CHRISTIANS BEHAVING BADLY #23

Where does the GOP find the religious nutjobs they allow to run for office?

Here are just three examples of Christians who ran for office in Arkansas, and thankfully lost their elections. 

-----

Three Republican House candidates simply shot themselves in the foot with their own words.  Rep. Jon Hubbard, Rep. Loy Mauch, and former Sen. Charlie Fuqua could not win their races after their extreme writings came to light.  It is likely that Republicans would have won at least two of these races without these self-inflected wounds.  The blame for these losses lie with the candidates who not only had bizarre points of view but published them in written form.

-----
Charlie Fugua, who ran for the Arkansas House, in his self-published book (filled with numerous spelling and grammatical errors) "God's Law: The Only Political Solution" advocated:

The maintenance of civil order in society rests on the foundation of family discipline. Therefore, a child who disrespects his parents must be permanently removed from society in a way that gives an example to all other children of the importance of respect for parents. The death penalty for rebellious children is not something to be taken lightly. The guidelines for administering the death penalty to rebellious children are given in Deut 21:18-21:

The minimum wage should be set at zero. It is simply a lie that raising the minimum wage helps people at the low end of the pay scale.

We cannot continue to sustain the percentage of our population that is in prison. No prison term should be longer than two years. Prison should be unpleasant and rehabilitative. Anyone that cannot be rehabilitated in two years should be executed.

I see no solution to the Muslim problem short of expelling all followers of the religion from the United States.

In an interview with the Huffington Post, Fugua said, "I think my views are fairly well-accepted by most people."  Apparently he was wrong.  "Most people" didn't vote for him.

-----

State Rep. Jon Hubbard (R-Jonesboro) told the Jonesboro Sun on Tuesday that he continues to believe the viewpoints he expressed in his 2009 self-published book, "Letters To The Editor: Confessions Of A Frustrated Conservative," that slavery was a "blessing" for blacks, TalkBusiness.net reports. In the book, Hubbard argued that blacks received a better quality of life as slaves in the U.S. than they did in Africa, and that African-Americans would not be in the U.S. were it not for slavery.

-----

State Rep. Loy Mauch (R-Bismarck) starting in 2000 wrote a series of letters to the editor of the Arkansas Democrat Gazette, defending slavery and attacking Lincoln, the Arkansas Times reports.

He has called Lincoln a "fake neurotic Northern war criminal" and said the 16th president committed "premeditated murder" on the Constitution. He called Lincoln and Civil War generals "Wehrmacht leaders" -- the name for the armed forces in Nazi Germany. He also praised his ancestors for standing up to "Northern aggression" and said the Confederate flag is "a symbol of Christian liberty vs. the new world order."

In two letters, Mauch wrote about the Bible and slavery. The Arkansas Times quotes from a letter Mauch wrote in 2009:

"If slavery were so God-awful, why didn’t Jesus or Paul condemn it, why was it in the Constitution and why wasn’t there a war before 1861?"

In 2010, it was reported that Mauch was a member of the Sons of Confederates Veterans and the League of the South, which has been described as a "neo-Confederacy" group advocating for second southern secession. Mauch was also reported to have chaired the western Arkansas chapter of the League of the South, which he downplayed as an honorary title. He also helped organize a 2004 conference calling for the removal of an Abraham Lincoln statue in Hot Springs. The conference included a keynote speech entitled "Homage to John Wilkes Booth."

Sources:
Talk Business
The Arkansas Blog and another post from The Arkansas Blog
amazon.com reader reviews
Huffington Post and another article from the Huffington Post