By DAVE WESTER | Elroy
When politics get mixed up with religion, both lose credibility. Sometimes they look silly. That was never more evident than it has been in the Iowa Republican presidential race.
Iowa Republicans usually support candidates who flaunt religion.
First it was Gov. Scott Walker, who blatantly told Republicans that God told him to run for president. Even Iowa evangelicals didn’t buy that Walker whopper for long, however. When Walker failed to manage his campaign budget and dropped out, Iowa Republicans went for the next most ostentatiously religious candidate, Dr. Ben Carson. Walker, by the way, never explained God’s change of heart.
After Carson’s eccentric statements and campaign blunders caused him to falter, Iowa Republicans flirted briefly with Donald Trump before shading to the next religious extremist, Sen. Ted Cruz. Cruz quickly revealed his intolerance and lack of empathy for those in need. “We will carpet bomb them into oblivion,” he said of Islamic State terrorists, exposing his machismo and disregard for killing innocent civilians.
Cruz took an unchristian, cold-hearted and bigoted view of accepting Syrian refugees, declaring that the U.S. should accept Syrian Christians but not Muslims. He said we cannot tell the few bad Muslims from the rest, but he ignored the same problem among Christians. He apparently was not concerned about pedophile Christian clergy, for example, even though that has been a serious problem.
Extreme hypocrisy always plays a supporting role to extreme religion, and Iowa politics pulls the curtain back.
