Michael Anthony Peroutka is the founder of the Institute onthe Constitution (with his brother Stephen), co-host of The American View radioprogram, and prominent member of theConstitution Party,being their candidate for president in 2004. His candidacy – the campaign themebeing “God, Family, Republic” – emphasized in particular the Bible and the ideaofAmerica as a Christian Nation,advocating for instance a revision of the First Amendment to affirm TriuneChristianity as the officially established religion of the United States. Peroutkawas accordingly endorsed by several prominent Dominionists, theLeague of the South,andAlex Jones.(In 2014 his ambitions are a bit lower, buthe is registered to run for spotson a county commission and on the Republican party committee in Anne Arundel County,Maryland;less power, perhaps, but also a greater chance of succeeding – and this guy isseriously dangerous.)

Yes, he is a staunch theocrat, claiming that the church–stateseparation a myth and a lie and that the Constitution, in reality, mandatesjust the opposite (which makes it a bit unclear why he thinks it needs to be changed, but fairenough). According to Peroutka “[a] revolution has happened in America […] overthe past 150 years.Evolution is at the bottom of it, and some very un-American people have been and arebehind it. The purpose of the revolution is to stop you from being able tothink and believe like an American [i.e. like Peroutka] any more …. It’s been acalculated and evil anti-God, anti-Christian revolution.” You don’t get muchmore insane than that; though he is probably right that people with a modicumof education and critical thinking skills probably won’t think and believe likehim. He has elsewhereargued that teahching evolution is “disloyalty toAmerica”.To support the claim, hequotes the Declaration of Independence:“There exists a creator God. He is the God of the Bible. He is not Allah, norany of the Hindu deities, nor is he the God that is in the wind or in the treesor some other impersonal force. He created us. We did not evolve from apes orslimy, swampy things.” Evidently secular scholars must have missed thatpassage.

In 2012, the Human Rights Campaign called Peroutka an“active white supremacist and secessionist sympathizer,” though Peroutka deniesthe charges. Hedoes, however, refer to the Confederate flag as “the Americanflag”.Interestingly, Peroutka does (at least occasionally) take his own goals to bein line e.g. with Martin Luther King’s goals, though he does havehis own interpretation of MLK’s words,claiming for instance that MLK did not call for civil rights in the 1963 “IHave A Dream” speech (but rather for Biblical law). Indeed, Peroutka has said that all civil rightslaws are unjust because“there is no such thing as a civil right.”

Peroutka is perhaps (or used to be) most noted for hisanti-abortion stance,advocating that the anti-choice movement should begin touse different and more extreme tactics and that local officials should beginprosecuting women for murder if they have an abortion.He apparently refuses to recognize Roe v. Wade; according to Peroutka that casedoesn’t have any impact on the law because it violates the Bible. He doesn’tlike gays either (surprise), and was part of the coalition to filethe motherof all Proposition 8 briefs in 2013 (arguing for instance that laws against homosexuality and sodomyaffirm rather than deny the humanity ofgay people). Peroutka has elsewhere emphasized that if we followed God’s lawsthen there would be “no way we are ever going to validate homo orsodomite-unmarriage,”compared gay marriage to bank robbery,claimed that ENDA isn’t about civil rights (there are none, remember) butan insidious attempt by the government to force you to be gay,and argued that the apparently un-Biblical victory of the Union in the CivilWarled directly to gay marriage –according to Peroutka the South’s defeat opened the door to a “huge black hole of centralized power,”which means that people began looking to the government, rather than God, asthe source of their rights; “the real effect of the War and the Reconstructionafter the war was to take the very foundation of our understanding of ourrights away from us, that is to say that they come from God, and put them inthe hands of men,” who can then change the meaning of concepts likemarriage. Yes, it is all going down thedrains;according to Peroutka, America is “heading toward Haiti” because we aredisobeying God’s laws.

Of course, due to its failure to align itself with God’slaws, Peroutka does not trust the legal system. He is accordingly for instancepessimistic about the Hobby Lobby case – Justice Anthony Kennedy will ruleagainst Hobby Lobbybecause he hates God: “The reason he hates God is becausehe thinks he is God.And if you think you’re God, then you hate anybody else or any other entity orbeing that anybody would give homage to that would interfere with what you seeyourself as; he is jealous of any other God.”

On the other hand, Peroutka is very fond of home-schooling,and argues that the solution to school violence is to abolish schools, which …well …