Can't explain the former so much, but I can explain the latter--it actually ties in with the "Christian Militia" and "Christian Patriot" movements.  You have to know a bit of the...decidedly bizarre mythology surrounding this, though.

Basically, a lot of these groups style themselves as "Constitutionalists" of some sort or another--usually in the realm of tax-protester movements (in claims that the 16th Amendment, which legally allowed the US to collect income taxes, was improperly ratified); in some cases, the "Constitutionalist" claim goes into conspiracy-theory land (in claims that the "New Deal" government of Roosevelt declared a national emergency that has been ongoing since 1933 which has suspended the Constitution; this is actually a very old claim within far-right wing groups including--notably--frankly racist groups such as the Ku Klux Klan, Nazi-sympathiser radioevangelist "Father" Coughlin, and the Posse Comitatus) and, occasionally, disturbingly into frank racism (especially in regards to the "Sovereign Citizen" movement--either in claiming that the Fourteenth Amendment (which extended the vote to former slaves) was improperly ratified or that it and the Twentieth Amendment (giving women the vote)  created a separate "non-sovereign" class of citizen equivalent to being a subject of the US government, as opposed to being a "Sovereign Citizen" (aka a white male landowner, the original persons granted citizenship and vote in the 1787 Constitution).

Some people into the "Patriot" movement go back further, claiming that the Constitution itself was improperly ratified and that the actual documents to be used should be the Articles of Confederation (which gave much more autonomy to the States--in essence, each state operated as an independent country handling its own internal affairs almost entirely, recruiting its own military, etc. but having a central body for trade and foreign affairs, the ability to call a Continental army, and having a standard defined currency (the "Continental dollar")--not unlike the European Union nowadays; however, it also gave the Federal government little real effective power, and many states during the Article of Confederation set themselves up as de facto (and occasionally de jure) religious theocracies).  

In such a setup (under the Articles brought back into force), non-citizens could be essentially prohibited from travel (the actual movement of people during the Articles of Confederation was more akin to the Schengen countries--no passport needed between member countries, import/export controls relaxed--but it explicitly allowed states to block travel of "vagabonds" between states); notably, the Articles of Confederation also made payment of funds to the central government responsibility of the states and prohibited the Congress from collecting taxes, which led to severe budgetary shortfalls.  Amendments were also nearly impossible (requiring unanimous vote)--the issue which ultimately doomed the Articles.

In this general vein, at least some "Christian Patriot" groups (and even more mainstream non-militia dominionist groups) are actively trying to set up "Constitutional Conventions" of their own, and one militia group linked to "Christian Patriot" groups has actually proposed a third Continental Congress (playing off the First and Second Continental Congresses prior to the ratification of the Constitution of the US).  

No less than the book "America's Providential History", a book promoting Christian Reconstructionism and heavily promoted in "Christian homeschool" correspondence-school circles, has specifically called for a Constitutional Convention to write a dominionist constitution for the US:

"If we work for more godly representatives in 2/3 of the state legislatures then we can bypass Congress and call a new Constitutional Convention to clean up all of the mess we have made of it in the past 200 years! Then with godly state legislatures, the odds are good that delegates appointed by them to a new Convention will be godly and wise as well." [8]

The "mess" the dominionists want to "clean up" begins with the 14th amendment: "no state shall `deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law;'"[9] and includes the 16th amendment, which gave Congress the power to collect progressive taxes on incomes;[10] and the 17th amendment in which Senators were no longer appointed by the state legislatures to represent their interests;[11] and the Supreme Court, which, the authors state, "has itself acted unconstitutionally."[12]

(Footnotes: all from "America's Providential History" as follows:
[8]  Ibid. at page 267.
[9] Ibid. at page 257-258.
[10] Ibid. at page 258.
[11] Ibid. at page 260.
[12] Ibid. at page 260-261. The book cites a quote attributed to Thomas Jefferson: "The germ of dissolution of our Federal government is in the constitution of the federal judiciary; an irresponsible body working like gravity by night and by day, gaining a little today and a little tomorrow, and advancing its noiseless step like a thief, over the field of jurisdiction, until all shall be usurped from the states, and the judges as the ultimate arbiters of all constitutional questions is a very dangerous doctrine indeed, and one which would place us under the despotism of an oligarchy....The Constitution has erected no such tribunal." The authors say "The Court has evolved to this very state today."  The authors' solution apparently is to place only "Christian" judges on the bench.)

Interestingly, the Eagle Forum (itself a dominionist group) has written (in an article criticising calls for "Con-Cons" on the grounds that "liberals might hijack the process") that thirty-two of the thirty-four states needed have reportedly issued specific statements in their legislatures calling for a Constitutional Convention--this may or may not be a high number, because there is controversy over whether a state may retract a resolution calling for a "Con-Con" (and reportedly some states have).   Some dominionist groups are now bringing back "Con-Con" calls to force through federal-level bans on gay marriages--and opening up the entire Constitution to rewrite.

