IF I WERE A REPUBLICAN

The Rev. Dana Prom Smith, S.T.D., Ph.D. (2/8/06)

If I were a Republican, which I once was for 55 years, I would feel betrayed by President Bush and the Republican Establishment in Washington. I knew I’d been betrayed just after President Bush was elected the first time. He lied about W.M.D. Deceit is a betrayal. However, now the betrayal has gotten worse with the passage of time. 800 people killed in Iraq in the month of January ‘06 alone for the establishment of an Islamic state.

The betrayal is deep. It is the wedding of the Republican party to right-wing zealots who call themselves Christians. I’ve been a believer in Jesus since I was a boy, but these ideologues bear no resemblance to the faith in Jesus in which I was reared and which I believe. They preach a religion of exclusion, vindictiveness, harshness, and condemnation, and viciousness, not the Gospel of Jesus Christ in John 3:16-17: "For God so loved the world that He gave His only Son, that whoever in him should not perish but have eternal life. For God sent His Son into the world, not to condemn the world, but that the world might be saved through Him."

The Republican alliance with this religion of hatred will come back to bite the Republicans. People are weary of it and will weary of the Republicans. Short term hatred and fear may work, but long term they fail.

The betrayal goes to the Republican Establishment’s assault on the middle-class. It’s called tax breaks for the rich and the corporations, but cuts in benefits for the veterans, the elderly, the poor, and the students. Eventually, these groups will realize what the Republican Establishment is doing to them, and they will weary of the Republicans.

Then the betrayal goes to the beginning of a repressive state with snooping on our telephone calls and emails. George W. Bush is a Thomas Hobbes Redux, planning to repress society for some so-called stability. Privacy is the foundation of freedom, and if our privacy is breached, our freedom will be lost. In case President Bush has not noticed, there is no peril of insurrection amongst the citizens. Our peril is from terrorists and from a President and Republican Establishment who have used an external peril to begin a program of internal repression.

If I were a Republican politician, I would worry about the star to which I have hitched my wagon. People are weary of false prophets preaching the bad news of hate under the guise of Christianity, of snoops, of political hacks sticking these noses in deathbeds and wombs, of debts that will hobble our children, of a government that wants to expand and take over, of an economy that benefits only the rich and the corporations, of a government willing to sacrifice the best and the bravest on the folly of a failed foreign policy, and of a party that has become a haven for misanthropes, preachers of hate, and is inept and cannot govern.

Copyright © Dana Prom Smith 2006