Harris is due to answer some tough questions

defending the First Amendment against the Christian right ...

... because if Jews don't speak out, they'll think we don't mind

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Harris is due to answer some tough questions

In My Opinion

By Fred Grimm, The Miami Herald, April 06, 2006

With the daily body counts coming out of her campaign headquarters, coverage of the Katherine Harris Senate run has come to resemble war dispatches. Gone, but not forgotten, are two campaign managers, her political consultant, a fundraiser, a communications director, a field operations director, a media consultant.

The candidate herself veers off on strange tangents. According to Florida Today, she told some supporters Saturday that her campaign staff had been ''infiltrated'' by enemies from within the Republican Party. ``I didn't know I was going to get the knives in my back from my own party.''

So the press spends time sorting out internecine intrigue.

The latest Harris turmoil comes after weeks of rumor-laden drama about whether she was going to quit her campaign. And reporters have been writing about the $10 million of her own inheritance she promised, with a biblical flourish, to add to her campaign fund. Or about the contributions she accepted from the same defense contractor who pleaded guilty in the Duke Cunningham bribery scandal.

Not Yet Recovered
And there are the whispers that Harris has not yet recovered emotionally from the recent death of her father.

Covering the Harris candidacy has been like NASCAR fans watching a car spinning out of control. But covering a political crack-up also relieves reporters from asking the truly discomfiting questions.

If not for so many distractions, we might have been forced to broach subjects that never come up in polite campaign coverage.

Last month, Harris spoke at the ''Reclaiming America for Christ'' conference at Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church in Fort Lauderdale, recalling how studying under Francis Schaeffer in Switzerland was a defining period in her life.

Schaeffer was plenty familiar to a gathering dedicated to retrofitting America into a ''Christian'' nation. He was among the founding theologians behind the Christian reconstruction movement, the dominionists, who preach that it is their paramount Christian duty to bring biblical law and ''Christian dominion'' to North America and the world beyond.

It has always been bad manners to ask a political candidate about faith and religion. But when religious pursuits spill over into governance, or the very transformation of constitutional government, maybe we ought to ask.

Extend Death Penalty
Of course, the reconstructionists embrace a wide spectrum of beliefs, but at the extreme end, they would tamper with the long decided legal precedents and extend the death penalty to adultery, homosexuality, blasphemy, heresy and other capital offenses enumerated in the Old Testament.

It just might be worth asking this candidate a few discomfiting questions.

Kevin Phillips, the one-time Republican boy wonder whose 1967 book, The Emerging Republican Majority, mapped how his party could wrest national control by including disaffected, deeply religious white Southerners in a new coalition, now worries that the religious wing has shanghaied the GOP. His latest book, American Theocracy: The Perils and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil and Borrowed Money in the 21st Century, notes that ``Christian evangelicals, fundamentalists and Pentecostals muster some 40 percent of the party electorate.''

The new Bible-based Republicans, Phillips laments, firmly believe that an imminent Armageddon is in the works and push policies based on a militant rejection of evolution, global warming, stem cell research and other scientific endeavors. Phillips warned, ''No leading world power in modern memory has become a captive of the sort of biblical inerrancy that dismisses modern knowledge and science.'' Not since Galileo anyway.

Before we elect leaders who covet a 17th century-style theocracy, maybe a few impolite questions might be in order.

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