Quite a few of these "Patriot" groups have close links with racist groups--mostly militia groups into Christian Identity, but occasionally Klan and neo-Nazi groups as well.  (This, too, is not new; the dominionist group with the longest recorded activity in the US, "The Fellowship", is documented to have had connections with Nazi sympathiser groups in the US pre-World War II, presumably because both groups were strongly anti-Communist, pro-business, and big on promoting "faith and family".  "Father" Coughlin, a vehement radio-preacher, was also an admitted Nazi sympathiser, printed anti-Semitic literature, and was eventually not only linked to a dominionist movement of the time which plotted to establish a fascist government in the US by blowing up synagogues and the Federal Reserve but eventually was forced off air by both broadcasters and his parish, and even ended up finally being formally charged under wartime espionage laws.  Coughlin, in a real sense, was the very prototype of today's Pat Robertson in many areas (including being highly influencial politically and being possibly the most listened-to radio preacher of his time).  Coughlin's increasingly strident antisemitism--and the reaction of broadcasters--made him a bit of a martyr-hero in Nazi Germany itself, who used Coughlin and the increasing criticism of his material as propoganda material for the Nazi cause.)

It's in large part because of the links with racist groups (and the general claims, too, of pretty much any international organisation being a tool of the "New World Order"/Antichrist) that "Minutemen" groups are so heavily anti-immigration.

Some of these groups also actively promote the idea that the United Nations, or the European Union, are the Antichrist--and have an entire conspiracy theory detailing this.  Many aspects of this conspiracy theory--including claims that Christianity, homeschooling, and such will be made illegal, that "Christians" and "patriots" will be rounded up in UN-mandated concentration camps, etc.--are designed explicitly to play on the fears of dominionists.

In short, these people are possibly one of the ultimate extensions of the dominionist "us against them" meme--in a sense, they believe the country has already been taken over, and they see themselves in the same role as the Founding Fathers back in the 1700s fighting the British.  In fact, the term "minuteman" itself is used as a codeword here, hearkening back to the days of the Revolutionary army militias.  (This is by design.)  Occasionally--especially the groups with closer links to the "Christian Identity" groups and to anti-abortion groups linked with "Christian Militias"--this has carried over into frank domestic terrorism (with Eric Rudolph and with various anti-abortionists who have claimed to be members of the "Army of God", and with Tim McVeigh in particular).

It's also something that is increasingly showing up in the dominionist community at large; I've written a article on this which details especially the links between "Christian Militia" groups, bona-fide racists, and "mainstream" dominionists (including the Constitution Party (formerly the US Taxpayer's Party) which has for the past twenty years been heavily marketed to tax-protester "militia" groups, originally was in part formed from a racist political party, and which has a large number of connections with "patriot militia" groups in general).

by dogemperor on Fri Apr 14, 2006 at 11:02:20 PM EST
[ Parent ]

It's a combination really of the "god warrior" motif plus code-words for "tax protester" and "Christian militia" groups that have been in currency since at least the time of Reagan (if not before then).

In fact, some aspects have been around for, oh, since before World War II; I've mentioned Father Coughlin, and another in his ilk is Gerald P. Winrod who (like Coughlin) was involved with dominionist-fascist groups (in fact, Winrod was proven to have founded at least one group, "Defenders of the Christian Faith", which started out as an anti-evolutionist, pro-segregationalist, pro-Prohibition group and later evolved into a bona fide Nazi sympathiser group; Winrod ended up being arrested for sedition, and his son is a Christian Identity "minister" presently in prison for kidnapping).

by dogemperor on Fri Apr 14, 2006 at 11:29:28 PM EST
[ Parent ]

Overlap, nothing--some of the same people involved with the "Minutemen" stuff have been actual Constitution Party founding members.  (The Constitution Party in its various guises (including the US Taxpayer's Party) has a very long history--dating back to its founding, in fact--of being heavily connected to militia groups like the Minutemen.  I wrote about this, in fact, noting racist and militia links to multiple dominionists including some of the organisers of the Justice Sunday events; the Constitution Party and its connections to militia groups are well documented in that article.

Other individuals directly linked to the "Minutemen" in the dominionist movement include Roy "Ten Commandments" Moore, including being a featured speaker at a militia event called the "Alabama Tea Party" where racist and "Minutemen"-type anti-immigration militia groups were in attendance.  (In fact, Moore's own legal adviser is linked with Klan and "neo-confederate" racist groups including the modern day versions of "White Citizen's Councils".  Moore is also linked with "Patriot Church" tax-protester militia movements.)

I'll go ahead and repost the specific bit on the Constitution Party and its links to militia groups, and links with the anti-abortion movement's more radical members and militia groups, below.


by dogemperor on Sat Apr 15, 2006 at 06:13:34 PM EST
[ Parent ]

This thick:

Constitution Party (formerly dba US Taxpayer's Party)

The Constitution Party--under both its present identity and its past name as the US Taxpayer's Party--has long been a darling of "Christian Militia" groups, Klan groups, Christian Identity practitioners, and similar racist rogues.

The Constitution Party's history is touched upon here in relation to the possibility of Roy Moore being a gubernatorial or even presidential candidate for the Constitution Party:

What none of these accounts mention is that the Constitution Party is in fact the home party of the Patriot movement and its attendant "constitutionalists" -- people whose far-right interpretations of the Constitution lead them to form militias and "common law courts."

