Martin Luther, Adolf Hitler, Bob Vander Plaats and Iowa

June 1, 2011 / Posted in  Adolf Hitler, Ancient Egypt, Bible, Church history, Education, Evangelical Christianity, GOP, History & Science Standards, Homosexuality, Iowa, Jesus Christ, Koch Brothers, Labor, Martin Luther, Nazis, Robert Vander Plaats, Roman Catholicism, Sarah Palin

1.2 million teenagers hit the streets in the USA every June unable to read or write. Detroit, Michigan epitomizes this country’s educational dilemma: 76 percent dropout/flunk out rate. Dozens of cities across the country suffer 50 to 60 percent dropout rates.  Eighty-four percent of the 23,000 people who took an exam for entry-level jobs at New York Telephone in 1988, failed because of lack of knowledge of basic math, English grammar, rudimentary science, and common rules of conversation.  An incomprehensible 42 million Americans cannot read, write or perform simple math. Another 50 million Americans cannot read past the 4th grade level. (Source: National Right to Read Foundation).  Detroit, Michigan epitomizes this country’s educational dilemma: 76 percent dropout/flunk out rate. Dozens of cities across the country suffer 50 to 60 percent dropout rates.  CNN reported on August 30, 2010, “7,000 American high school students drop out every day; one every 26 seconds [actually, 1 ever 1.3 hours].” (http://www.rense.com/general92/7000.htm) 

The problem is that teachers cannot and do not teach.  Students will not or cannot read, write, or do basic mathematics.  They have no concept of grammar.  Public education is not only underfunded (especially as states switch to a greater voucher system) but the textbooks are inadequate to inaccurate.  Some, because of parental pressure, leave public schools to enter parochial centers which teaches them outdated material and instills Dark Age mentality with such errors as Intelligent Design, the need for spiritual guidance and similar mental exercises that do not advance science or knowledge.  In some cases, as at Tucson, Arizona, schools abandon teaching to install the deficient and educational debased, decadent, and pathetic International Baccalaureate Programme that encourages children to illegally download music, DVDs, and more from its PET to FCE (examination certificates) levels).   The more fundamentalistic the center of education (frequently in the home), the more hatred is built in the minds of the young against minorities (racial and sexual), while instilling falsehoods and distortions.

What is necessary is to test the teachers to determine if they are subject-matter experts.  Instead of filling vacancies with the poorly trained or those who took a degree by repeating what the professor said and not comprehending or accepting current research, positions are filled by the incompentent who has a degree awarded by a celebrated university, or the teacher accepts a position while waiting either for an offer of marriage or a better paid non-teaching opportunity.  For example, Stephen Meyer has a PhD from Cambridge (UK), yet is totally ignorant of science of which he claims to be an expert, and because he has the PhD, the gullible believe that he is a subject matter expert but in fact is only an apologist for creationism which he writes articles for the Discovery Institute.

In this regard, the USA is deficient, as once a person is awarded a degree, unless the individual teaches in a university that has a “publish or perish” program, requiring peer review.  Few teachers will go further with their academic studies, master no new methodologies, and remain slack in teaching strategies.  Education will continue to be boring, or memorized without any real understanding only to pass a test–the information then to be forgotten.  This is especially true where young students are taught subjects they know are false but are required because of a curriculum core, such as the teaching of Intelligent Design and Creationism, demanded by evangelicals on the Texas Board of Education, US Congressional Representative Michele Bachman (R-MN) who exposes daily her lack of learning (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-zimmerman/michele-bachmans-stance-o_b_868771.html?ir=Politics), Robert Vander Plaats, and evangelical extremists, when evolution is known in all states and all cities–to the chagrin of evangelical extremists and bible-pounding fundamentalist fanatics in Louisiana. 

In 2008 the Louisiana State Legislature passed the Louisiana Science Education Act, which brought a vocal reaction from Louisiana students, led by Zack Kopplin, 17, of Baton Rouge who started a petition to have the law repealed.  He received the signatures of 42 Nobel Laureates, who wrote in a letter:

“Because science plays such a large role in today’s world and because our country’s economic future is dependent upon the United States’ retaining its competitiveness in science, it is vital that students have a sound education about major scientific concepts and their applications.”

This propelled State Senator Karen Carter Peterson to introduce a bill to repeal (http://veracitystew.com/2011/05/10/louisiana-students-take-a-stand-against-creationism/).  She noted that if the law continued not only would Louisiana lose its young scholars to more enlightened states, but that the drop out rate in Louisiana would rise faster.

Those who drop out are unfit for any form of legal work, save the most menial tasks.  The majority turn to welfare, crime, prostitution, and hate organizations (such as Focus on the Family, American Family Association, Family Research Council, Sovereign Citizens, Ku Klux Klan, Aryan Nation, and FAMiLY Leader (the latter that is based in Iowa) led by one-time coach Bob Vander Plaats, it parallels شيعة‎ in Islam with the title being, exactly the same: عائلة زعيم; cp. http://www.islam-qa.com/en/ref/10001 and http://www.islam-guide.com/ch3-14.htm) and numerous neo-Nazi groups in Germany, Russia, the USA, UK, etc. {cp. http://newsgroups.derkeiler.com/Archive/Misc/misc.survivalism/2006-04/msg01771.html}, religiously watch Fox News, and applaud the leaders of the lunatic fringe of the far-right: Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, Sarah Palin, Michele Bachman, Rudy Giuliani, and the doomsday prophet Harold Camping (cf. http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/northwestvoices/2015158983_campingannouncesnewdoomsdaydate.html and http://abcnews.go.com/Entertainment/harold-camping-doomsday-preacher-explains-failed-rapture-prediction/story?id=13669592) and turn to cults that preach of a Rapture that has no biblical foundation.

Much of today’s rhetoric of rage ranted by religious fanatics and theological terrorists take their tears from the tart testaments of Adolf Hitler who relied heavily on the writings of the German one-time monk Martin Luther. Hitler’s heirs, from Rand Paul and Mike Huckabee to Bob Vander Plaats have identical visions of what society should be: controlled and void of independent thinkers.  Each parrots the sour message of the German leader Adolf Hitler who publicly and repeatedly called Martin Luther his “spiritual adviser” and took his stand against the Jews from the antisemitic writings of Martin Luther.

Martin Luther was considered by Germans since 1522 to be a clergyman, a preacher, a reformer, but few Germans today consider the Saxon to be a saint.  With a careful reading of his Works (that have been repeatedly reprinted both in Germany, the USA, and in other nations); the reformer, as Martin Luther was styled, was a hate-filled author of venomous vile demanding the slaughter of Jews (cf. Von den Jüden und jren Lügen [1543], in the harshest of terms, requiring the nobles to waste no time or effort nor expense in dispatching the peasants from this life; this was quickly repeated in Martin Luther’s Vom Schem Hamphoras und vom Geschlecht Christi [1543, a few months later] and his “final warning against the Jews {Weimar Ausgabe 51:194-196; J.G. Walch, Dr. Martin Luthers Sämmtliche Schriften, 23 vols. (St. Louis: Concordia, 1883), 12:1264-1267}] and peasants (Wider die räuberischen und mörderischen Rotten der Bauern [1524-1526]) and those who opposed his staid and ossified spiritual aspirations and control over them were condemned by Luther as meriting the most foul forms of hell that matched Luther’s personal and daily rhetoric.

Luther’s foul language and repetitive use of cuss and cruse words was legendary—and he became the spiritual ancestor of Adolf Hitler and fascists of similar minds. As Dr. William Temple, Archbishop of Canterbury noted, “It is easy to see how Luther prepared the way for Hitler.” (“The Archbishop’s Conference”, Malvern, London, 1941, page 13).

The Nazis themselves claimed Luther as their spiritual father. “It was Luther, we must understand, who began to Germanise Christianity; National Socialism must complete the process.” This from Alfred Rosenberg (1893-1946), an early and intellectually influential member of the Nazi Party who was first introduced to Adolf Hitler by Dietrich Eckart who one of the important early members of the National Socialist German Workers Party (NSDAP, or Nazi party) and a participant of the 1923 Beer Hall Putsch. Rosenberg later held several important posts in the Nazi government. He is considered one of the main authors of key Nazi ideological creeds, including its racial theory, persecution of the Jews, Lebensraum, abrogation of the Treaty of Versailles, and opposition to “degenerate” modern art, is one of their typical sayings.

Long before Hitler arrived on the German scene (he was from Austria) there were German Protestant scholars of great standing who analysed aright the part Luther played in the history of Germany. “Lutheranism played an important part in the political and military development of German Prussia,” wrote Prof. Ernst Troeltsch of Heidelberg, German theologian, historian, and sociologist (cf. Troeltsch, Ernst. Luther und die moderne Welt, Schutterwald/Baden : Wiss. Verlag, 2000). Ernst Troeltsch (1865-1923) was, for a short time he was a Lutheran curate in Munich, but preferred the academic world and turned to teaching. Through his use of the objective methods of modern scholarship, Troeltsch contributed to the sociology of religion and the problems of historicism early in the present century.

“German nationalism plus the Prussian State have made our Reich, and both have their origins in Luther,” said Karl Sell, another pre-Hitler professor who wrote volumes on the German Luther whom he saw as the father of German superiority: cf. Luthers Einfluss auf die politische Geschichte Deutschlands: Vortrag. Leipzig, 1899; Festgottesdienst zur 400jährigen Feier des Geburtstages Dr. Martin Luther’s; am 11. November 1883 vormittags 10 Uhr in der Stadtkirche zu Darmstadt; Darmstadt Waitz 1883).

What most apologists for Luther and Lutheranism have forgotten is that Martin Luther was never a reformer nor a Protestant. He merely wanted to eliminate the sale of indulgences, and if that had happened, there would be no separation until Martin Luther came to grips with the growing German nationalism that was a part of the council of German nobles. To that end, Martin Luther addressed the German Nobility—to organize them into a collective group and to put down dissent and ultimately rule the world. It was Luther who anointed the German people as a nation in his 1520 An den christlichen Adel deutscher Nation and called for two kingdoms: one on earth, and the other in heaven. Two years later, in Wittenberg each interested party – prince, town council and commune – wished to expand its influence on the governance of the church in accord with its own values and needs—religion was to be the servant of the lord (who many wanted to equate as the prince being the personification of the Christ of the New Testament; Carter Linderg, The European Reformations(Boston: Blackwell

Publishing, 2006), pp. 96-97). To this end, Adolf Hitler would proclaim: “The national government will preserve and defend those basic principles on which our nation has been built up.  It regards Christianity as the foundation of our national morality and the family as the basis of national life” on February 1, 1933, during his first radio address after coming to power. He added, it is the purpose of the government “to fill our whole culture once more with a Christian spirit, and that not only in politics. We want to burn out the harmful features in our theater and our literature.” For Hitler the center of education was the family (Die nationalsozialistische Bewegung hat dem Staate die Richtlinien für die Erziehung unseres Volkes gegeben. Diese Erziehung beginnt nicht in einem gewissen Jahr und endet nicht in einem anderen. Die menschliche Entwicklung brachte es mit sich, daß von einem bestimmten Zeitpunkt an die Weiterbildung des Kindes aus der Obhut der engsten Zelle des Gemeinschaftslebens, der Familie, genommen und der Gemeinschaft selbst anvertraut werden muß; Adolf Hitler Rede am 30. Januar 1937 vor dem Reichstag in Berlin) as it remains with Vander Plaats who argues, like Luther and Hitler, that it is the church that must set the tone for education, weddings had to take place in a church where the woman was required to promise to obey her husband.

These are identical to the politics of Iowa’ Robert Vander Plaats and his The FAMi:Y Movement, a quasi-Nazi hate group that aligned with Focus on the

Family “TrueU” (created by Stephen Meyer {born 1958} and advocate for intelligent design who helped found the Center for Science and Culture (CSC) of the Discovery Institute (DI), which is the driving force behind the intelligent design movement. The True U is a pseudo-university made up of DVDs and a guide to “prove the Bible is true”. 

While Stephen Meyer has worked tirelessly to make Intelligent Design a respected form of science, educators, scientists and the courts have found otherwise, as with the celebrated court case Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District where ID was ruled to be religion. In March, 2002, Meyer announced a “teach the controversy” strategy, aimed at promoting the false idea that the theory of evolution is controversial within scientific circles and included an annotated bibliography of 44 peer-reviewed scientific articles that were said to raise significant challenges to key tenets of what was referred to as “Darwinian evolution”.  In response to this claim the National Center for Science Education, an organization that works in collaboration with National Academy of Sciences, the National Association of Biology Teachers, and the National Science Teachers Association that support the teaching of evolution in public schools, contacted the authors of the papers listed and twenty-six scientists, representing thirty-four of the papers, responded. None of the authors considered that their research provided evidence against evolution (http://ncse.com/creationism/general/analysis-discovery-institutes-bibliography).  Meyer is as great a fraud as is Vander Plaats.  (Read: “Misrepresented scientists speak out,” Reports of the National Center for Science Education September-December 2001, vol. 21, nos. 5-6, pp. 14-16; see the same issue, pp. 5-21 passim, for evidence of the Discovery Institute’s quote-mining and reactions by the scientists whose views were misrepresented. Cp. Jerry Coyne, “Creationism by stealth,” Nature 2001, vol. 410, pp. 745-746; Eugenie C. Scott, “Fatally flawed iconoclasm,” Science 2001, vol. 292, pp. 2257-2258; Kevin Padian and Alan Gishlick, “The talented Mr. Wells,” The Quarterly Review of Biology 2002; vol. 77) As for graduating with a PhD from Cambridge, that is a degree taken for accumulating hours, and does not represent reasoned thinking nor does it represent that the professors agreed with his work; it is on the same level as the troubled IB Programme that claims to teach students English—around the world, while what it teaches in street English and not correct academic English).  No degree means that the degree holder is a subject-matter expert as seen in those clustered around Vander Plaats and the parochial schools where he gives presentations.

