How much does Mike Huckabee hate Catholics?
http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=2712
Three Roman Catholic peace activists found themselves arrested at the Des Moines, http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=2810, the Christian Right ideologue who hopes to be Republican nominee for US President. The trio were part of an eight person delegation who held a banner reading “Who Would Jesus Bomb?”, a reference to Huckabee’s religious stance, which he preaches relentlessly, and his prowar position. The peace activists also had signs reading “End Iraq War” and “No War with Iran,” and read a list of soldiers killed in Bush’s war on Iraq.
The protest was a response to Huckabee’s refusal to reply to the peace group’s November letter asking Huckabee to pledge withdrawal of US forces from Iraq within 100 days of taking presidential office, as well as to promise not to launch an attack on Iran, among other demands, such as benefits for veterans.
Huckabee campaign grunts called the police, who arrested three of the eight activists on trespassing charges for “holding signs, singing and reading aloud, basically making a disturbance,” according to Des Moines policeman Vincent Valdez. While normally such arrests would perhaps be reasonable, they may reflect the anti-Catholicism Mike Huckabee and his campaign have been accused of, as well as his Christian Zionism. Christian Zionists are maniacal supporters of the Iraq War, and many call for an attack on Iran.
Since Mike Huckabee likes to parade around as a “Bible believing Christian,” the actions of his campaign in arresting Christian pacifists already have some Christians scratching their heads. After all, in 1 Corinthians 6 Saint Paul admonished believers against using the civil law to settle disputes among themselves.
But it may be that Huckabee doesn’t consider Catholics to be Christians in the first place. Only a few weeks before his apparent violation of 1 Corinthians, Huckabee appeared and spoke at the Texas pulpit of the http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=2793, a fanatic so extreme that the late Jerry Falwell, himself an ardent Christian Zionist, condemned his teachings that Jews do not need salvation from Christ as heretical. (Among other Hagee beliefs is that Jesus Christ was not the Messiah).
Huckabee’s ally Hagee is so off the wall that even http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=519 lobby’s main group. Among the beliefs of Christian Zionism is the teaching that nuclear war is not only inevitable, but should be welcome as a herald of the Second Coming.
Mike Huckabee’s appearance at John Hagee’s church greatly alarmed Catholic leaders, among them Catholic League president Bill Donahue, who pointed out that Hagee “suggests the Pope is the anti-Christ, and that the Catholic Church is “The Beast” mentioned in the book” of Revelation. Hagee also holds Catholics reponsible for “anti-Semitism”: “Anti-Semitism in Christianity began with the statements of the early church fathers, including Eusebius, Cyril, Chrysostom, Augustine, Origen, Justin, and Jerome …. This poisonous stream of venom came from the mouths of spiritual leaders to virtually illiterate congregants, sitting benignly in their pews, listening to their pastors. They labeled the Jews as ‘the Christ killers, plague carriers, demons, children of the devil, bloodthirsty pagans who look for an innocent child during the Easter week to drink his blood, money hungry Shylocks, who are deceitful as Judas was relentless,'” writes Hagee.
At another point, Rev. Hagee says, “The Roman Catholic Church, which was supposed to carry the light of the gospel, plunged the world into the Dark Ages…. The Crusaders were a motley mob of thieves, rapists, robbers, and murderers whose sins had been forgiven by the pope in advance of the Crusade ….The brutal truth is that the Crusades were military campaigns of the Roman Catholic Church to gain control of Jerusalem from the Muslims and to punish the Jews as the alleged Christ killers on the road to and from Jerusalem.”
While Hagee and Huckabee are clearly nut cases, Catholic concern is legitimate. Thanks to television, Christian Zionism has become endemic in evangelical churches in America, which form the foundation of America’s religious life. And the blatant hatred expressed by this leadership has very serious political implications. In the 1840s and 1850s anti-Catholicism spread out from churches into politics, resulting in the infamous Know Nothing movement, which agitated against the immigration of Irish and German Catholics and maintained a conspiracy theory which held that Catholics were secretly loyal to the political leadership of the Pope.
Fundamentalist Mike Huckabee’s campaign seems to tap into this latent but dangerous current of hatred, which is also being expressed in an anti-Mormon campaign — another very old hatred — against his rival http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=1845 in his own right — to contend that he is unelectable because of his supposed faith.
While Mike Huckabee’s Christian Zionism and end of the world belief system is dangerous to the planet, the religious intolerance he relies on and reflects in his actions should concern us all.