Founded in 1992 as the U.S. Taxpayers Party, its leading light for years has been Howard Phillips, the former Republican strategist who peeled away from the party in the early '90s. Phillips was its presidential candidate in the 1996 and 2000 elections. The Constitution Party is explicitly antitax, antigovernment, anti-abortion, and seeks to abolish the IRS, close down the Department of Education and terminate federal funding for Planned Parenthood, AIDS education, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Under its USTP moniker, the party openly supported the formation of citizen militias -- in fact, a manual on forming militias was available through the party -- and a number of Patriot militiamen spoke before party functions and openly affiliated themselves with it.

(One of the USTP's most notorious moments came in 1995, when a militia promoter named Matthew Trewhella appeared at its national convention. Trewhella, a notorious anti-choice activist, said: "This Christmas I want you to do the most loving thing and I want you to buy each of your children an SKS rifle and 500 rounds of ammunition." Trewhella also signed a declaration saying that murdering abortion providers is "justifiable homicide.")

The Montana Human Rights Network carried the following report on Phillips' presidential campaign appearance in Montana:

    Howard Phillips, the party's presidential candidate, spoke numerous times throughout the convention. His campaign received very little mainstream media attention, but was closely covered by right-wing periodicals like The Spotlight and Media Bypass. At the Montana convention, Phillips spent most of his time discussing all the federal agencies and programs he would eliminate if elected. These included: the income tax, Federal Reserve, FEMA, EPA, ATF, and the Department of Education. He also claimed that both Democrats and Republicans had adopted the Socialist Party's platform of 30 years ago. He continually stressed Republicans were more dangerous than Democrats, because "They fly a false flag."

Just how linked is the Constitution Party with militia groups?  They've happily sold antisemitic militia tracts and militia manuals at their state conventions:

While the GOP struggles to keep itself together under the big tent theory, the upstart USTP has managed to erect a small,

but spacious tent of its own. The USTP is home even to the armed, the racist, and the anti-Semitic:

* Rev. Matthew Trewhella --USTP National Committee, Wisconsin. A signer of  Paul Hill's Defensive Action statement, Trewhella leads the anti-abortion group Missionaries to the Pre-Born. At the USTP Wisconsin state convention, he called for the formation of armed militias, such as the one he leads through his church. Newsweek reports that one member of the Missionaries   who lived in Trewhella's basement for five months in 1990) kept a journal which included apparent plans for a guerrilla campaign of clinic

bombings and assassinations of doctors.  What's more,  a 100 page guerrilla army manual was sold by the USTP of Wisconsin at their May convention.  Among the manual's justifications for armed resistance to the federal government is legalized abortion.

• William K. Shearer -- Member, USTP National Committee, California. Was a member of the National Executive Committee of the Populist Party, in 1984 when the group was dominated by Neo-Nazis and Ku Klux Klan leaders.

• Dr. Curtis Caine -- USTP National Committee, Mississippi. He embarrassed the Southern Baptist Convention's Christian Life Commission in 1989, when he defended apartheid in South Africa and called Martin Luther King a fraud.  Caine also heads the Jackson chapter of the John Birch Society.

Convention in May 1994, Dale led sessions on The Problem with Our Debt Money System and Alternatives to the Debt Money System. Dale was in the early 1980's a confidant of Posse Comitatus leader Gordon Kahl, according to the Bismarck Tribune.  The Posse was an anti-tax, anti-government organization that swept the Farm Belt in the 1970's and 1980's. Gordon Kahl, killed two federal marshals in a shoot-out in Medina, North Dakota.  Dale told federal marshals that he would hide Kahl, if he appeared, and threatened to fight foreclosure on his ranch by shooting as "many of the sons of bitches as he could".  At one USTP event, Dale sold The Revelator, a publication that rails against "Anti-Christ Banksters" (sic) whose basic strategy is to instigate war and finance both sides, especially if it involves Christians killing

Christians.

* Jeffrey Baker -- Chair, USTP of Florida, declared at the Wisconsin USTP convention, Abortionists should be put to death.  "They are murderers." Baker was identified as a speaker on a recent

conference program, as representing, 10th Amendment Militia, Church Status.

(Paul Hill's "Defensive Action Statement" was a note stating that the murder of doctors, nurses, and other clinic staff at women's centers performing abortions was "justified homicide"; Paul Hill was eventually executed in Florida after being found guilty of the stalking and murder of a doctor who performed abortions.)

(Also, as a side note, "Anti-Christ Bankers" is a common code word in racist communities to denote Jews.  Posse Comitatus is considered a racist organisation by most experts, including the ADL and SPLC.)

At least one other article on the militia movement confirms the stories of militia manuals being sold at Constitution Party events:

Christian fundamentalists, especially those drawn to the antiabortion movement, also have played key roles in the growth of the militias. In the forefront have been Matthew Trewhella, leader of the Milwaukee-based Missionaries to the Preborn, who helped organize militia gatherings through his church and preached their formation;15 and Jeffrey Baker, a Florida antiabortionist who has called for the death penalty for abortionists.16

Both appeared as speakers at a U.S. Taxpayers Party convention in 1994 at which they promoted the concept of militias, and a "Free Militia" manual was sold entailing how to form one's own militia cell. The manual cites as a source for its constitutional theories, Separation of Church and State: Historical Fact and Current Fiction by Robert Cord, who argues that the First Amendment never was intended to bar the church from government.17 Baker's conspiracy opus, Cheque Mate: The Game of Princes, is a popular fixture at patriot gathering book tables, along with his video, Government Gone Mad.18 Baker and Trewhella are closely linked with Christian Reconstructionists, a fundamentalist movement to transform America into a Christian theocracy.19

(Footnotes: 15 See Betsy Thatcher, "Trewhella urges, 'Be a good shot,'" Milwaukee Sentinel, August 18, 1994, pp. 5A-8A, and Mike Mulvey, "Trewhella tied to 2 who held arms training," Milwaukee Sentinel, August 19, 1994, pp. 1A-10A.

