Gun Owners of America, which Rep. Ron Paul has called “the only no compromise gun lobby in Washington,” is thrilled with Christine O’Donnell’s victory in the Delaware Senate primary on Tuesday. On its website, the group enthused:
The O’Donnell win adds to a string of victories for GOA-backed candidates this year in Senate primaries in Nevada, Kentucky, Utah, Colorado, as well as the non-primary in Florida (where Marco Rubio chased Gov. Charlie Crist out of the primary—and out of the Republican Party).
All of the candidates supported by GOA-PVF were opposed by the Republican establishment in their respective primaries. And all of these candidates agree with Gun Owners of America that it is not enough simply to defeat anti-gunners in elections. They must also be replaced with leaders who will fight to restore Constitutional liberties that have been under attack for decades. . . .
But candidates supported by GOA—pro-freedom champions like O’Donnell, Sharron Angle, Rand Paul, and Marco Rubio, to name just a few—have no intention of coming to Washington to blend into the woodwork. If most or all of these candidates win in November, it will go a long way toward slamming the brakes on the anti-gun, socialist Obama agenda.
As Julie and I detailed in a piece in July, the GOA is more than about guns, it’s about God. GOA’s executive director, Larry Pratt, believes the federal government has exceeded its divinely ordained authority, and that armed militias should be at the disposal of the states to combat it:
The militia movement and Christian Reconstructionism both contend that our current civil government, most especially the federal government, is illegitimate: that it has overreached the limits of its divinely ordained authority, and that it continues to do so. At this intersection of the religious right and the militia movement, gun ownership is portrayed as a religious issue. “When we’re talking about firearms,” GOA executive director Larry Pratt told me, “we’re not really talking about a right but an obligation, as creatures of God, to protect the life that was given them.”
You can read the whole thing here. GOA’s endorsement of O’Donnell is just one more piece of evidence that her base of support comes not just from the tea parties, but from religiously-motivated right-wing groups that coalesce with the tea parties’ anti-government rhetoric.