Martin Luther wrote that woman is God’s instrument or vessel (not a human being with basic rights equal to a man, nor a person who could stand before her god as an equal to any man, for woman was to be the “helpmeet/helpmate” of man and be submissive like a slave to man), for God uses her to this end that she may bear children, give them birth and nourishment, and watch over them, and rule the household. Martin Luther taught that

“the wife should stay at home and look after the affairs of the household as one who has been deprived of the ability of administering those affairs that are outside and concern the state….” (Luther, Martin. Lectures on Genesis 3:11.)   Luther’s attitude toward the “enfebbledness” of women is clearly stated in his writings, that matched Hitlers, and come close to Vander Plaats’ pronouncements.  Luther wrote, above women:

Men have broad chests and narrow hips; therefore they have wisdom. Women have narrow chests and broad hips. Women ought to be domestic; the creation reveals it, for they have broad backsides and hips, so that they should sit still. [WA, TR I, no. 55, p. 19; cf. Hazlitt-Chalmers translation, p. 299]

There is no dress that suits a woman or maiden so badly as wanting to be clever. [WA, TR II, no. 1555, p. 130]

Doctor Martin Luther laughed at his Kertha, who wanted to be clever, and said:

“God created man with a broad chest, not broad hips, so that in that part of him he can be wise; but that part out of which filth comes is small. In a woman this is reversed. That is why she has much filth and little wisdom.” [WA, TR II, no. 1975, p. 285]

. . . when women speak well, it is not praiseworthy. It befits them to stammer and not be able to speak well; that adorns them much better. [WA, TR IV, no. 4081, pp. 121-122]

. . . what goes in through women’s ears comes out again through their mouths. For that reason a secret is to be entrusted only to a dead woman. [WA, TR IV, no. 4434, p. 311]

By shutting down female convents within the movement, Protestantism effectively closed off the option of a full-time religious role for Protestant women, as well as one which had provided some women a life in academic study. (Allen, Charlotte. “The Holy Feminine.” Journal of Religion, Culture, and Public Life, 1999. Online: http://www.firstthings.com/article.php3?id_article=3241) and to give greater strength to restrict the rights of women, Luther married the nun Katharina von Bora who is commemorated / remembered on the Lutheran Calendar of Saints on December 20.   She had entered the convent to study (education was forbidden to most secular women) but had a strong interest in the outside world and human sexuality, as seen in her escape from the convent with several other nuns and common concern that she would take to the street (prostitution) if she did not marry quickly (Roland H. Bainton, Here I Stand, p. 223).  This became Adolf Hitler’s call (Kinder, Küche, Kirche that was actually first uttered on December 1898 by the then New York Senator Chauncey Depew who claimed he heard it first from the German Kaiser Wilhelm II; in Chauncey Mitchell Depew and John Denison Champlin, Orations, Addresses and Speeches of Chauncey M. Depew: Club and Society Addresses, privately published 1910, p. 260) and the demand of Iowa’s Bob Vander Plaats who is in league with such fascists as Annette Sweeney (R-44th District: Hardin County)  would do away with the rights of women to control their own bodies.  Vander Plaats claims that his stand is “Pro-Family” where the woman is silent and has no rights (http://www.desmoinesregister.com/article/20110506/NEWS09/105060335/Vander-Plaats-to-deliver-warning-from-tea-party?odyssey=tab|topnews|text|News and http://iowapoliticalalert.blogspot.com/2009/07/senator-behn-mr-vander-plaats-what.html, cp. For Vander Plaats “issues” see: http://vpforgov.rocksolidclients.net/issues.htm).  

Adolf Hitler was equally worried about the education of the German people. To the Führer, education had to be moral and fearsome:

“… a general moral instruction without a religious foundation is built on air; consequently, all character training and religion must be derived from faith. From our point of view as representatives of the state, we need believing people. A dark cloud threatens from Poland. We have need of soldiers, believing solders. Believing solders are the most valuable ones. They give their all.”

(read:  Ernst Christian Helmreich. The German Churches under Hitler: Background, Struggle, and Epilogue. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, page 121.)

To purify the corruption of stealth sex and the abandonment of “moral obligation” to marry “and replenish the earth,” Luther commanded women to tend to the home, produce children, and be subject to their husbands—the very idea that Hitler would enshrine during his sovereignty over the Third Reich. Hitler said: “The government, being resolved to undertake the political and moral purification of our public life, is creating and securing the conditions necessary for a really profound revival of religious life”.  This evolved into the grotesque preachification of racial and sexual “purity”: that which mortals like Luther, Hitler, Vander Plaats argued was essential for a “god-chosen race”.

Echoing the Letters of Paul in the New Testament, Luther and Hitler demanded that marriage be “kept from corruption” and that the purpose of marriage was to bring children into the world to be obedient subjects of the government. Any cross-marriages or those that would not be sanctioned in Luther’s or Hitler’s interpretation of the Bible (as translated by Martin Luther) were to be thrown away—thus neither would tolerate Jews marrying Christians, Muslims marrying Christians, or any Adventist or Jehovah’s Witnesses marrying a Lutheran or Catholic. The few homosexuals who rallied for the right to be public about their sexuality were hunted down, forbidden to associate, and over 500,000 executed in the concentration camps created by Adolf Hitler with the financial support of US Senator Prescott Bush (R-CT; cf. www.guardian.co.uk/world/2004/sep/25/usa.secondworldwar;  www.consortiumnews.com/2008/051808.html and http://www.rense.com/general40/bushfamilyfundedhitler.htm and http://www.georgewalkerbush.net/bushfamilyfundedhitler.htm; www.nhgazette.com/
cgi-bin/NHGstore.cgi?user_action=detail&catalogno=NN_Bush_Nazi_2; http://www.oilempire.us/bushnazi.html; www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/gate/archive/2002/08/19/hsorensen.DTL). Hitler noted in his autobiography:

A Volkisch state must therefore begin by raising marriage from the level of a continuous defilement of the race, and give it the consecration of an institution which is called upon to produce images of the Lord and not monstrosities halfway between man and ape. (Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf Vol. 2 Chapter 2)

Bob Vander Plaats follows Hitler’s mentality in his repetitive attacks on the LGBT community, calling homosexuality a “public risk hazard” (http://thinkprogress.org/2011/04/08/bob-vander-plaats-homosexuality-health-smoking/) and harmful like smoking (http://www.towleroad.com/2011/04/bob-vander-plaats-compares-homosexuality-to-smoking.html) which creates low self-esteem.   Like Hitler and Martin Luther, Bob Vander Plaats argues that he is repeating “the Lord’s will”—being an Old Testament Christian—and, demonstratively, with no knowledge of what the books actually say that he quotes for he shows he knows none of the original languages.  Vander Plaats “obligation to marry” and have children follows, rigidly, that of Islam (see: Koran/Qur’an 4:21).  Once more, we find Vander Plaats following Islam:

The fact that Vander Plaats argues that his particular, peculiar, and special interpretation of “the Bible” is god-inspired, he shows his ignorance of what the Bible became, when it was finally commissioned in 325 CE by the pagan Roman Emperor Constantine who created the Christian Church when the emperor call his Council of Nicaea (as Eusebius wrote: σύνοδον οἰκουμενικὴν συνεκρότει: “he [the emperor] convoked the council”) to settle difference between warring bishops who claimed to lead different factions within the corpus christianorum: an ongoing  battle between chrestianos and christianos. This was especially true concerning the divinity of Jesus, which was not universally accepted, but was more popular in Rome, than in Asia Minor. Arians and Nestorians and a host of other rival groups all claiming to have a claim on what the Jesus of the New Testament is allegedly to have said and commanded although there was not a single authentic document at that time where the author mentioned such a man, nor any document save spurious forgeries that claimed the man existed.  Even then, when, in 322 CE, Constantine ordered fifty bibles to be compiled by the Arian prelate Eusebius, bishop of Caesarea, who wrote:

“Such were the emperor’s commands, which were followed by the immediate execution of the work itself, which we sent him in magnificent and elaborately bound volumes of a threefold and fourfold form.” (Vita Constantini. 4.36.37; original is in Greek)

There was heated debate over what constituted scripture until Constantine stepped in and determined the canon (Newman, Albert Henry (1900), A Manual of Church History, Philadelphia, American Baptist Publication Society, 1900-1903 [02] Vol. I, p. 330 on-line at http://www.archive.org/stream/amanualchurchhi05newmgoog/amanualchurchhi05newmgoog_djvu.txt. Describing the proceedings of the Nicene Council we read: “Eusebius of Caesarea then proposed an ancient Palestinian creed, which acknowledged the divine nature of Christ in general biblical terms. The emperor had already expressed a favorable opinion of this creed. The Arians were willing to subscribe to it, but this latter fact made the Athanasian party suspicious. They wanted a creed that no Arian could subscribe, and insisted on inserting the term identical in substance”—a canon that was not closed in the Roman Catholic Church until the sixteenth century Council of Trent (cf. J. Le Plat, Monumentorum ad historicam Concilii Tridentini collectio (7 vols., Leuven, 1781 – 1787).).