16 See Janny Scott, "Radical antiabortion alliance described," The New York Times, August 18, 1994.

17 Book published by Baker Book House, Grand Rapids, Michigan. Cord is also cited in a Summit Ministries article, "The role of the Bible and Christianity in America," which argues that the founding fathers "expected our nation to be (on the whole) Christian, and that our government to reflect that bias." Summit Ministries, based in Manitou Springs, Colorado, operates the world-wide web site, Christian Answers Network on which David Barton's Wallbuilders (an anti-church-state separation page) appears. Like Gritz, Summit Ministries preachers decry secular humanism as the religion now in place in our schools and government.

18 Both are also sold through the Militia of Montana and the Christian Patriot Association's catalogues.

19 See Tom Burghardt, "God, Guns, and Terror: Missionaries to the Preborn," Bay Area Coalition for Our Reproductive Rights.)

In fact, the Constitution Party (under its prior name, the US Taxpayer's Party) ended up listed as a hate group by Southern Poverty Law Center and was subjected to "dead-agenting"--character assassination--by a state head of the party.  (American Vision is similarly targeting the SPLC for character assassination after its listing by SPLC as a hate group.)

The Constitution Party was originally formed from a group called the American Independent Party which itself had considerable ties to racist groups.

Michael Peroutka, the last presidential candidate run by the Constitution Party, is himself a racist.  He is a member of the League of the South, per this article:

The blond-haired, blue-eyed, 53-year-old became a Constitution Party favorite by launching the Institute for the Constitution, which peddles 12-week seminars teaching a Biblical version of the U.S. government. His membership in the League of the South has helped bring neo-Confederates into the Constitution Party.

For those who aren't aware of the League of the South, the group is a racist "neo-Confederate" group that is also explicitly dominionist:

After as many as 30,000 revelers descended on Biloxi, Miss., for last April's "Black Spring Break 2000," many locals, offended by incidents of public nudity and angered by two cases in which white women were partially stripped by drunken men, called for more police, better traffic control and improved planning. Others criticized police for losing control and for not making more arrests.

But J. Michael Hill went further.

To the founder and president of the League of the South (LOS), the 6-year-old organization that has emerged at the forefront of the neo-Confederate movement, the incidents in Biloxi -- along with similar attacks on white women in New York City's Central Park by black and Hispanic men -- represented a call to arms.

The assaults, he suggested, were not merely the handiwork of individuals. All minorities, in Hill's view, were responsible.

"It is time for us, as Southern whites, to look to our own well being and defense against these thugs," the one-time college professor wrote on AlaReb, an invitation-only, neo-Confederate discussion group on the Internet.

"Moreover, it is time we demand that respectable members of the 'minority community' control their debased 'brothers and sisters.' If they refuse, then we can only believe that they secretly condone such behavior. Let us not flinch when our enemies call us 'racists'; rather, just reply with, 'So, what's your point?'"

Hill, of course, has never suggested that whites control the actions of their "debased brothers and sisters," whites who kill, maim and harass blacks and other minorities. He has offered no lectures about the white mobs that attacked blacks during the civil rights era -- on the contrary, he has spoken of the era as a halcyon time in Southern history.

He has never spoken out about the criminals who have randomly murdered black people over the last few years in the name of building a whiter America. And he was silent when a white mob in York, Neb., attacked the home of a white woman dating a black man in 1998.

Instead, Hill has concentrated his fire on the minorities he is certain are destroying America.

Hill is no aberration in the LOS, a group that has grown to include 9,000 people organized into 96 chapters in 20 states. Despite the group's claims that it will brook no racists, the League is rife with white supremacists and racist ideology.

One key LOS figure and old Hill colleague, a man who is the former head of the LOS chapter in Tuscaloosa (Ala.) County where the League got its start, was even blunter than his leader in his own AlaReb posting about black-on-white crime.

"You see the day is coming when we will NEED a new type of Klan," G. David Cooksey wrote after the Central Park incidents in June. "Yes I said Klan!! If push comes to shove I'm for it! ... Time has come to stop this crap now!

"Or would you all like to see your daughters raped???"

Academics Set the Tone

The League of the South, first known as the Southern League, was founded in 1994 by Hill and a group of 40 other people. At first, the LOS appeared to be concerned primarily with questions of Southern culture, threatening to push for secession, at least rhetorically, as a final resort if what were seen as the rights and dignity of the South were not respected.

It keyed in on the notion that Southerners alone among U.S. population groups were commonly denigrated by the "politically correct" dominant culture, seen as emanating from the Yankee North.

And it pushed the idea of the South as fundamentally Christian, calling, in effect, for imposition of a theocracy -- a government in which prayers and other religious observances would be common, and mandatory, in public life.

Lest anyone doubt their racism:

But hints of its future radicalism -- the raw anger LOS now openly directs at blacks and other minorities -- were evident early on. In 1995, Hill joined a crowd of angry whites, including some professional white supremacists, at the funeral of Michael Westerman, a white murdered by a black youth, ostensibly for flying the Confederate pennant on his pickup truck.

Hill, according to the book Confederates in the Attic, declared it was "open season" on anyone who dared to question "the illicit rights bestowed on a compliant and deadly underclass that now fulfills a role similar to that of Hitler's brown-shirted street thugs of the 1930s."

He was referring to black people.

Since then, the tone of the League has grown consistently more hard line. Its ideologues now openly reject the notion of egalitarianism, opting instead for the idea that society is composed of a God-given hierarchy of groups that should not necessarily have the same rights and privileges as one another. Hill now publicly decries racial intermarriage under any circumstances.

He says people other than white Christians would be allowed to live in his South, but only if they bow to "the cultural dominance of the Anglo-Celtic people and their institutions." Where the goal of secession was once largely rhetorical, it is now a seriously stated aim.

And, in a June posting on AlaReb, Hill called slavery a "God-ordained" institution.

This radicalization is also reflected in an e-mail signed by Hill last April, right after the events in Biloxi. 'WE MUST NOT WAIT AND REACT TO THE ENEMY," Hill wrote. "Let us be bold and take the fight to him. He (the NAACP, Chamber of Commerce, and most elected officials) is well funded and determined to wipe out any vestige of Confederate heritage and culture. ...

"We must not compromise with evil."

The League of the South is also a primary force in hijacking congregations in the south in attempts to convert entire denominations to Christian Reconstructionism, Southern Baptist Hijacking style:

Key members of a white supremacist organization, the League of the South (LOS), are moving to take control of conservative churches around the South, prompting a possible split in a major Presbyterian denomination.

The central player in this little-noticed drama is the Rev. Steven J. Wilkins, pastor of the Auburn Avenue Presbyterian Church in Monroe, La., and a founder and current board member of the neo-Confederate LOS. Wilkins is an advocate of Christian Reconstruction, a theology that seeks to impose draconian Old Testament law on civil society.

The League's goal, Wilkins has said, is to save America from "paganism" and restore it as "the last bastion of Christendom" - a Christendom that, in Wilkins' view, sees slavery as "perfectly legitimate."

Last summer, Wilkins almost caused a rupture within the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA), a conservative Southern denomination founded in 1973 that has more than 300,000 North American members.

Persuading 10 churches to join him, Wilkins called a meeting of the PCA'S Louisiana Presbytery to consider the possible departure from the PCA of those with "theonomic" views - the idea that the Bible, not man-made civil law, should form the legal basis of society.

Although the debate was temporarily tabled, PCA officials say that a schism may be imminent.

The Constitution Party also runs quite a number of blatant racists:

Those planks only begin to tell the story. In its brief history, the Constitution Party has flirted egregiously with some of the most extreme elements of the antigovernment militia movement and of Christian Reconstruction, a radical theology that calls for imposing Old Testament laws - stoning to death adulterers and homosexuals, to name just two.

Among the party's current roster of local candidates is a Salt Lake City man, Jack Gray, who has no qualms about presenting himself as a member of David Duke's white supremacist hate group, the European American Unity and Rights Organization (EURO).

The party's official "key race" for 2003 is a gubernatorial bid by Mississippi's most virulent Confederate flag defender, John Thomas Cripps, a long-time member of the white-supremacist hate group, League of the South.

...

Judging from the rhetoric in Clackamas, engaging with real voters might be a thorny task indeed. Until their spiritual leader took center stage, the Constitution Party stalwarts reserved their loudest amen chorus for a balls-to-the-wall speech by Jim Ludwick, chair of Oregonians for Immigration Reform.

Ludwick roused the congregation with an enthusiastic endorsement of the Reconquista conspiracy theory - the notion, espoused by anti-immigration extremists, that Mexico, in league with Mexican Americans, is "invading" the United States, bent on "reconquering" the Southwest territory it lost in the mid-19th century.

"President Vicente Fox has made it a priority to gain control of parts of the United States," Ludwick asserted. His tone grew even harder toward the end of his address, when Ludwick launched into a litany of cautionary tales about illegal immigrants who have committed heinous crimes, including accused serial sniper Lee Malvo and the infamous "railroad killer," Angel Reyes Resendez.

While many voters would surely be turned off by such blatant bigotry, others might get queasy listening to Kevin Starrett, white-bearded head of the Oregon Firearms Federation. Starrett won enthusiastic applause by grimly denouncing the nation's most powerful pro-gun organization.

"The NRA won't stand up for gun owners," Starrett declared. He then announced that the Constitution Party had joined a more extreme gun-owners' coalition, Keep and Bear Arms, which recently started a campaign to end the federal ban on many assault weapons.

And then there's Lon Mabon, whose name has been bandied about in party circles as a potential presidential candidate in 2004. A diminutive 56-year-old with a wiry mustache and a soft, tentative speaking voice that belies his ferocious convictions, Mabon made a name for himself in the 1980s and '90s with his Oregon Citizens Alliance (OCA), which championed a series of state ballot initiatives to curtail gay rights and abortion rights.

With the successive failure of each initiative, Mabon's stock fell among conservative Oregonians, and his Constitution Party run for U.S. Senate last year garnered only 2% of the vote.

It didn't help that Mabon had spent 42 days in jail earlier in 2002, cited for contempt of court after refusing to show up for a debtor's hearing. His Citizens Alliance had been ordered to pay $31,500 after a jury hearing a civil lawsuit against his group found that an employee used excessive force in kicking a gay-rights advocate out of a meeting.

When Mabon failed to show up for the hearing to determine whether he could pay, claiming that the presiding judge had no jurisdiction because he hadn't taken a proper oath of office, the state's largest newspaper, The Oregonian, editorialized that Mabon had "crossed over into the official crackpot zone."

But his Constitution Party kindred in Clackamas listened approvingly to Mabon's rambling speech about Biblical governance - probably because they largely agree with his political philosophy, which leans heavily toward the theocratic.

"I hear the voice of God saying that the [government] must surrender to the requirements of His Holiness," Mabon has written. "This means that the Governor, U.S. Senators, Representatives and all elected officials should be allowed into office only after they have proved to the Citizens ... that they are indeed obedient to the Will and Holiness of God."

by dogemperor on Sat Apr 15, 2006 at 06:17:37 PM EST
[ Parent ]

Dominionist "anti-abortion" groups

Perhaps some of the strongest links between dominionism and the racist right have been in the antiabortion movement.  This has been both via support by racists (Klan groups have often taken an antiabortion line) and--more darkly--support by dominionist anti-abortion groups of militia organisations.

Possibly the most infamous example of this is Eric Rudolph, the "Olympics Bomber", who also was ultimately convicted of bombing an abortion clinic and gay nightclub.  Rudolph was a member of a group calling itself the "Army of God" which distributed manuals on how to conduct terrorist attacks on women's clinics, and which was promoted by "Christian militia" groups.

One of the most definitively linked of groups to the militia movement is Matthew Trewhella's "Missionaries to the Preborn"--which itself can be legitimately considered a "Christian Militia" type group:

In 1994, PPFA released a video of Missionaries to the Preborn leader Rev. Matthew Trewhella calling for the formation of armed militias. Trewhella had made a speech at the Wisconsin convention of the U.S. Taxpayers Party, urging that "churches can form militia days and teach their men to fight." Trewhella's own church held classes for its members on "the use of firearms." He recommended buying "each of your children an SKS rifle and 500 rounds of ammunition." Trewhella was also a signatory to Paul Hill's Defensive Action petition, in which the "use of lethal force" is "justified" to save the "unborn." (Hill has been sentenced to death for the murders of a doctor and clinic escort in Florida.) The anti-abortion views of militia-and-gun supporters are beginning to overlap with the religious right-wing's ideology and rhetoric. The line between these groups is blurring, revealing both groups' deep anti-government thinking and little tolerance for separation of church and state. Abortion is just one issue in this convergence.

Disturbingly, another group linked to both militia groups and other "crossover" organisations like the Constitution Party is none other than Operation Rescue and Randall Terry in particular:

But what few have remarked upon is Terry's long history of association with the most violent elements of right-wing extremism, and his early role in fomenting the formation of "citizen militias" and the "Patriot" movement. Terry's extremism is very broad-ranging, and includes some of the most dangerous and nakedly anti-democratic elements in American society.

In fact, my first awareness of the existence of a "militia movement" came in 1994, when I watched a video tape of Terry and his frequent cohort, Matthew Trewhella, exhorting a gathering of Howard Phillips' U.S. Taxpayers Party (now known as the Constitution Party). Terry called for the "justifiable" killing of abortion doctors, while Trewhella painted militias as one of the solutions for dealing with abortion.

An earlier report from 1995 describes some of his activities in this regard:

    Randall Terry, founder of Operation Rescue, is working with the radical right U.S. Taxpayers Party (USTP) launching a new "leadership institute" to train "militant" and "unmerciful" activists. Terry has recently assumed a leadership position at the USTP, writing newsletters and speaking at events. He says he plans to run as a USTP candidate in the state of New York in 1996. "I'm anxious to run," he said "I am chomping at the bit to actually be in office."

    Terry said a new "leadership institute" will be held near his hometown of Binghamton, New York in October and will offer "three days of intense training on vision, courage, biblical ethics, raising up a cadre of people who are militant, who are fierce, who are unmerciful to the deeds of darkness, unmerciful to the ideologies of hell." At the same conference Matthew Trewhella, leader of Missionaries to the Pre-born urged delegates to form armed militias and to establish a "militia day" in their churches. Conference organizers sold copies of a manual on how to create an armed underground army. Jeffrey Baker, USTP National Committee member touted that "Abortionists should be put to death" during his convention speech. The audience erupted in applause.

    The U.S. Taxpayers party is headquartered in Vienna, Virginia. In 1992 the USTP presidential candidate, Howard Phillips, ran a series of controversial campaign commercials which featured the photograph, name, and home address of medical directors at a Planned Parenthood in Iowa while the narrator stated "Howard Phillips urges you to contact these baby killers and urge them to mend their ways. A vote for Howard Phillips is a vote to prosecute the baby killers for premeditated murder."

The previous article also notes further links:

One militia leader has been fined over $500,000 for his participation in abortion blockades with Oregon-based Advocates for Life. This same man also conducted target practice with Shelley Shannon four days before her attempted murder of Dr. George Tiller in Wichita. Larry Pratt, former Pat Buchanan aide and executive director of Gun Owners of America, a favorite speaker at white supremacist gatherings, raised $150,000 to pay Operation Rescue's bills. Many pro-gun, anti-government zealots have connections to Operation Rescue, and OR activists have demonstrated at the Waco compound.

