15 December 2008

Christian Missionary and Daughter: "Collateral Damage" In the Drug War

Mary Anastasia O'Grady wrote a heartbreaking article in yesterday's WSJ. In it she detailed the current efforts by Rep. Pete Hoekstra (Michigan Dutch Fever, Catch It!) to get to the bottom of the murders of a Christian missionary and her infant daughter. O'Grady unflinchingly writes:
On that day the Bowers family was flying in a single-engine plane over the Amazon toward their home in Iquitos. Mrs. Bowers was holding the infant on her lap when a bullet fired by the Peruvian Air Force, under direction of the CIA, hit the aircraft, traveled through her back and into Charity's skull. The plane crash-landed on the Amazon River. Mr. Bowers, his young son and the pilot survived. Neither the plane nor its passengers were found to be involved in any way in the drug business and initial reports said that the mistaken attack was a tragic one-time error.
One-time my ass. (Sorry, this topic gets me really heated. But you couldn't tell, right?)

Hopefully, this will put a little dent into the government's biggest mistake in its history, the drug war. A large amount of the wrong-headed support for the war on drugs comes from evangelical Christian households, people who supported Mike Huckabee for president (Huckabites?). I'll be the first to admit I don't have numbers to back that up, but my extensive anecdotal experience with the community supports the statement. Just trust me, that, for a myriad number of reasons, many evangelicals have no problem voting in a fashion that conforms state law to match their personal morality.

For those type of voters, stories like this just need to be dropped into the evangelical-chain-email loop and hopefully they'll metastasize to gargantuan "conventional wisdom" status.

Y'know, sorta like the "[Insert Democratic Presidential Candidate Name Here]: The Antichrist???" emails that fill my inbox every 4 years.

No comments: