Focus on the Fundies: Sen. Sam Brownback

Jeff Sharlett interviews Sen. Sam Brownback (R.-Kan.), a possible candidate for president in 2008 on the Republican far right. The article (a "rough draft" of his recent Rolling Stone piece) is hard to excerpt, but the impression one gets is that of a sincere, very religious crypto-fascist.

One day, the man who came up with Bill Frist's plan for a "nuclear option" with which to blast away Democratic resistance to right-wing judges stops by (Brownback's Senate office). He's there on behalf of the NFL. I'm invited into the meeting, but I can't tell you what the NFL wants, because it's a secret. Then there's an archbishop from the Sudan, a reasonable and wise man, but the conversation turns strange when Brownback's staff starts sifting language, talking about planes that fly by night, if you know what I mean, which would be something, because I don't. Well, I eventually found out, actually, but again, I can't tell you -- it's a secret.

Just like most of what's said by the ambassador to the Vatican from a certain foreign nation who has been brought around by a Christian conservative lobbyist to talk about "religious liberty." ...

At the end of the article, Sharlett notes lobbyists and constituents alike have to pay a minimum of $2000 just to talk to their senator, but Brownback doesn't take the checks himself; a staff handles it all with discretion, freeing Brownback himself to wax sentimental:

One night he calls me around 10:30, for a literal heart-to-heart. It's been a long day for the senator, what with the Alito hearings, but there are some thoughts he wants to share. About hearts. He never has to wonder what God wants for the nation, because God has already written the answer on Brownback's central organ. Mine, too, and yours also. "Everybody has a good heart," he says, by which he means that everybody has an inner fundamentalist, waiting to come out and embrace "moral values."

Sharlett's RS piece is more explicit:

In (Brownback's) dream America -- the one he believes both the Bible and the Constitution promise -- the state will simply wither away. In its place will be a country so suffused with God and the free market that the social fabric of the last hundred years -- schools, Social Security, welfare -- will be privatized or simply done away with. There will be no abortions; sex will be confined to heterosexual marriage. Men will lead families, mothers will tend children, and big business and the church will take care of all.

Jeff Sharlett, Revealer, Sam Brownback, Republicans, fundamentalists