Never deterred by his lack of Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Coptic or any other biblical language, Vander Plaats daily exposes his ignorance of the Bible he worships as if it were a god.  The word “homosexual” does not appear anywhere in any of the original bibles, scrolls, or manuscripts, nor is it even of fashion until 1892. Leviticus 18:22 and 20:13 were understood to be references to non-Hebrew (pagan) worship fertility practices and have nothing to do with the story of Lot in Sodom (Genesis 19) that the prophet Ezekiel 16:49 clearly states that the “sin of Sodom” was pride—not sex: הִנֵּה־זֶה הָיָה עֲוֹן סְדֹם אֲחֹותֵךְ גָּאֹון שִׂבְעַת־לֶחֶם וְשַׁלְוַת הַשְׁקֵט הָיָה לָהּ וְלִבְנֹותֶיהָ וְיַד־עָנִי וְאֶבְיֹון לֹא הֶחֱזִיקָה׃.   In the Leviticus references, the word is qadesh (originally a Canaanite and Egyptian goddess, the goddess of Love and Beauty) and is a reference to a male cultic attendant (by some considered to be a sacred prostitute engaged in the worship of the Canaanite/Egyptian goddess

Qetesh who was associated with Yahweh’s wife Asherah who was known as “Lady of the Stars of Heaven” and was pictured with the moon beneath her feet or on her head and her eyes set on the rising sun-god), while the sexual love (1 Samuel 20:30) between Jonathan and David (they do kiss in 1 Samuel 21:41) in the Books of Samuel was never condemned (Halperin, David M. (1990). One Hundred Years of Homosexuality. New York: Routledge, p. 83 and Boswell, John (1994). Same-sex Unions in Premodern Europe. New York: Vintage (pp. 135–137; the problem here is not only a literal reading but a literal interpretation of the words, for example “David” { דָּוִד} actually is a word for “house” or “dynasty” and Saul’s condemnation is against Israel going after other races or people to the neglect of his own Jonathan {  יְהוֹנָתָן} where in 1 Samuel 13 he goes after the Philistines alone, but I will address this issue in a later essay).  This is the interpretation even the Jesus of the New Testament gave to the punishment of Sodom, warning that towns that did not provide hospitality to his disciples would suffer a similar fate (which never occurred), in Matthew 10:14-15 and Luke 17:10-12.  Romans 1:26-27 is commonly read out of context for it does not condemn homosexuality in males, but sexual abandonment in males and females which he saw as a form of slavery which the authors of the Letters of Paul claim that Saul of Tarsus supported.  As for the claim that Paul condemned homosexuality in 1 Corinthians 6:9-11, that can be overturned rapidly, as the Greeks (and the original text was written in Greek by all accounts) had a term for homosexuality: androkoitēs (it actually means “men in bed” { άντρες στο κρεβάτι } and has no sexual connotation by itself;  the ancient Greek world found nothing wrong with men sleeping together, and if sex did transpire, it was considered common and ignored) but the word used in Corinthians is arsenokoitēs (ἀρσενοκοίτης) and it means “wrong doers” such as “lawless and disobedient” as found in 1 Timothy 1:9-10: ειδως τουτο οτι δικαιω νομος ου κειται ανομοις δε και ανυποτακτοις ασεβεσιν και αμαρτωλοις ανοσιοις και βεβηλοις πατρολωαις και μητρολωαις ανδροφονοις πορνοις αρσενοκοιταις ανδραποδισταις ψευσταις επιορκοις και ει τι ετερον τη υγιαινουση διδασκαλια αντικειται.

 In 1892, “homosexual” appears for the first time, in C.G. Chaddock’s translation of Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis, {R. v. Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia sexualis : mit besonderer Berücksichtigung der conträren Sexualempfindung : eine klinisch-forensische Studie (6. verm. und theilweise umgearb. Aufl.) Stuttgart : Ferdinand Enke, 1891}, but then H. Havelock Ellis was scornful, noting sarcastically, that the word “”Homosexual’ [being judged as] a barbarously hybrid word, and I claim no responsibility for it.” [Havelock Ellis, H. (1897). Studies in the Psychology of Sex, vol. 1: “Sexual Inversion.”  London: University Press]. The word “homosexual” was not used until 1912 in the USA and it did not apply to any biblical reference. 

While he served part-time as a teacher and part-time as a coach, Robert Vander Plaats is definitely neither a philologist nor a psychologist and nowhere near being a theologian, but his hatred for homosexuals equals that of both Adolf Hitler and Martin Luther, and by his constant consideration and consternation over it, indicators are that he is at minimum a self-repressed homosexual, and on April 13, 2011 sent out an e-mail lamenting that his birthday was hijacked by One Iowa to raise money for equal rights (he expected adulation on his birthday as he received from Fox News and Fox commentator Mike Huckabee); One Iowa’s email address is info@oneiowa.org and are among the few patriotic groups fighting Vander Plaats.   

This was to cause terror in the hearts of all evangelical extremists in Iowa who trembled that the Time of Tribulation was close at hand and that evil would take

over the State of Iowa.  Vander Plaats response matches that of Adolf Hitler and Martin Luther, as Ernst Rohm, the chief of Hitler’s SA boasted:

“The people want wholesome dread. They want to fear something. They want someone to frighten them and make them shudderingly submissive”.  

Vander Plaats is giving poorly educated, marginally employed and retired hate-filled Iowa evangelicals something to fear.  His greatest fear, and most likely secret fantasy, is the alleged “homosexual agenda.”

Equally important for Luther, Hitler and Vander Plaats was, and is, that the nation must have a common identity, a single purpose, and one attitude on all things so that the state would be a composite whole without separation for differences.  As Hitler said in one of his speeches, “The struggle against materialistic views and for a real national community is just as much in the interest of the German nation as in [the interest] of the welfare of our Christian faith.” To this end there had to be a single religious affirmation throughout a single state: the state church proclaimed by both Hitler and Luther: “The government of the Reich … regards Christianity as the unshakable foundation of the morals and moral code of the [Nazi] nation.” (Hitler, Adolf (1922-1939), ed. Baynes, Norman Hepburn (1942), The Speeches of Adolf Hitler, April 1922 – August 1939,, Vol. 1, pp. 369-72; London: Oxford University Press, 1942; 1969 edition); note Hitler’s famous statement:

Today Christians … stand at the head of [this country]… I pledge that I never will tie myself to parties who want to destroy Christianity .. We want to fill our culture again with the Christian spirit … We want to burn out all the recent immoral developments in literature, in the theater, and in the press – in short, we want to burn out the poison of immorality which has entered into our whole life and culture as a result of liberal excess during the past … (few) years.

