Pastoral Existence

"I drink a different kind of Jesus juice."

-- Mike Huckabee in 2005

I know that yesterday I suggested taking a careful tack with the, uh, "revelation" that Mike Huckabee had commuted the sentence of alleged cop-killer Maurice Clemmons -- but that was really only in reference to the political angle of this story. What I don't mind hammering home, mostly because it's unlikely anyone in the mainstream media will be willing to broach the subject of religion from a negative perspective, is the fact that, by his own admission, it was Huckabee's staunch Southern Baptist viewpoint that led him to make the devastating error in judgment that turned a violent career criminal like Clemmons back out onto the streets.

Huckabee's always approached his job in government from the position of his job as a Baptist pastor. For the record, there are times that I've thought this was a good thing -- mostly because I've always given credit to Huckabee for at least being one of the few public figures in the Republican party who sees Jesus as a model of mercy, forgiveness and understanding rather than an excuse for intolerant assholes to wage a culture war without end. But there's no denying that maintaining a steadfast certainty in something for which there's no physical proof -- only a hand-me-down belief system based on nothing more than faith -- makes a guy a pretty easy mark for any con man who's skillful enough at invoking the name of the Lord. That's pretty much exactly what Maurice Clemmons did: He preyed on the fact that Huckabee prays.

And he's apparently not the only one who's professed to have had a jailhouse conversion and found himself swiftly handed a second chance by a very forgiving -- and very naive -- Pastor/Governor Huckabee.

While in a relative sense I respect Huckabee's vision of the role religion should play in the lives of those who accept it, I abhor -- in no uncertain terms -- his opinion that church and state are inextricably linked, and should be. His idiotic decision to do some kind of laying-on-of-hands and play the role of the forgiving Christian father figure to convicted felons, again and again and again, all because they knew the right button to push, is unconscionable; it put lives at risk and, it could easily be argued, actually took the lives of four innocent cops just sitting in a Washington diner doing paperwork.

Whenever I bring up the subject of religion and my often negative opinion of it, someone invariably asks the question, "Well, what's so wrong with believing in God if it's a person choice that gets them through the day?" My answer is always the same: This is a free country and you're absolutely entitled to believe whatever you'd like, but from an ironically logical perspective, it's important to remember that beliefs don't stand on their own -- they inform a person's actions. There are a million things you do every single day that stem directly from the set of beliefs you hold as truths. You go outside because you believe you can breathe the air. You drive across a bridge because you believe it will hold and you won't fall into the river below. You trust your friends and family because, for the most part anyway, you believe they're not planning to fuck you over.

Belief informs action.

And if you firmly believe that this life is only a trial run for the next one, that Jesus will soon come and remove the faithful from the Earth and cast everyone else into a lake of fire, that the world is only 6,000 years old, and that there's an equal parts benevolent and vengeful invisible being that hears your thoughts and can grant forgiveness or strike you down at his whim and may eventually allow you to spend eternity with him and his divine son in heaven -- imagine what that might cause you to do. Not believe -- do.

Now imagine you're an elected official, with power over the lives of others, and are allowed to make decisions based on this irrational belief system.

That's what Huckabee did -- and people's lives were put in jeopardy because of it.