(Yes, you read that right.  They were literally protesting in support of David Koresh.)

Other articles have noted how militia groups are also explicitly partnering with the antiabortion movement, including Bo Gritz (yes, the Michigan Militia Bo Gritz, the same Michigan Militia that Oklahoma City bomber Randy Weaver was linked with) partnering with "Christian Militia" groups.

Aside from being the one dominionist faction that has most frequently crossed the line to frank domestic terrorism, the anti-abortion faction of the dominionist movement not only has avowed racists but those racists freely borrow tactics from racist groups:

John Burt, a former Klansman, borrows tactics like his "wanted" posters from the KKK, and says that "fundamentalist Christians and those people[the KKK] are pretty close." (The Progressive, 10/94) Paul Hill told USA Today (3/7/94), "I could envision a covert organization developing --something like a pro-life IRA."

(Paul Hill went on to murder a doctor who provided abortions and was ultimately executed by the state of Florida.)

Trewhella has even promoted the idea of forming "Christian Militias" at Constitution Party rallies:

In 1994, Planned Parenthood released a video showing Trewhella speaking ata Wisconsin state USTP convention. "What should we do?" Trewhella asked. "We should do what thousands of people across the nation aredoing. We should be forming militias." According to Planned Parenthood, the USTP sold a Free Militia manual on how to form an underground army. Defending the "right to life" against "legalized abortion" is the first of the manual's stated reasons why one should take up arms.

In fact, these groups have even directly threatened the lives of government officials:

In December 1994, NBC refused to air a segment of the program TV Nation in which Roy McMillan of the Mississippi-based Christian Action Group said that assassinating Supreme Court justices would be justifiable homicide,and that the president was in "probable harms way." TV Nation producer Michael Moore believes that the airing of the segment could have led to arrests that might have prevented the Brookline clinic killings. "It's a federal offense to say the president should be killed," Moore told USA Today (1/16/95). Eventually the interview aired on the BBC in Britain, but not in the U.S.

Going back to Eric Rudolph and the Army of God mess, Southern Poverty Law Center again does an excellent job in detailing the links between dominionist antiabortion groups and militias and other racist groups:

Eric Robert Rudolph, the government says, bombed an abortion clinic in Birmingham, Ala., earlier this year, killing a police officer and partially blinding a nurse. Agents also want to question him about the bombings of an Atlanta area clinic and a lesbian bar, attacks which injured seven bystanders. And many suspect Rudolph of involvement in the 1996 Atlanta Olympics bombing which killed one person and injured 100 others.

To many, these targets seem unrelated. But they are not.

More and more, anti-abortion extremists, white supremacist groups and the conspiracy-minded "Patriot" movement have come to share the same enemies list. Many in these previously separate movements agree that everything smacking of "one-worldism" -- the Olympics, the United Nations and any other global agency -- is part of a massive plot to subject Americans to tyranny.

Activists in all three movements describe homosexuals as "sodomites," people who deserve capital punishment. And in the latest development, many of those involved in these groups are bitterly attacking abortion.

"Eric Rudolph is symbolic of this new merger," says Dallas Blanchard, chairman of the University of West Florida's sociology department in Pensacola. "Militia types have shown more and more interest in the abortion issue, while anti-abortionists are becoming more and more militant and allying themselves with the militia movement."

Since the early 1990s, Patriot and white supremacist groups have used mainstream issues like gun control and land and environmental regulation to draw people into their organizations. Now, they are taking up the banner of fighting abortion.

America's Invisible Empire, a Klan group, describes abortion as "America's greatest crime." White Aryan Resistance, another white supremacist group, calls for "future Aryan justice" for abortionists -- except in the case of non-white abortions. Leaders of the U.S. Taxpayers Party, a Patriot-linked group, have called for the death penalty for abortion doctors and even their patients.

Neal Horsley, who has called on militias to seize nuclear weapons, posts on his Web site the names of and other details about more than 300 people he considers pro-abortion, demanding "Nuremberg" trials.

The Michigan Militia has long been bitterly opposed to abortion, and other Patriot groups now take similar stands.

...

Most recently, a Tennessee abortion activist repeatedly arrested in clinic invasions has begun converting a former Washington state lodge into a retreat for others who share his militant brand of religion. Allison Hall Grayson, who now calls himself a "Steward of the Church of Christ," is a friend of Paul Hill, convicted of killing an abortion doctor and his escort, The (Spokane, Wash.) Spokesman-Review reported.

Grayson doesn't believe in license plates, driver's licenses, Social Security or public schools, the newspaper said. He supports armed militias. The registered agent for his corporation is tied to "common-law courts" and militia activities.

His wife, Catherine, is a cartoonist for Life Advocate, an anti-abortion magazine that supports "justifiable homicide" and shares a post office box with the American Coalition of Life Activists (ACLA). Many ACLA directors have been outspoken in their support for the murderers of doctors.

Grayson's project, officials and observers say, is the latest evidence of the melding of the militant anti-abortion and antigovernment movements. But similar cases, some of them documented by Planned Parenthood, have cropped up around the nation recently.

