Watch out, Columbia SC

Yes, well, in the previous post I set out to report on a clever plan devised by an American religious organisation to enable their adherents to gain political power, but when I started to write about their target – South Carolina – I got sidetracked into going on about dining cars and Eartha Kitt. I shall start again:

The project is called Christian Exodus and if you find what follows hard to understand their website explains it in some detail. They believe that the US government under President Bush is committing atrocities by being soft on abortion, allowing the discredited theory of Darwinian evolution to be taught in schools, celebrating sodomy, and planning to outlaw the preaching of Christianity.

They are not at all pleased about this and have devised a strategy whereby, rather than spending resources in continued efforts to redirect the entire nation, they will redeem States one at a time. As they quite rightly point out, “millions of Christian conservatives are geographically spread out and diluted at the national level”. Therefore, they will concentrate their numbers in a geographical region with a sovereign government they can control through the electoral process.

What they are doing is moving thousands of Christian constitutionalists to specific cities and counties in South Carolina through a series of emigrations, believing “the values of this state to be very similar to the values held by our membership”.

The first move will begin when their organisation has 12,000 members, who will be “encouraged” to move to a selected city and county. “That number of activist émigrés, when combined with the present Christian electorate, will enable us to win the city council, the county council, elected law enforcement positions, and elected judgeships. We will then be able to protect our God-given and constitutionally protected rights within our local community.”

They reckon to move thousands into South Carolina by the end of 2008 and then start their political campaigns. This is only Phase One, of course; as migration proceeds, city, county and then state will fall, probably by 2016, and at that point there could be secession from the Union.

I can see several ways in which this plan may run into difficulties, but in a nation where, according to an opinion poll in the 1990s, 3.7 million people say they have been kidnapped by extra-terrestrials, anything is possible. It would be wrong for a foreigner to comment, but for the British there is some resonance with the 1980s misdeeds of Dame Shirley Porter, the "homes for votes" scandal, involving selling empty council houses and flats in Tory marginal wards to the professional middle classes and forcing the homeless to live outside the borough. But that of course was illegal, whereas Christian Exodus is presumably not; you couldn’t charge hundreds of thousands of migrants with gerrymandering, though the organisers might be at risk.