The ridiculous ravings of the right-wing extremist supported by the Republican Party in Maryland as our next Attorney General

As I reported in Friday’s Sun column, the right-wing extremist Michael Peroutka, now enjoying the support of the Maryland Republican Party as its candidate for Attorney General, has been a prolific essayist for a website called “News With Views,” sponsored by My Pillow. The website touts itself as a place “where reality shatters illusions,” and there’s more of the latter than the former. For instance, according to a Peroutka essay, the Covid-19 pandemic that killed more than 6.4 million people worldwide was a “fraud and hoax.”

In the Peroutka archives, you’ll find lots of crackpot thinking about the American legal system that, as an attorney, Peroutka is part of. There are numerous posts on “God’s law,” and, specifically, how “God’s law” supersedes any law created by duly elected legislators.
“What is not in accord with God’s Law is not law,” Peroutka wrote in 2014, and that’s pretty disturbing stuff coming from a man who wants to be attorney general of Maryland. Peroutka believes the separation of church and state is “a great lie.”

Here, if you can stand it, is more of what this guy has had to say over the years:
In one of his more ridiculous posts, he denies that law “is something that a judge can make just by deciding a case [or] something that a legislature can make just by passing a bill and sending it to a governor or a president for his approval.” He also wrote this: “When our local officials, including County Councilmen and Sheriffs, confront such ‘pretended legislation,’ it is their duty to resist its implementation.”

Peroutka uses the term “pretended legislation” repeatedly to characterize laws that were actually passed by the duly constituted authority, but he says they “are not law at all” because they “conflict with God’s moral law.”

If by some tragic fluke Peroutka ended up as attorney general, he would have little interest in enforcing environmental laws.
Under the headline: UNLAWFUL ACTS OF CONGRESS ARE NOT BINDING ON YOUR COUNTY, Peroutka writes that the Clean Water Act “is not law. In fact it is null and void and of no effect…. There is no reason, therefore, for the State of Maryland or for the County of Anne Arundel to comply with any standards or requirements published by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) or any other federal agency or department.”
Extending that argument, he continues: “Acts of Congress are not always binding on the states…. They only are binding if they are lawful, that is when they do not conflict with the Constitution and with the Law of Nature and Nature’s God. When they are not lawful, they are ‘pretended legislation,’ and the States are supposed to declare them as null and void…. If the governor fails to nullify these lawless enactments, then the local officials, such as the County Council must stand in the gap and nullify this villainy.”

Under the headline: HAS YOUR STATE LEGISLATURE FORFEITED ITS VALIDITY? Peroutka suggests that not only particular laws but the General Assembly as an institution and all its legislative acts can be declared invalid:
“The behavior of the legislature… raises the question whether the people of Maryland may be justified in reaching the conclusion that what we call our ‘General Assembly’ is no longer a valid legislative body. And if the case can be made that the legislature of Maryland or of your state is not a valid body, then, it follows that no validity should be given to any of its enactments…. An enactment must not violate God’s law. (For example, an enactment that allowed the taking of innocent life would violate God’s Commandment
‘Thou shalt not murder,’ and would, therefore, not constitute a law – even if it were enacted and signed.… Is it possible that those who are sworn to uphold the law, such as police and sheriffs and judges and prosecutors, may soon come to the conclusion that the enactments of this body should be ignored because they are based not in law, but in lawlessness?”

Want more?
Here’s one under the headline, WHAT LAW IS AND WHAT LAW ISN’T AND WHY IT MATTERS
“Last year, the legislature in my state of Maryland enacted something called Senate Bill 281. This ‘enactment’ (notice, please, that I am not calling it a law) blatantly violates the God-given right for Marylanders to keep and bear arms for their individual and common defense… There are objective standards by which to determine if the acts of legislatures or executives or courts are lawful. Simply put these actions must be moral (not violating God’s Word), and they must be constitutional (not violating the Constitution) or else they are NOT ‘law.’… So, Senate Bill 281, as well as many other enactments of the Maryland legislature, is NOT law. Recognizing this, I wrote to my County Sheriff, Sheriff Ron Bateman, a man who has taken an oath, before God, to protect and defend his constituents from lawlessness.
“In my note, I made the case that this enactment by the legislature was NOT law and I asked him his intentions in this very important matter. I wanted to know whether he intended to enforce SB 281, which I explained would be wrongful, or whether he intended to defend his constituents from this lawlessness. Since Sheriff Bateman is an elected official, I wanted to know whether he would take appropriate action to arrest and seek prosecution of those who might, ‘under the color of law,’ actually break the law by trying to enforce this immoral and unconstitutional enactment of the Maryland legislature and the Maryland governor.
“His answer was disappointing. Essentially he said that he doesn’t get to decide which laws he will enforce. He just does his job, which I take to mean, he will do whatever the legislature says even though it violates the law. Perhaps the greatest threat to liberty today in America is the fact that, almost without exception, those who are charged with law enforcement don’t have any idea what the law actually is. They do not know the difference between ‘law’ and ‘pretended legislation.'”

Here’s more Peroutka rubbish:
“[Courts] do not make laws…. For years, courts have been issuing opinions and claiming to themselves lawmaking powers that they don’t legally or morally have…. Traditionally, courts have used the ‘equal protection clause’ or the ‘due process clause’ of the Fourteenth Amendment to establish national policy. In effect, they use these clauses to accomplish an ‘end run’ around the clear meaning of the words of our Constitution….

On various other issues, Mr. Peroutka says that the United States “is NOT a democracy,” public schools are an evil force intended to de-Christianize American children, civil rights are “make-believe,” separation of church and state is a “great lie,” and the theory of evolution is not just false but a crime:

“Does it drive you crazy when you hear politicians and talking heads refer to America as a “democracy”? If it does, I sympathize with you…. Despite what you have repeatedly heard, the purpose and the premise of the Constitution of these United States is the establishment of a Christian Republic under God, NOT a democracy.
“Now there are many evil persons (and many of their ignorant followers) who want us to be a democracy. They would prefer that the whims and fancies of the majority, manipulated by the media and by elitist power brokers, become the law of the land. Under such a system, neither our lives nor our private possessions are safe. But, in a Christian Republic governed by a Constitution which is rooted in Biblical law, all life and property are safe.

“Now do you see why the politicians and the talking heads keep calling us a ‘democracy’? They want you to believe that we are one. And that should drive you crazy.”

“… Government tramples our God-given rights and now pretends to issue what it calls ‘civil rights.’ But ‘civil rights’ are make-believe. Real rights come from the Creator.”

“…To subjugate and enslave a Christian people, you must first de-Christianize them…. Piece by piece, Christian beliefs must be removed, along with the memory of those beliefs, from the minds of the people….You must concentrate on the children. You must take them away from their parents and everyday, day by day, indoctrinate them to reject and forget the Christian ideas and habits of their fathers and their mothers, their grandfathers and their grandmothers. This is precisely what government schools were designed to do. This is what they have done and continue to do…. You can’t conquer a Christian people. But if you can steal their children, and train them to believe that there is a wall of separation between God and government, then you can enslave them….”

In another commentary, Peroutka says public education and television are “the major polluters of American minds.”]

Commenting on “the dangerous effect of evolutionary thinking in the American culture” (which he calls “Darwin’s deadly legacy”), Peroutka declares that “the false theory of evolution is un-American since it violates the very first precept of American law.”