Governor Bevin Warns of Bloodshed

Republican Governor Matt Bevin of Kentucky made these comments at the Values Voter Summit just over a week ago:

Somebody asked me yesterday, I did an interview, “Do you think it’s possible, if Hillary Clinton were to win the election, do you think it’s possible that we’ll be able to survive, that we’d ever be able to recover as a nation?” And while there are people who have stood on this stage and said we would not, I would beg to differ. I do think it would be possible, but at what price? At what price? The roots of the tree of liberty are watered by what? The blood of who? The tyrants, to be sure, but who else? The patriots.

Whose blood will be shed? It may be that of those in this room. It might be that of our children and grandchildren. I have nine children. It breaks my heart to think that it might be their blood is needed to redeem something, to reclaim something that we, through our apathy and our indifference, have given away. Don’t let it happen.

Bevin sounds like my father, and like so many other homeschool fathers I grew up knowing in the conservative evangelical community in which I grew up. And that’s not a coincidence. Bevin is a homeschool father.

The first thing I notice is the insistence that we are are living at a turning point, a moment of high drama and extreme crisis which will determine whether our nation can survive. They say this every election. Do they think we don’t remember their dire predictions in 2008? A psychologist would likely have a heyday with this. There’s something there in their desire to believe they live in critically important times. It allows them to see themselves as heroes and as patriots, standing up courageously against the forces of evil.

As a quick aside, the heroes in stories like these usually get carted off to jail, watch their friends killed, or otherwise suffer consequences. What’s interesting here is that Bevin (and others like him) create a hero-narrative—and enjoy the rush it gives them—without actually running the risks faced by those in hero-narratives. Oh, they do think they face consequences. But let’s be real. No one is being jailed for being politically conservative, or for being evangelical (and no, Kim Davis doesn’t count).

The next thing I noticed was the invoking of his nine children. In evangelical homeschool circles—in the circles in which I grew up—children become politicized and weaponized. In this case Bevin assumes that his children will grow up to share his beliefs and political views, that his children will grow up to fight for his cause in the war he believes may be coming. But they may not. Bevin’s children may grow up to be LGBT-supporting feminist progressives like me. God help them if they do, because Bevin will not be happy.

And yes, I do remember being taught that we might someday need to engage in a literal war against an out-of-control government.

What did you think all the guns were for?

My family didn’t support the second amendment because we liked to hunt. We didn’t hunt. We didn’t support it for our protection against muggers or murderers either, not really. No, we supported the second amendment so that we would be able to defend ourselves against the government once it had become inimical to our rights. That was why we believed the second amendment had been written (which is odd, now that I think about it, because that is definitely not why it looks like it was written).

No matter. We were ready.

I should note that this is usually just rhetoric, rhetoric that is recycled again every election. We’ve never seen a full-scale uprising like what Bevin describes, but—and this is an important but—for decades now there have always been some who take the rhetoric seriously and resort to bloodshed. Timothy McVeigh, for instance, but others that are less known too. Armed “militia” groups became an increasing problem under Obama, and have grown only further this year. Just last week a Kansas group was caught making bombs intended to blow up local Somali immigrants and—they hoped—ignite a religious war.

Hopefully Bevin’s words will remain just that—words. But even words are dangerous.

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