Constitution deserves more attentive study.

Like Libertarians, Constitutionalists call for the abolition of most federal agencies like the Department of Education and the IRS. They want to withdraw from international institutions, especially the United Nations. They want to eliminate spending on social programs and foreign aid. And they favor a moratorium on nearly all immigration. These policies alone are absurd, but, unlike Libertarians, the Constitution Party also subscribes to an overtly Christian agenda.

The Constitution Party is an Orwellian euphemism for Christian dominionism. The party’s goal, as articulated in their preamble, is to “restore American jurisprudence to its biblical common-law foundations.” To that end, they would criminalize homosexuality, ban all abortions and stem cell research, and prohibit pornography and gambling.

“This great nation was founded, not by religionists, but by Christians; not on religions, but on the Gospel of Jesus Christ,” they claim.

For starters, Christian dominionism is predicated on shaky theological grounds. Jesus’ teachings were apolitical, and his message exclusively religious. “Render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s,” he said, separating church and state (Matthew 22:21). In Romans 13: 1-7, the Apostle Paul was less ambiguous about the gospel’s political indifference. He instructed Christians to submit to their earthly governments for every authority has been appointed by God.

However, I care less about whether their philosophy is actually Christian than whether it’s constitutional. With even a cursory reading of the Constitution, it’s obvious the framers, many of whom were deists and agnostics, forbade the intersection of religion and government. The Establishment Clause of the First Amendment, for example, explicitly bars the Congress from establishing a state religion. The framers’ private writings only further prove their secular intent. And as if to put any doubts to rest, President John Adams approved and the Senate unanimously ratified the Treaty of Tripoli, which reads: “The Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion…”

I frankly doubt the Constitution Party cares about the constitutionality of their platform. Because, ultimately, they prefer the Puritans’ government to the framers’. Their Bible supersedes the Constitution as the “supreme law of the land.”

It’s been said you can learn a lot about people from the company they keep. The same could be said for the Constitution Party.

Jerome Corsi is the Constitution Party’s foremost “scholar” – their Noam Chomsky. He is best known for co-authoring “Unfit for Command,” a libelous attack on Sen. John Kerry’s military service, and he is currently celebrated by the Constitution Party for his conspiratorial drivel about the North American Union. What intelligence Corsi may have is not evident in his ritual vilification of Muslims as “ragheads” and Democrats as “anti-American communists.”

The Constitution Party has an alarming number of extremist political bedfellows: gun rights activists who think the NRA is too liberal, nativist vigilantes who patrol the border to repel Mexican “invaders,” and Christian Reconstructionists who want to reinstate draconian Old Testament laws, like the stoning of apostates, homosexuals and disobedient children, among other “traditional values.”

The Constitution Party also has extensive ties to the League of the South, a racist neo-Confederate organization. The League of the South has advocated outlawing interracial marriage, deporting Jews and Arabs, and disenfranchising all but white landowning males over 21. President Michael Hill went so far as to call slavery a “God-ordained” institution.

Incredibly, the Constitution Party ran a member of League of the South, Michael Peroutka, as their 2004 presidential candidate. John Thomas Cripps, another member of League of the South, was tapped as their 2003 gubernatorial candidate for Mississippi. Just this year, they again championed a blatant white supremacist, Jack Gray, for Salt Lake City Council. Fortunately, he didn’t make it past the primary.

The Constitution Party has inherited this racism from its political predecessors, the American Independent Party and the U.S. Taxpayers Party. George Wallace, former governor of Alabama, created the American Independent Party and ran in the 1968 presidential election on its anti-civil rights platform. Eventually, the AIP merged with other far-right entities to form the U.S. Taxpayers Party in 1992. And when the U.S. Taxpayers Party was listed as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center, it changed its name to the Constitution Party.

This is not a proud tradition of which to be a part, and it is not one we should continue. Hopefully, the Constitution Party’s fate is with its forerunners in the ash heap of history.