Perry should pray for brains, not rain

Public figures who play fast and loose with God risk bringing down Her wrath. Look at Rick Perry, who continues to dismiss climate change after having proclaimed 72 hours back in April as three days of prayer for rain.

We can see how that worked out. Fresh wildfires are continuing to burn East Texas to a crisp, and Perry had the good sense to leave the campaign trail and be a presence in his state during the crisis — most likely because that’s where the phone he uses to call Washington is located.

Polls would probably show that, unlike Perry, most Texans understand that climate change is the real deal, and that praying won’t help. We learned in history that the main reason our founders wanted to keep church and state separate was to guarantee religious freedom, not thwart it. Many of our original settlers had fled countries where an official religion was forced down their throats. Perhaps unstated, though, is the possibility that our founders also understood the risks to progress if an American government was driven by religion.

I personally don’t trust politicians who brandish their religion as testimony of their goodness. The faith Rick Perry demonstrates so overtly doesn’t make him a good man — indeed his positions on issues of great importance to most Americans puts him at direct odds with Jesus. Perry may think he’s a good man, but he’s not.

Rick Perry — the face of the dark ages

I’m thinking about the possible effect on the future of mankind of a president who thinks global warming is a hoax. It’s hard to understand why an educated person can’t grasp the science behind it. It’s pretty simple. Nature spent millions of years turning carbon-based life forms into fossil fuels beneath the surface of the earth. Humans have dug or pumped up much of it and burned it since the beginning of the first Industrial Revolution in the 18th century, releasing the carbon into the atmosphere. Carbon dioxide is a primary greenhouse gas. It traps heat in the atmosphere, which makes the planet habitable. The more carbon dioxide, the more heat will be trapped. Simple, right? This is something we can measure, and it doesn’t take a genius to link warming with the accelerated combustion of fossil fuels.

Climate change deniers charge that the overwhelming majority of the world’s scientists who agree that global warming is real and influenced by human activity are part of some vast conspiracy to delude the world just so they can keep receiving research grants. They prefer to cite instead the handful of dissenting scientists who are in the employ of oil and coal companies.

Real scientists believe that the principal side-effect of global warming is climate change, and we are amassing more and more evidence each year to support that belief. This is the part of the science that’s not exact, but we’re seeing the very dramatic changes in weather patterns that have been predicted since the 1980s and perhaps earlier. The increasing severe weather events and polar melting are two of the most visible indicators.

Right now Rick Perry, the Republican primary frontrunner, is staunchly in the denier camp. This alone should disqualify him as a presidential contender, but there he is at the top of the heap — and he could win, if voter anxiety over jobs and the economy doesn’t ease.

Perry isn’t alone. Global warming denial seems to be at the top of the Republican primary platform, with only John Huntsman firmly on the side of common sense. So imagine a world with its leading democracy firmly entrenched in the dark ages of science.

The danger of Perry looms

Texas governor and Republican presidential primary candidate Rick Perry has big plans to overhaul the Constitution, which he described in his book, Fed Up! Our Fight to Save America from Washington. His proposals, summarized in a Yahoo! blog, The Ticket, by Chris Moody, range from limiting tenure of federal judges to abolishing the income tax to defining marriage as being between a man and a woman to prohibiting abortion nationwide. They involve amending the constitution, adding new amendments, and rolling back existing amendments.

Here’s the good news: you can propose changes to the Constitution till you’re blue in the face, but the founders were smart enough to make it an arduous process, probably recognizing that the occasional peanut brain with looney ideas might get elected to high office. In our history, only one really stupid amendment was ever added to the Constitution — prohibition — and I’m sure every member of Congress, the president, and every state legislator of three-fourths of the states who voted to approve it was drunk at the time they voted.

Assuming he became the Republican nominee, and assuming he won the presidency, Perry would have to hope that enough peanut brains were elected to Congress to get his changes off the ground — possible, but a statistical unlikelihood. But his ideas should sound an alarm about this presidential wannabe.

Lifetime tenure is one of the underpinnings of the concept of checks and balances, and while we may not like the idea of an Antonin Scalia serving forever, we at least get a Ruth Bader Ginsberg for that long. The power to nominate judges rests with the president, which should give pause to voters when they cast a ballot every four years. This is how men far, far wiser than Rick Perry meant it to be so long ago.