Interesting question over at Dispatches. I doubt that he is; his statements regarding the separation of church and state, though somewhat ill-informed perhaps, don't show that he's a Dominionist or a Reconstructionist at all. Certainly one cannot base such an accusation on the fact that such people might endorse him. In a statement on July 24, 2006, Paul complained about the IRS cracking down on churches where the church leaders were propagating political views. He said that
"[t]he supposed motivation behind the ban on political participation by churches is the need to maintain a rigid separation between church and state. However, the First amendment simply prohibits the federal government from passing laws that establish religion or prohibit the free exercise of religion. There certainly is no mention of any 'separation of church and state,' yet lawmakers and judges continually assert this mythical doctrine.
"The result is court rulings and laws that separate citizens from their religious beliefs in all public settings, in clear violation of the free exercise clause. Our Founders never envisioned a rigidly secular public society, where people must nonsensically disregard their deeply held beliefs in all matters of government and politics. They certainly never imagined that the federal government would actively work to chill the political activities of some churches.
"Speech is speech, regardless of the setting. There is no legal distinction between religious expression and political expression; both are equally protected by the First amendment. Religious believers do not drop their political opinions at the door of their place of worship, nor do they disregard their faith at the ballot box. Religious morality will always inform the voting choices of Americans of all faiths.
"The political left, however, seeks to impose the viewpoint that public life must be secular, and that government cannot reflect morality derived from faith. Many Democrats, not all, are threatened by strong religious institutions because they want an ever-growing federal government to serve as the unchallenged authority in our society. So the real motivation behind the insistence on a separation of church and state is not based on respect for the First amendment, but rather on a desire to diminish the influence of religious conservatives at the ballot box.
"The Constitution's guarantee of religious freedom must not depend on the whims of IRS bureaucrats. Religious institutions cannot freely preach their beliefs if they must fear that the government will accuse them of 'politics.' We cannot allow churches to be silenced any more than we can allow political dissent in general to be silenced. Free societies always have strong, independent institutions that are not afraid to challenge and criticize the government."
The language may be somewhat extreme, but it's really just standard conservatism and it does have truth behind it: the Democrats' motivation was primarily political.
Far more troubling to me is the question of whether Paul is a neo-confederate of the variety of Thomas Di Lorenzo and allied crackpots. He is quoted as having called for the literal end of the Constitution: "Why do we need the federal government? There's no Cold War and no Communist threat. Many other nations are breaking into smaller and smaller pieces. The centralization of power in Washington occurred in a different time. Why not think about getting rid of the federal government, returning to the system of our Founders, and breaking up the United States into smaller government units?" (I don't have a source for that quote.) He has endorsed a popular myth among the Di Lorenzo crackpots, saying in one speech that the "war between the states" was "fought primarily over tariffs." In 1995, he spoke at the Council of Conservative Citizens (which is what the Klan politely calls itself nowadays) and appeared to endorse secession and to attack Lincoln as the originator of centralized government, another neo-confederate myth. "The Civil War wasn't fought over slavery," he said on Bill Maher's show, but "was fought over unifying a strong centralized state. You could have paid for all the slaves and released them." (Simple as that! What was old Abe thinking?)
Paul has endorsed many other crackpot notions as well, but the neo-confederacy aspect is always a good barometer. He should be kept far from the White House.
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