Adolf Hitler, quoted in: Hitler, Adolf (1922-1939), ed. Baynes, Norman Hwpburn (1942), The Speeches of Adolf Hitler, April 1922 – August 1939, Vol. 1 (London, Oxford University Press), pg. 871-872.

That Hitler anticipated and demanded a single national church was made clear in his autobiography, where he wrote:

While both denominations maintain missions in Asia and Africa in order to win new followers for their doctrine — an activity which can boast but very modest success compared to the advance of the Mohammedan faith in particular — right here in Europe they lose millions and millions of inward adherents who either are alien to all religious life or simply go their own ways. The consequences, particularly from a moral point of view, are not favorable. (Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, Vol. 1 Chapter 10 [all editions and presses]). 

To this end, Vander Plaats set in motion the undemocratic movement to impeach Iowa Supreme Court justices who did not agree with him and his twisted, tortured,  theology and puerilitious pandering of a preacher (http://www.desmoinesregister.com/article/20101103/NEWS09/11030390/Iowans-dismiss-three-justices and http://www.kcci.com/r/24528192/detail.html) with the frequently married, divorced, and repetitively adulterous Newt Gingrich of Georgia secretly funneling more than one-third of the $850,000 campaign to remove the Iowa justices (http://thinkprogress.org/2011/03/16/newt-gingrich-anti-gay-hate/) with documents showing that Gingrich funneled $125,000 through the nationally registered (http://www.splcenter.org/get-informed/intelligence-report/browse-all-issues/2010/winter/the-hard-liners) organized hate group American Family Association (AFA) to be followed by the nefarious Focus on the Family.  Censorship was the only solution, so that there would be “one faith, one god, one morality, one reality, one state”.   This would come about only with rigid censorship over and of all things:

“Only in the struggle between two philosophies can the weapon of brutal force, persistently and ruthlessly applied, lead to a decision for the side it supports.” … the number of inward supporters grows in proportion as the persecution increases. Consequently, the complete annihilation of the new doctrine can be carried out only through a process of extermination so great and constantly increasing that in the end all the truly valuable blood is drawn out of the people or state in question. The consequence is that, though a so-called ‘inner’ purge can now take place, it will only be at the cost of total impotence. Such a method will always prove vain in advance if the doctrine to be combated has overstepped a certain small circle. (http://www.hitler.org/writings/Mein_Kampf/mkv1ch05.html)

With limitations placed on a one-time free press, assembly, self-expression, and the increase in parochial education, freedom dies—the goal of Luther, Hitler, and Vander Plaats.

To advance the state-church union, a theocracy that Vander Plaats longs to see in Iowa, Vander Plaats accepted Martin’s Luther’s concept of a church controlled state (http://www.christianforums.com/t7564291/) with education that had to be Christian (Luther’s Works. Vol. 45 (Philadelphia: 1962), 347-378) as Luther had no tolerance for anyone who did not profess the Christian faith. 

Openly, Martin Luther sanctioned killing all Jews:  Luther advocated setting synagogues on fire, destroying Jewish prayerbooks, forbidding rabbis from preaching, seizing Jews’ property and money, and smashing up their homes, so that these “poisonous envenomed worms” would be forced into labour or expelled “for all time” (Luther, On the Jews and Their Lies, Luthers Werke. 47:268–271) citing Deuteronomy 13 (especially verses 9-10 that Hitler loved to quote) as justification for the murder of Jews.

In Luther’s “Sermon on Keeping Children in School” (1530), the friend of nobles and murderers who had little to no time for the poor, homeless, or those who disagreed with him, Martin Luther was concerned with the parents who withdraw their children at an early age from school.  The leader of the state church (Evangelischen Kirche in Deutschland which ultimately incorporated Lutherans, Calvinists, and other “Protestants”), Luther wrote: “I see them, withdrawing their children from instruction and turning them to the making of a living (ibid., p. 219).” Neglecting the role of Scripture in the life of their children, parents appear to underestimate the function of learning in the service of the Word, the sacraments, and “all which imparts the Spirit and salvation”. While admonishing his fellow Germans, Luther reminds parents of the dire warning of punishment “to the third and fourth generation” of those who do not love God, adding that “you are guilty of the harm that is done when the spiritual estate disappears and neither God nor God’s word remains in the world” (see Luther’s concept at Luther’s Works. Vol. 46 (Philadelphia: 1967), p. 222).

Luther turned the Bible into a god for Germans to follow his interpretations that were far stranger than those debated at the Council of Nicaea.   The Bible of today has nothing in common with the Bible of antiquity, as seen in a simple reading of the Codex Vaticanus or Codex Sinaiticus, but this did not stop Luther or Hitler and Vander Plaats has no problem with this established fact.

Traditional Lutherans, who in Iowa follow Vander Plaats as the promised prophet prior to the Rapture, argue that the Old and New Testaments of the are the only divinely inspired book in the same way that radical Muslims argue that the Qur’an is the only divinely inspired book prepared and given by god to man;  furthermore, both Lutherans and Muslims as well as evangelical sects within Protestantism and Islam, their holy book is the only source of divinely revealed knowledge, and the only norm for Christian or Muslim teaching.  Scripture, alone, like the Qur’an alone (قرآنيون and أهل القران), is the formal principle of the faith, and the final authority for all matters of faith and morals because of its inspiration, authority, clarity, efficacy, and sufficiency (cf. Koran/Qur’an 2:185, 34:28, etc; on the value of education, the Koran is identical to the dreams and demands of Bob Vander Plaats: Koran/Qur’an 58:11; interestingly, every statement that Vander Plaats has made on education comes directly quoted out of the Muslim Koran/Qur’an, cf. Koran 20:114, and Vander Plaats seeks teachers “learned in the scriptures” that is identical to the Muslim insistence on mu’ allim or mudarris all who have to be religious scholars or ‘ulama’.  There is no difference between Vander Plaats arguments and that of Islam and Vander Plaats follows closely the teachings of the theological students (Taliban) of Islam in Afghanistan and matches that of the Muslim clergy of Pakistan; for example: To ascertain truth by reason alone is restrictive, according to Islam, because spiritual and temporal reality are two sides of the same sphere. Many Muslim educationists argue that favoring reason at the expense of spirituality interferes with balanced growth.  Vander Plaats would bring tears of joy from any jihadist Muslim, for he is one of them intellectually and spiritually). To this end the Lutherans and their off-shoots, like the Muslims ruled that all education had to come out of their scriptures.

