“This is how we should order our lives together,” he said. “And frankly, yes, we are going to impose it upon you. If you don’t like it, I’m sorry, but this is good and right and just if it lines up with God’s standards, and I am going to enforce my morality on you in as much as our morality is God’s morality.”
“You should always check yourselves,” he continued. “Do I believe what God believes? Am I defending what God says is good?”
“And if it is, then you should have the courage to say, ‘This is how we’re going to run our town, this is how we’re going to run our county, this is how we’re going to run our state, and this is how we should run the United States of America by legislating the morality that we can find in the Bible.'”
I once trained a guy who worked with some of the Saudi royals. He was really cool, wasn’t Saudi (Jordanian, the poor Arabs without oil), and wasn’t a practicing Muslim. The subject of alcohol came up, and I said that it was illegal over there, and he said “Not for the royal family. They have rooms filled with cases of booze. I’ve seen it, often. The people can’t drink, but the royal family definitely does.”
If the house of saud could maintain their power without the clerics you bet your ass they would. The clerics are an allied power who could turn against them if they got out of line.
They both like the control that each other offers. It’s a good, perfectly complementary partnership…for them.
In theory, but the house wants to live above religious laws and the clerics want no limits. They’re allied because neither alone can have all they want, but both do resent the other forcing them to only have some of what they want
All of the things that will be forbidden to us under “bible law” will of course be widely available to the very wealthy and the Republican elites. That’s part of living in a totalitarian state.