Via TMPDC, Think Progress reports on Texas congressional candidate Stephen Broden’s radio interview in which he says that a violent revolution to overthrow the government is “on the table.”
On Glenn Beck’s special program on religion in America on July 1, Broden said, “I think that the thing that we’re fighting here against, Glenn, is that there is a power grab on the part of the progressive left. And in order for them to effectively pull power from America, they have to marginalize and negate the Judeo-Christian influence in public square.”
That segment aired almost two months before Beck’s Restoring Honor rally where he announced the formation of his Black Robed Regiment. But Broden and Beck’s other guests discussed it during that program, after Richard Lee of Newt Gingrich’s Renewing American Leadership brought it up. Beck concluded the program with, “Black Robe Regiment. There it is. Pastor Broden from Texas, and all of you great gentlemen, thank you very much.”
Broden’s not alone, either in claiming to protect our “Judeo-Christian heritage” with a revolutionary overthrow of the government. That was Ralph Reed’s shtick at his Faith and Freedom Coalition conference in September — in the polite company of the Mayflower Hotel, no less.
Broden, who is one of thirty or so African-American Republicans running for Congress this year, is a pastor — yes, a pastor — supported by the Frederick Douglass Foundation, whose chair, Timothy Johnson (also vice-chair of the North Carolina Republican Party), has a violent criminal record. Broden is a tea party favorite who has spoken at tea party rallies and who claimed at Michele Bachmann’s Code Red rally against health care reform that health care reform was “against the law of nature and nature’s God” and “against the Judeo-Christian ethic that this nation was built upon.”
Broden also appears in Maafa 21, a propaganda film that claims that reproductive rights are a conspiracy to commit “black genocide.” The film has been promoted by the Frederick Douglass Foundation, which describes itself as a a Christian organization. (It also supports Allen West, running for Congress in Florida, who writes for a south Florida biker magazine, in which he has written that “the upcoming election is the time to get rid of ‘Barry Obongo,’ and asks readers to imagine having sex with [Democratic Congresswoman Debbie] Wasserman Schultz,” according to the Sun-Sentinel.)
Broden represents not just the religious right, and not just the tea party, but the volatile tea party-religious right marriage, where claimed religious imperatives meld with assertions of the “tyranny” of the federal government, and where accepted elements of a liberal civil society are routinely depicted as godless oppression in need of revolutionary, and even violent change. I wonder if he’d object to being thrown out of office, should he be elected.
