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Sunday, March 12, 2006

What is it with these good, churchgoing Republicans anyway?
Posted by Jill | 7:52 AM

A Bible-thumpin' fundamentalist Christian once explained to me that there are so many instances of Christians falling into sin because Satan targets them directly. Apparently the model is some kind of cosmic video game; something like the old "Death Race 2000", in which the ol' forked-tongued demon gets bonus points for getting Christians to sin, whereas getting plain ol' heathen to sin is just a simple one-pointer.

In my more charitable moments, I wonder if the kind of "clean slate Christianity" which says that a Jew got nailed to a cross 2000 years ago to absorb all of the sins of mankind in perpetuity, and its implied "get out of jail free" card, doesn't contain quite enough "carrot and stick" to keep the kind of fallible humans who seem to NEED this sort of thing on the straight and narrow. As much as I have no great love for Catholicism, at least it has a structure for recognizing one's sins, confessing them, and doing penance, so it has a built-in incentive to at least attempt to be virtuous.

When simply believing that some old Jew sacrificed his life for you gets you a free pass to heaven, where's the incentive, unless you can recognize that someone who would make that kind of sacrifice deserves at least the consideration of thinking twice before you decide to, oh, say, scam department stores.

The latest case of a staunch, right-wing so-called Christian fallen into sin is one Claude Allen, a former domestic policy adviser to C-Plus Caligula himself. It seems that Allen's particular scam was to buy stuff at stores like Target and Hecht, then take the receipts back into the store, pull the same goods off the shelf, then take them to the customer service desk for a refund -- thereby getting the actual items he bought free.

What I don't understand is how a staunch Christian, whose stock in trade is judging other people, justified this in his own head.

But Allen obviously was able to do so:

Allen is accused of swindling Hecht's and Target stores out of more than $5,000 in refunds for items he did not buy. His lawyer, Mallon Snyder, denied the charges. "His returns and refunds were exactly what they should have been," Snyder said yesterday, saying that the charges stem from a series of misunderstandings.

Allen's arrest marks a baffling setback in a career that until recently seemed headed nowhere but up. "If the allegations are true, something went wrong in Claude Allen's life," Bush said. "And that is really sad."

Bush named Allen his top domestic policy adviser last year. With a West Wing office and a salary of $161,000 a year, Allen was the top-ranking African American on the White House staff. His broad portfolio involved advising Bush on policy issues including health care, space exploration, housing and education.

In a White House where real power is centered in a few hands, Allen was not so much a decision maker as he was purveyor and tailor of Bush administration policy. Still, Allen was frequently at Bush's side, accompanying him on trips around the country and briefing him and the media on the administration's domestic policy initiatives.

Despite its prominent profile, the chief domestic policy job was only a consolation prize for Allen. Bush had named him in 2003 to a seat on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit, but the nomination was scuttled by Senate Democrats who saw Allen as too conservative and too inexperienced, and blocked it from coming to a vote.

Before coming to the White House, Allen served four years in the No. 2 job in the sprawling Department of Health and Human Services.

Allen got his start in politics in North Carolina, and he spent years working for Jesse Helms, the former North Carolina Republican senator alternately revered and reviled as a conservative stalwart. Allen became a protege of Helms, a fervent opponent of affirmative action who stood against a federal holiday for the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

[snip]

Allen's conservative positions earned him the enmity of some civil rights and liberal leaders, but he was a favorite of Christian conservatives, who saw him as one of their own.

Some of Allen's friends in the Avalon Farm neighborhood of Gaithersburg described him as a deeply religious man who was personable and wise, honest and honorable.

"Knowing Claude, I knew that this was not true, and to think that his character would be maligned in this way, in such a public way, was sad," said Ava Rushford, 44, a homemaker who lives near Allen, whom she considers a close friend.

Three years ago, while Rushford was recovering from a spinal tap, Allen's wife, Jannese, sat by her bedside while Allen and his children played with Rushford's daughters. She cried when she learned of Allen's arrest.

The allegations "would be completely day and night out of character from what we would know of him and have been aware of how he operates and the level of integrity he has," said neighbor Nick Tedesco, 50, who takes weekly ballroom dancing classes with the Allens.


This guy is a pretty intersting character. Here you have a black man who got started working for Jesse Helms, of all people. Now, I'm not one to decide that all black Americans have to be monolithic in terms of belief, any more than all Jews think everything Israel does is just ducky. But when a black man works for an unrepentant racist like Jesse Helms, who in his later years was most famous for the infamous "white hands" advertisement in his campaign against Harvey Gantt, clearly something is going on.

But even if we want to give him the benefit of the doubt and say that his views are honestly arrived at, the response coming from the right is so typical of this kind of clean-slate Christianity. Let's look at Bush's remarks again:

"If the allegations are true, something went wrong in Claude Allen's life," Bush said. "And that is really sad."


Now, this is a president who as governor of Texas, presided over 131 executions, stating blithely, "I'm confident that every person that has been put to death in Texas under my watch has been guilty of the crime charged, and has had full access to the courts." And yet, when it's someone who worked for him, the crime is a function of "something [gone] wrong in Claude Allen's life." That sounds an awful lot like a plea to look at "root causes", isn't it? Why is it that such extenuating circumstances are OK to look at when it's a Republican operative who allegedly committed a crime, but when it's just a bunch of guys from the poor side of town, the only thing we look at is the crime?

It's pretty obvious that something has gone wrong in Claude Allen's life. Perhaps he lays awake at night and thinks about the unholy bargain he made in selling his soul to a party which paints a black candiate in the opposition party as a pimp (see Steve Gilliard for just how charged the word "fancy" is when talking about a black man). Perhaps he even thinks occasionally about the tens of thousands of black men in prison whom his former boss insists on believing had the same access to counsel that rich Republicans had. And just maybe there's a little part of himself somewhere that realizes something is wrong; and he's trying to self-medicate through what is essentially shoplifting. I could understand that. And if Allen were to repent of his ways and stop sucking up to people who just want to use him as a prop to make them look like something other than the white elitists they are, I'd be the first one to welcome him over to our side. But somehow I think he's not going to do that. He doesn't have to, because after all, Jesus has already forgiven him, right?
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