· August Kreis and James Wickstrom, longtime leaders of the violently racist and anti-Semitic Posse Comitatus, recently put up an article on their Web site hailing Rudolph as "a true warrior of YHVH [God]."

Wickstrom, a Michigan militia enthusiast who organized paramilitary training for the Posse during the 1980s, has served prison time for impersonating public officials and counterfeiting. Kreis, Wickstrom's Posse deputy, headed The Messiah's Militia in Pennsylvania.

In their article, the men complain about the "several hundred JOG agents (jewish occupational government forces)" searching for Rudolph.

· The Rev. Matthew Trewhella, who founded the militant Missionaries to the Preborn, was one of the first anti-abortion leaders to publicly call for militias.

At a 1994 Wisconsin convention of the U.S. Taxpayers Party (USTP) -- which mixes anti-abortion and antigovernment Patriot militants -- he called on churches to form armed militias. After telling congregants to do "the most loving thing" by buying their children "an SKS rifle and 500 rounds of ammunition," he said he was teaching his own 16-month-old the location of his "trigger finger."

The Wisconsin USTP ticket has included Ernest Brusubardis III, a "captain" of the Wisconsin Militia arrested in several Wisconsin clinic blockades.

· Willie Ray Lampley, head of the Oklahoma Constitutional Militia, is serving 11 years in federal prison for plotting to blow up abortion clinics, gay bars, the Southern Poverty Law Center, Anti-Defamation League offices and other targets. His wife and another man were also convicted in the ammonium nitrate bomb conspiracy.

· The Rev. W.N. Otwell, who reportedly has called America a "white man's country" and protested "race-mixing," has led his camouflage-clad followers in protests at an abortion clinic.

In 1996, Otwell traveled from his Texas compound to support the white supremacist Montana Freemen in their 81-day armed standoff with federal agents. He also protested in behalf of Republic of Texas criminals during their 1997 standoff.

· Larry Pratt, executive director of Gun Owners of America, helped Operation Rescue at a time when it was facing a $50,000 fine. Pratt's Committee to Protect the Family Foundation raised nearly $150,000 to pay Operation Rescue's bills, without that organization ever holding the money. Pratt only halted his fundraising when a judge ruled that the foundation could be held liable for Operation Rescue's fines.

Pratt has spoken at white supremacist gatherings and has long advocated formation of armed militias.

· Texas anti-abortion leader Jack DeVault, while on work release for illegally blocking clinic entrances, reported on the Branch Davidian trial for the American Patriot Fax Network and "Radio Free America," a program that has featured many extremists. He also reportedly proposed forming citizens' posses to run out "meddling federal agents."

· Joe Holland, one-time national director of the North American Volunteer Militia, has said government support for "murder clinics" and the "advancement of homosexuals" made him a rebel.

Holland, who died in prison this spring, once threatened to send law enforcement officers "home in body bags." He was serving time for criminal syndicalism and jury tampering in Montana when he suffered a heart attack in March.

· Tim Dreste, a leader of the militant American Coalition of Life Activists, also has been a captain and chaplain of a militia group, the 1st Missouri Volunteers. Dreste led several 1988 invasions of abortion clinics in New York and Atlanta. After the 1993 murder of Dr. David Gunn, he carried a sign: "Dr. ... Are you feeling under the Gunn?"

· Dale Pultz, a member of the Missionaries to the Preborn who has been convicted of illegally blocking clinics, used Patriot "common-law" techniques to slap a $700,000 lien on a judge who jailed him. This type of common-law "paper terrorism" is a Patriot tactic that is derived from the anti-Semitic Posse Comitatus group active in the 1980s.

(The entire article is excellent and does a very damning job of linking, among other things, Christian Reconstructionist groups and racist groups like the Klan.)

In some cases, as I've noted, racist groups themselves have been joining the dominionist antiabortion movement:

Ku Klux Klansmen have been demonstrating at clinics in Florida in full Klan robes. They said they were protesting both

against abortion and the presence of federal marshals assigned to guard the clinics. Operation Rescue leadership asked members not to picket as long as the Klan are at the clinics. Klan spokesman J.D. Alder told Reuters "I am selectively opposed to abortion. I don't care if blacks and Jews have abortions."

(source: San Jose Mercury News)

During the same month, however,

Randall Terry, founder of Operation Rescue, is working with the radical right U.S. Taxpayers Party (USTP) launching a new "leadership institute" to train "militant" and "unmerciful" activists. Terry has recently assumed a leadership position at the USTP, writing newsletters and speaking at events. He says he plans to run as a USTP candidate in the state of New York in 1996. "I'm anxious to run," he said "I am chomping at the bit to actually be in office."

Terry said a new "leadership institute" will be held near his hometown of Binghamton, New York in October and will offer "three days of intense training on vision, courage, biblical

ethics, raising up a cadre of people who are militant, who are fierce, who are unmerciful to the deeds of darkness, unmerciful to the ideologies of hell." At the same conference Matthew Trewhella, leader of Missionaries to the "Pre-born" urged delegates to form armed militias and to establish a "militia day" in their churches. Conference organizers sold copies of a

manual on how to create an armed underground army. Jeffrey Baker, USTP National Committee member touted that "Abortionists should be put to death" during his convention speech. the

audience erupted in applause.

by dogemperor on Sat Apr 15, 2006 at 06:19:31 PM EST
[ Parent ]