Quote of the day, from the Salon article about Howard Ahmanson Jr., the guy who’s bankrolling the schismatics in the Episcopal church. Rushdoony (who died in 2001) was a loony racist type who was a formative influence on Ahmanson.
Rushdoony spelled out his philosophy in painstaking detail in his 1973 magnum opus, “Institutes of Biblical Law,” which he self-consciously named after John Calvin’s “Institutes of Christian Religion.” In the 800-page tome, Rushdoony presents his vision for a new America in which the church subsumes the federal government and society is administered according to biblical law, or at least his interpretation of it. According to biblical law, he writes, segregation is a “basic principle,” and slavery is permitted “because some people are by nature slaves and will always be so.” Those who don’t comply with Rushdoony’s rules — disobedient children, “pagans,” adulterers, women who get abortions, repeat criminal offenders and, of course, homosexuals — would be executed. Mrs. Ahmanson, who described Rushdoony as “quirky in some ways,” qualified his extremism: “To impose the death penalty you need two witnesses. So the number of executions goes down pretty quickly.”