The monopoly of Christianity over education in Nazi Germany gave reason for Adolf Hitler to roar in one of his speeches that there had to be but one educational program, one pattern for schools, and that the teachers educate students based on national standards guided by and administered by religious people who followed his concept of faith as patterned after the writings of Martin Luther:

Secular schools can never be tolerated because such schools have no religious instruction, and a general moral instruction without a religious foundation is built on air; consequently, all character training and religion must be derived from faith …we need believing people.
(Adolf Hitler, April 26, 1933, speech made during negotiations leading to the Nazi-Vatican Concordant)

In backward civilizations, such as Martin Luther’s Germany, true learning was replaced with biblical studies and rote memorization. Bob Vander Plaats, advocating religious mind-control supported by the taxes of the state in church schools and home schooling, comes directly out of Luther and Hitler, and the children learn less, learn what is not true (creationism; cp. http://scienceblogs.com/aetiology/2006/10/dmr_on_vander_plaats.php and http://www.dmcityview.com/2011/01/06/columns/skinny.html which Vander Plaats has termed “intelligent design”) and not what can help them in a real world where other states and nations are rapidly bypassing Iowa—which at one time, in the 1960s—was known as a center for quality education.  The Renaissance, south and north (especially with Erasmus) which had made a small inroad into Germany quickly disappeared when Luther screamed out against the “secularism” of humanists (even though he met and corresponded with Erasmus, Melanchthon {with whom he developed a friendship}, and others) and ended the Renaissance on a dark note of hatred. As Friedrich Nietzsche proclaimed “the Reformation was a reaction of backward minds against the Italian Renaissance”. In Nietzsche’s Menschliches, Allzumenschliches [Human, All too Human] Leipzig: Naumann, 1906, and Leipzig, Kröner, 1919, we read

“The Renaissance had positive forces which have, as yet, never become so mighty again in our modern culture. It was the golden age of the best thousand years, in spite of all its blemishes and vices. On the other hand, the German reformation stands out as an energetic protest of antiquated spirits. . . With their northern strength and stiff-neckedness they threw mankind back again. . . . The great task of the Renaissance could not be brought to a termination; this was prevented by the protest of a contemporary backward spirit. It was the chance of an extraordinary constellation of politics that Luther was preserved, and that his protest gained strength, for the Emperor protected him in order to employ him as a weapon against the Pope, and in the same way he was secretly favoured by the Pope in order to use the Protestant princes as a counterweight against the Emperor. Without this curious counter-play of intentions, Luther would have been burnt like Huss—and the morning sun of enlightenment would probably have risen somewhat earlier, and with a splendour more beauteous than we can no imagine” (Read: http://www.classicauthors.net/Nietzsche/Human/Human6.html no. 237).

It should be remembered that Nietzsche was the son of a Lutheran pastor and was brought up as a Lutheran.  Like all Lutheran lads, Nietzsche knew the teachings of Martin Luther from a very young age.

Luther’s reformation, like the crusade by Vander Plaats in Iowa against personal freedom, was a stifling stagnation of life, thought, and liberty. Protestantism in Northern Europe, like the FAMiLY in Iowa, was a malediction upon art, poetry, beauty, knowledge, the greatness of the mind, heart, will, deed, and generosity towards the poor and less fortunate. In Germany, the Protest revolution was a Teutonic reaction against everything Roman, a raw strike against the gentleness of spirit and tenderness of feeling; it was soulless and senseless in a time when the senses gave grandeur to life and being, while in Iowa, Vander Plaats took direct aim at destroying the heart of democracy: the right to free speech, association, and choice—for the Protestants of Northern Europe like wretchedly vacuous farmers and evangelical extremists of Iowa have never had tolerance for differences or disputation.  

Lutheranism and Nazi ideology, like the venom of Vander Plaatism has stood for many as a strong attack on science and reason, pushing backward the movement toward knowledge and enlightenment. Lutheranism of the sixteenth century as it would be through the terrible trials of Adolf Hitler, was the elevation of superstition worse than endured for one thousand years during the Dark Ages, and it was the mother of war, rape, pillage and violence.  It has become the promise of the Time of Tribulation of Vander Plaats who would purify Iowa of its sins and transgressions.

It was Luther’s first thought to look in the Scripture for a political reformation, as it has been for the Southern Baptist Convention, Mike Huckabee and the myriad of mincing mendicants cloaked as Pentecostal pastors and Protestant preachers. Religious and social questions mingle together in the Reformation; it was in fact quite as much a social and political revolution as a religious movement. As Heinrich Hermelink wrote: “Thus it was no accident that Luther was called on to take a leading part in the controversies.” Thus it happened that “Lutheranism was political” and it is certainly with justification that a Protestant church historian calls Luther “one of the greatest politicians of Germany” (Hermelink, Heinrich in Zeitschrift fur Kirchengeschichte, Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer [1876 – ], vol. 29, 1908, p. 478; cp. Hermelink, Heinrich, Der Toleranzgedanke im Reformationszeitalter Leipzig: Verein für Reforationsgeschichte, 1908; and, von Schubert, Hans and Hermelink, Heinrich (1908), Bündnis und Bekenntnis 1529/1530; Der Toleranzgedanke im Reformationszeitalter, Leipzig: Verein für Reformationsgeschichte, 1908).

“I need two secretaries. I do practically nothing all day long but write letters. . . . I am Preacher of the Convent and the Refectory; and vicar in the district, and therefore elevenfold Prior; I am responsible for the fish-ponds at Leitzkau; I am agent at Torgau in the suit for Herzberg parish church; I give lectures on St. Paul, I am collecting notes on the Psalter. I rarely have time to recite my Office and say Mass.” “Physically I am fairly well, but I suffer in spirit,” he would confess. “For more than the whole of last week I was tossed about in death and hell, so that I still tremble all over my body and am exhausted. Billows and tempests of despair and blasphemy assailed me and I had lost Christ almost entirely” (Luther, Martin, Letters, Enders Edition, vol. 1, pp. 66, 67, and vol. 6, page 71).

Far from being a chaste saint, Luther confesses his desires, writing in 1521: “I am here in idleness, alas neglecting prayer and not sighing once for the Church of God. I burn with all the desires of my unconquered flesh. It is the ardor of the spirit that I ought to feel. But it is the flesh, desire, laziness, idleness and sleepiness that possess me” (ibid. vol. 3, page 189), evidence that points to neuropathic disorder and delirious hallucinations that indicate strongly that Martin Luther was mentally deranged with a mania for persecution while entertaining a mania for greatness he felt he would never achieve. His constant quest to seek combat with the Devil endeared him to the superstitious folk of Germany, and made him a widely sought after preacher who would cater to the most base desires of those seeking wisdom from the occult. It was his custom to argue that “Satan sleeps with me much more than my wife does,” and used what can only be described as filthy obscenities when describing that which he found abominable. His words came out like more like vomit than as a teaching tool to explain scriptures to the illiterate and superstitious which captured their imaginations more than if he had spoken from a scholarly perspective. Luther admitted that he could “compose, write, pray and preach well, [but only] I have to be in a rage.” (Luther, Martin. Table Talk, 1210).

Martin Luther’s pyschopathological mad obsession with the Devil shows that he was mentally insane, but also that he reflected the community madness that was common in backwater, poorly educated areas of Europe.  Frey-Rohn, a practicing psychologist, refers to the subjective relativity of “good” and “evil,” and, more importantly, the individual’s personal responsibility for deciding what is good or evil for themselves rather than relying solely on external laws, rules, and regulations (http://www.angelfire.com/biz2/daimonic/psychologyofevil.html).  Luther, and later Hitler, and today Vander Plaats, each experienced a self-loathing that arched itself into their social discourses and ultimately, with Hitler, accepting Luther’s command to “kill all the Jews” as religious right to prove his love for his god in much the same way as god proved his for the world (John 3:16)–a warped use of the word love.  While Hitler created the ovens that burned Jews, Luther wrote on the auto de fe  that could consume Jews, as Vander Plaats argues for courts that protect minorities have their judges impeached and removed from the bench. 

Martin Luther commissioned Lucas Cranach to prepare a series of eight woodcuts for his Birth and Origin of the Pope that was to appear in his book Against the Papacy at Rome, Founded by the Devil (printed in March 1545).  Luther took deliberate measures to make sure that Cranach knew what to depict:  each illustration had to have a mhyming verse for each plate; to that end “A cartoon shows the Pope and three cardinals being expelled from the anus of a female devil while three furies are nursing and caring for three infant popes …” a graphic echo of Luther’s assertion in his treatise that the pope had been born from the devil’s anus–but only those who sat at Rome (he left the door open to a German pontificate for himself), while corrupting the gospel of Matthew (16:18).

