The Constitution Party: Delusional Religious Fanatics Pushing for Christian Tyranny

Sharron Angle, Republican nominee for U.S. Senate from Nevada was a member of the Independent American Party, the Nevada affiliate of the Constitution Party, for six years, 1992 through 1998, before becoming a Republican in order to increase her chance of getting elected to office. If the Constitution Party sounds familiar, perhaps it’s because, during the 2008 presidential campaign, Todd Palin was revealed to have belonged, for seven years, to the Alaska Independence Party; Alaska’s Constitution Party affiliate.

The Constitution Party is not simply a political party that supports a strict adherence to the Constitution, as its name might suggest, but rather a party that promotes a very specific reinterpretation of the Constitution, based on founder Howard Phillips’ commitment to Christian Reconstructionism. His son, Doug Phillips, also involved with his father in the Constitution Party, is the founder of Vision Forum, an organization ideologically compatible with the Constitution Party, which describes its motivation as “a zeal for the restoration of Biblical patriarchy.”

Howard Phillips emerged as one of the new Christian Right in the 1980s and remains chairman of the Conservative Caucus. The Conservative Caucus, a political organization that served, during the presidential campaign, as a virtual clearinghouse for anti-Obama messaging may still be relied on for all the latest Obama/socialist/birther nonsense. The Caucus works closely with the John Birch Society, a 1950s Red Scare era anachronism, which is intent on protecting society from the evil fluoride conspiracy.

The Constitution Party started out in 1992 as the U.S. Taxpayers Party. It changed its name as part of a re-branding effort in 1999.

The platform of the Constitution Party is similar to the self-defeating, contradictory ‘Biblicalibertarianism’ of Tea Party rhetoric that has been the featured theme of innumerable Fox cable shows; often sharing the exact same language of ‘returning America to its Christian foundations under Biblical principles’.

The Constitution Party has 367,000 registered voters but is quickly gaining ground as part of the Tea Party populist movement engineered through Freedom Works and their corporate sponsors. As I discussed in a previous post, the Constitution Party and Christian Reconstructionism have deeply influenced both Kentucky Senate candidate Rand Paul and his father.

The South Carolina Governor’s race has become so mired in religious harassment and Christian bias that candidates have been pressured into public statements affirming their Christian faith. The ‘No Religious Test Clause‘ of the Constitution states;

The Senators and Representatives before mentioned, and the Members of the several State Legislatures, and all executive and judicial Officers, both of the United States and of the several States, shall be bound by Oath or Affirmation, to support this Constitution; but no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States.

Already, the Christian conservatives of the New Right have infringed on our religious freedoms and effectively eroded the fundamental principles of freedom enshrined in the Constitution.

The principle of the First Amendment’s religion clause providing for a separation of church and state is rejected by the Constitution Party. Their assertion is that the founders always understood, and therefore intended, that the United States of America be a Christian nation founded on biblical law.

The Constitution Party opposes women’s reproductive rights, abortion, and women’s right to make their own reproductive choice in all instances. The Constitution Party calls for the repeal of all federal gun laws. It supports state’s rights and independence and the end of any federal government programs not explicitly delineated in the Constitution.