Welcome to Glennbeckistan, Land of the Tea-hadis

Just remember to check your brain at the border.

Chip Ward over at TomDispatch.com asks (and answers) this rhetorical question:

What if the Tea Party ruled? Imagine a land, let’s call it Glennbeckistan, where white, patriarchal, religiously zealous, Tea Party-type patriots hold a super-majority in both houses of the legislature, sit in the governor’s mansion, and control most local governments. It’s a place so out of sync with the rest of the nation that states’ rights and even secession are always on the agenda. It’s a place where gun-ownership trumps all other rights, climate change is considered an insidious socialist conspiracy, and a miscarriage can be investigated as a potential crime. Welcome to Utah.

It's well worth reading the whole thing (page down and find the headline Welcome to Glennbeckistan -- Where the Tea Party Rules and Tea-hadis Roam). While it's fairly long, it's an incisive examination of our first American Taliban state, which despite the bizarre religious beliefs held by most members of the Mormon Church, is striving hard to be included in the top drawer of the American politically über-conservative religious ethos.

BTW, that list of bizarre religious practices? That's only the top ten and doesn't include, for example, the Mormon holy underwear or the baptism of the dead(!) rituals.

Chip Ward has the distinction of actually being a resident of Utah, so he knows what he's talking about. Why he lives there is another question. It must be the scenery...

And BTW, not nearly enough has been made of Glenn Beck's zeal-of-the-convert adherence to the Moron Mormon religion. See, for example, here and here.

And for a look at how his fellow Mormons feel about his rant against those communist-fascist "social justice" churches, see here and here.

The short answer is that Beck is insane. Which is a scary proposition, since so many people believe that he is not insane and are willing to listen to him blindly (a bit of a mixed metaphor, but you know what I mean), and worse, are willing to follow him blindly.

As regular readers know, I've been on the rant wagon about the Moron Mormon Church a lot over the course of the five years I've done this blog. Enough, I'm sure, to get me on that infamous-if-still-secret "Mormon Blacklist". This is just one more.

For some reason the whole thing reminds me of that old "Chinese curse": May you live in interesting times...