Martin Luther had no sympathy for reason any more than did his spiritual son Adolf Hitler, or spiritual grandson Robert Vander Plaats and the Tea Party that has destroyed the very fabric of democracy in the USA.  Luther wrote:

“Reason is the Devil’s greatest whore; by nature and a manner of being she is a noxious whore; she is a prostitute, the Devil’s appointed whore; whore eaten by scab and leprosy who ought to be trodden under foot and destroyed, she and her wisdom. . . . Throw dung in her face to make her ugly. She is and she ought to be drowned in baptism. . . . She would deserve, the wretch, to be banished to the filthiest place in the house, to the closets” (Luther, Martin. Werks Erlanger edition, vol. 16, pp. 142-148). 

“Usury, drunkenness, adultery—these crimes are self-evident and the world knows that they are sinful; but that bride of the Devil, `Reason’, stalks abroad, the fair courtesan, and wishes to be considered wise, and thinks that whatever she says comes from the Holy Ghost. She is the most dangerous harlot the Devil has.” “Reason is contrary to faith”, he writes elsewhere. “Reason is the whore of the Devil. It can only blaspheme and dishonor everything God has said or done” (Luther, Martin. Werks Erlanger edition 29, 241) 

Luther begged the question: “If we could conceive by reason that God who shows so much wrath and malignity could be merciful and just, what use should we have in faith?” In reality, Luther’s theology was credo quia absurdum est.

Martin Luther and Adolf Hitler saw the Devil in everything (http://www.humanitas-international.org/showcase/chronography/documents/luther-jews.htm), as does Robert Vander Plaats in Iowa today. There was nothing good unless it was

blind submission to a Father figure: the pastor (formerly the priest), the civil authority, or the ruler. Satan controlled every thought, every word, every sigh, and was the author of every evil that the Bible detailed graphically. Throughout his intellectual life, in his social and political intercourse, in his writing and preaching he would always reintroduce the Devil and the evils of this mythological being who was one of the original Sons of God and he was the select and the favorite Son of God who was given the title of “The Satan” [meaning: “advocate” or “revealer” of the plan(s) and purpose(s) of the god of ancient Babylon from which the scripture was plagiarized after the Hebrews left Babylon (Job 2:1-2: וַיְהִי הַיֹּום וַיָּבֹאוּ בְּנֵי הָאֱלֹהִים לְהִתְיַצֵּב עַל־יְהוָה וַיָּבֹוא גַם־הַשָּׂטָן בְּתֹכָם לְהִתְיַצֵּב עַל־יְהוָה׃ וַיֹּאמֶר יְהוָה אֶל־הַשָּׂטָן אֵי מִזֶּה תָּבֹא וַיַּעַן הַשָּׂטָן אֶת־יְהוָה וַיֹּאמַר מִשֻּׁט בָּאָרֶץ וּמֵהִתְהַלֵּךְ בָּהּ׃; cp. 1 Kings 22:19: וַיֹּאמֶר לָכֵן שְׁמַע דְּבַר־יְהוָה רָאִיתִי אֶת־יְהוָה יֹשֵׁב עַל־כִּסְאֹו וְכָל־צְבָא הַשָּׁמַיִם עֹמֵד עָלָיו מִימִינֹו וּמִשְּׂמֹאלֹו׃ cp. Luke 22:31: ειπεν δε ο κυριος σιμων σιμων ιδου ο σατανας εξητησατο υμας του σινιασαι ως τον σιτον). The Germans loved hearing Luther thunder thumping his self-translated Bible in the sixteenth century as Luther became the Christ of the emerging German states, in the same way the Germans celebrated the hate speeches of Adolf Hitler in the middle of the twentieth century as Adolf Hitler became their Christ, in the same manner as today’s Lutherans and evangelicals who applaud the hate speeches of Iowa’s Nazi leader Robert Vander Plaats for Vander Plaats has become the Christ of Iowa following a few isolated verses that define Jesus as a total monster bent on war and carnage (Matthew 10:34: μη νομισητε οτι ηλθον βαλειν ειρηνην επι την γην ουκ ηλθον βαλειν ειρηνην αλλα μαχαιραν [but a Christ who was the exact opposite of what Vander Plaats preaches, for this Christ was against the family and came to divide it, setting parents against children and siblings against each other (vs. 35-36): ηλθον γαρ διχασαι ανθρωπον κατα του πατρος αυτου και θυγατερα κατα της μητρος αυτης και νυμφην κατα της πενθερας αυτης και εχθροι του ανθρωπου οι οικειακοι αυτου], and Luke 7:34: εληλυθεν ο υιος του ανθρωπου εσθιων και πινων και λεγετε ιδου ανθρωπος φαγος και οινοποτης φιλος τελωνων και αμαρτωλων where many saw Jesus as a drunkard who ate and drank with tax collectors, thieves, and reprobates who did not have Robert Vander Plaats interpretation or concept of “family values”—as was Martin Luther).

There is no difference between Luther, Hitler and Vander Plaats.  All three hate mongers share one thing in common: mind control and the elimination of individual freedom and rights. Luther was supported by the German Nobility. Hitler had the Reichstag behind him once he filled it with his Nazi followers, and the State of Iowa in the USA became the Fourth Reich in 2010, its house taken over by the Nazis of the USA known as the Tea Party—an insult to the original Tea Party led by Samuel Adams and John Hancock to stop the increased taxes on the people so that King George III could give the East India Tea Company tax breaks and let corporations rule from behind his throne. Iowa today is far worse than anyone would have imagined, rifling in on human and civil rights as if using Sarah Palin’s rifle and cross-hairs to silence dissent (as occurred in Tucson, Arizona in 2011) and end the rights of the working class (as the Christian Governor Scott Walker has done in Wisconsin, followed by “good Christian” governors in Indiana, Ohio, New Jersey, Florida, and elsewhere). 

Martin Luther would be proud of the Tea Party and Michele Bachman as they are rooting out the evil that he believed existed among the peasants in the sixteenth century, and that Hitler spoke out against in his frequent rants against immorality and the need for stricter censorship, and their anger has found the parched throat of Robert Vander Plaats who despises the common worker in Iowa, cries out for a cut in government spending (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5um0Br7LjHU) and enjoins the government to spend more on private schools and religious exercises sectarian in basis while denying science any support.  His words are strong and resonate with the passion of Adolf Hitler and Martin Luther as he attempts to wrest control of the government of the USA away from those who would “despoil it”: workers, labor unions, “one-worlders”, independent women, and those who do not share his Weltanschauung.  On May 9, 2011, Vander Plaats continued his outcry against the Obama government by sending another newsletter to all e-mail recipients (I am on the list, but how my e-mail address ever was given him is still a mystery) from his grassroots@ifpc.org, accusing Barrack Obama of “raising the debt ceiling” while ignoring the facts that it was Ronald Reagan, a Republican and dearly loved by ultra-conservatives, who raised the national debt more than any other president in history. But history was always a subject disdained by Vander Plaats who had a little knowledge of USA history as Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh or other illiterates dominating the USA airwaves.

