Big plans: DeLay's next mission is in God's hands

From the Washington post via the Houston Chronicle, an opinion piece on DeLay's new career as a Christian crusader for the GOP:

Looking back, I see DeLay as a somewhat pathetic figure. He'd started his professional life as a pest exterminator in Houston. His business eventually went under, but not before the IRS had sued him three times for not paying income and payroll taxes, and he twice lost court judgments to ex-partners who claimed he'd cheated them. From that base, he launched his unlikely political career in Sugar Land in 1978 as part of the Reagan revolution. As a professional pest-killer, DeLay came to believe that government threatened the very existence of small businesses and made a career of speaking for the little guy; he likened the Environmental Protection Agency to "the Gestapo." As a state legislator, he did little of note, except develop a reputation for partying that earned him the nickname "Hot Tub Tom."

What struck me as truly pathetic, though, was his shambles of a family life. His late father and two brothers were alcoholics; DeLay himself, when first elected to Congress in 1985, "would stay out all night drinking till the bars closed," he told me. He swore off hard liquor after he was "reborn" as a Christian, he said.

The scars of family dysfunction cut deep. When I profiled Delay, he was touting his commitment to "family values," but had ceased attending family functions and had not spoken to his mother in two years, even though she lived 10 miles from him.

DeLay dates his Christian rebirth to his alcohol-hazed first year in Congress, when he saw a video by James Dobson, the Christian family guru, on the dangers of putting career ahead of family. "I started crying because I had missed my daughter's whole childhood," he said. "It was me, me, me, me. It was golf or my business or politics that came first. It told me what a jerk I really was."

Click here for the rest.

DeLay represents in a nutshell the major problems I have with fundamentalist Christianity: in order to be a far right-wing Christian, one must practice Orwellian "doublethink" like a pro. That is, I have no doubt that DeLay sees himself as a true believer, a real "born again" Christian, but he, like the vast majority of American fundamentalists, doesn't pay much attention to what the Bible actually says. No, scratch that; fundamentalists, in reality, obsess over the Bible. What actually happens is that they overemphasize the stuff that justifies their harsh and barbaric worldview, especially the dictates of the genocidal Old Testament, from which the coming of Christ supposedly freed humanity, while underemphasizing the good stuff from the New Testament, especially Christ's words about compassion and love. This kind of uber-hypocrisy is what allowed DeLay to become a Christian without changing his political ideology one bit. This is what allowed hundreds of thousands of fundamentalists to say "God is love" on the one hand, but "invade Iraq" on the other. Sick stuff.

Well, DeLay, if he's able to avoid jail time, may very well end up being something of a bully pulpit and fund raising champion for the Christian Right, but no matter how much private power he's able to amass, America is still way better off with him out of Congress than in it.

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