Ron Paul has just announced that he is developing a curriculum for use by homeschooling parents. He says this will teach young people to believe in freedom, yet guess who is working as the Director of Curriculum Development for this project? Gary North, the most prominent Christian Reconstructionist in the world. Freedom?

Allow me to quote what North himself has said on the subject of education and freedom. When I first came across this quote several years ago, I thought it simply too good — or too bad — to be true. Whenever a quote seems too perfect, I tend to assume that it is until I track it down in an original source. And this one turned out to be accurate. He wrote this in 1982 in an article entitled “The Intellectual Schizophrenia of the New Christian Right” in Christianity and Civilization: The Failure of the American Baptist Culture. You can still read it online.

“So let us be blunt about it: we must use the doctrine of religious liberty to gain independence for Christian schools until we train up a generation of people who know that there is no religious neutrality, no neutral law, no neutral education, and no neutral civil government. Then they will get busy in constructing a Bible-based social, political and religious order which finally denies the religious liberty of the enemies of God.”

This is the man that Ron Paul has put in charge of writing his allegedly liberty-loving curriculum. He is also a staunch advocate of Biblical stoning, including for all the things the Bible demands that it be used for. You know, like being gay or a woman (but not a man, of course) not being a virgin on her wedding day. You can find all of this in another of his books, The Sinai Strategy.

Walter Olson, a genuine libertarian (as opposed to these totalitarian theocrats who falsely claim that label), wrote about this long ago.

“The Christian goal for the world,” Recon theologian David Chilton has explained, is “the universal development of Biblical theocratic republics.” Scripturally based law would be enforced by the state with a stern rod in these republics. And not just any scriptural law, either, but a hardline-originalist version of Old Testament law–the point at which even most fundamentalists agree things start to get “scary.” American evangelicals have tended to hold that the bloodthirsty pre-Talmudic Mosaic code, with its quick resort to capital punishment, its flogging and stoning and countenancing of slavery, was mostly if not entirely superseded by the milder precepts of the New Testament (the “dispensationalist” view, as it’s called). Not so, say the Reconstructionists. They reckon only a relative few dietary and ritualistic observances were overthrown. So when Exodus 21:15-17 prescribes that cursing or striking a parent is to be punished by execution, that’s fine with Gary North. “When people curse their parents, it unquestionably is a capital crime,” he writes. “The integrity of the family must be maintained by the threat of death.” Likewise with blasphemy, dealt with summarily in Leviticus 24:16: “And he that blasphemeth the name of the Lord, he shall surely be put to death, and all the congregation shall certainly stone him.”

This is the American and Christian version of the Taliban, and claiming to be advocates of liberty for fuck’s sake.