Vander Plaats has friends in high and low places: he is supported not only by most organized hate groups (as defined by the Southern Poverty Law Center) but by disreputable and dishonorable US Supreme Court Justices such as Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia.  Scalia, like Thomas, eager to make a dollar and with little interest in human rights, told an audience at John Carrol University in Suburban Cleveland, Ohio,

“The Constitution just sets minimums.  Most of the rights that you enjoy go way beyond what the Constitution requires.”  Once this was said, Scalia opined that USA citizens can expect “the protections will be ratcheted right down to the constitution minimum [as Hitler did in Nazi Germany].”  Not wishing to terrify his audience of appreciable admirers, the jurist promised, “I won’t let it go beyond the constitutional minimum” while acknowledging that rights now taken for granted in the USA would rapidly evaporate in the steam of the Tea Party’s neo-Nazi movement (http://web.payk.net/mailingLists/iran-news/html/2003/msg00331.html cp. www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A55227-2003Nov2.html, and www.why-war.com/news/2003/01/26/theciass.html, and www.commondreams.org/views03/0408-07.htm, and www.spiritone.com/~gdy52150/noon.html).

With the elevation of Big Businesses that pay no taxes, such as ExxonMobil, Koch Industries, GE, and others, the aim of these giants is not only to control people but reap obscene profits while backbreaking the American workforce. 

This is in keeping with Martin Luther’s address to the German nobility during the Peasants’ War of 1525.  So angry was he that the working class would struggle for human dignity, better working conditions, and security that the German reformer ordered the nobility to “stab, kill, slay” in secret or in day light all who were in revolt against their masters.  The peasants uprising (Deutscher Bauernkrieg ) was drowned in blood, and Martin Luther was primarily responsible for it (Der Aufstand der Bauern wurde im Blut erstickt. Luther hat daran einen erheblichen Anteil) as he wrote:

The peasants have taken upon themselves the burden of three terrible sins against God and man; by this they have merited death in body and soul… they have sworn to be true and faithful, submissive and obedient, to their rulers… now deliberately and violently breaking this oath… they are starting a rebellion, and are violently robbing and plundering monasteries and castles which are not theirs… they have doubly deserved death in body and soul as highwaymen and murderers… they cloak this terrible and horrible sin with the gospel… thus they become the worst blasphemers of God and slanderers of his holy name”

(cf. Luther, Martin (1525). Wider die räuberischen und mörderischen Rotten der Bauern).

To this end they have spent billions of dollars running lies on television, radio, in newspapers and fliers against those who would defend liberty and the American way as it had been when Russ Feingold was in the USA Senate, to cannibalize states such as Iowa, Indiana, Ohio, Wisconsin, Massachusetts, Florida, New Jersey, and so forth.  The USA has only had a brief taste of what is in store for the nation, the people of the USA, beginning the the heartland of the Midwest (Iowa, Ohio, Indiana, and so forth) are soon to discover that Adolf Hitler and his SA and SS supporters were gentle when it came to the civil rights of its “Aryan” citizens of Germany for no such leniency will be afforded to citizens of the USA when the Koch Brothers supporters and retainers are in power.  

Hitler and his Nazi Party was no aberration, but a forerunner of would-be totalitarians as Sarah Palin, Michele Bachman, Michael Cain, and others.  The doors for future concentration camps have been opened, to imprison dissenters (http://www.thewatcherfiles.com/dissenters.htm), with new detention camps to be built by Kellogg, Brown and Root (KBR), a subsidiary of Halliburton whose CEO was/is Dick Cheney (see: http://www.commondreams.org/views02/0814-05.htm; cp. October 9, 2006 article at http://www.alternet.org/rights/42458/) with an open attack on workers (http://issawatch.couragecampaign.org/index.php/page/158). 

Russell Pearce (R-Legislative District 18), Arizona Senate President,  quipped to the Greater Phoenix Chamber of Commerce that if public workers started protesting, he would go the Sherrif Arpaio route, declaring:  “I’ve spoken with the sheriff, and he has some nice buses that hold a lot of people. We’ve also got some tents with a view.”  Pearce, like the Arizona Republican Party believes that there is no fundamental right to protest and those who protest must be imprisoned in “detention camps” modeled after those created by Adolf Hitler, but with the twist that they would be in the middle of the Arizona desert (cf. http://tucsoncitizen.com/arizona-unapologetic-liberal/2011/03/02/im-on-russell-pearces-brown-list/ and http://thinkprogress.org/politics/2011/05/16/166453/russell-pearce-lock-up-public-workers/).

The death knell was rung on democracy in the USA with the 5-4 ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, 558 US 08-205 (2010).  By overturning the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002 (BCRA, sponsored by John McCain {R-AZ} and Russ Feingold {D-WI}), 2 USC § 441b (that prohibited corporations and unions from using their general treasury funds to make “electioneering communications” big money, especially from the Kings of Pollution, the Koch Brothers, openly bought political offices, installed their cronies, and began to wreck the laws that would protect the environment, the elderly, education, and justice.  Their first target was to defeat an International Criminal Court in fear that George W. Bush would be tried for crimes against humanity; the second rifle hair was focused on a complete withdrawal of the USA from the United Nations, and using Nazi rhetoric “dismantling one-world government” so great is their fear of communism that they are funding the rewriting of USA history to make Senator Joe McCarthy (R-WI) a hero and creating the myth that Blacks were happier as slaves than being on welfare.

The radical right’s revisionism is echoed by Robert Vander Plaats.  His attack on human and civil rights is now legendary.  His opposition to public education and science matches the ignorance of 74% of the US Senate Republicans rejection of reality, and in the end, Vander Plaats is rewriting the Iowa slogan: “Iowa: A Place to Grow” so that it reads: “Iowa: A Place to Go From” for future generations.  Fortunately, Iowa does have a solid (but dwindling) intelligentsia, thinking people who struggle daily to undo the damage of the evangelical extremists who get media headlines and attention of major papers.  Vander Plaats can be defeated if his corruption and preoccupation with the private lives of others–revealing that he himself is worried about his own orientations (cf. Diamant, Louis and McAnulty, Richard D. McAnulty (1995) The Psychology of Sexual Orientation, Behavior, and Identity: A Handbook. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press; )cp. http://www.behavenet.com/capsules/disorders/genderiddis.htm–can be fully exposed.  Even if he is exposed, there will be others to follow him–requiring that thinking Iowans stay ever vigilant or the door to wisdom will be closed tightly.

Fortunately, for Iowa, there are clusters of democratic-thinking people, who are willing to fight for the state of my birth, and will continue to oppose the draconian policies of Robert Vander Plaats and legislators like Annette Sweeney who want curbs against whistle-blowers who would expose animal abuse (Representative Sweeney of Alden, Iowa wrote the legislation to curb under cover videos of animal abuse on large farms after receiving sizeable donations from the farmers where animal abuse was regularly reported). Continue reading on Examiner.com Undercover whistleblowers can endanger animals and food, says lawmaker (Part 1) – National Animal Policy | Examiner.com http://www.examiner.com/animal-policy-in-national/undercover-videos-can-endanger-animals-and-food-says-lawmaker-part-1#ixzz1O1yD6Pea;  http://iowaindependent.com/tag/annette-sweeney and http://vetrescue.blogspot.com/2011/03/iowas-whistle-blowers-bill-sf-431.html and http://www.examiner.com/animal-policy-in-national/undercover-videos-can-endanger-animals-and-food-says-lawmaker-part-1) and those who would dumb down education and instill creationism  in Iowa schools so that the students can become menial laborers (http://ncse.com/cej/1/2/reactions-to-creationism-iowa and http://www.sciencemag.org/content/208/4449/1208).