O’Donnell the Dabbler

When Christine O’Donnell defeated Mike Castle in the recent GOP primary in Delaware, it sparked an internal fight between Tea Party populists and the establishment elites. I’m not elite enough to be part of the Ruling Class and I have an aversion to populism so I really have no dog in this fight. I’m certainly happy to to see a liberal squish like Castle go, but O’Donnell appears to be a bit, well, eccentric .

Maureen Dowd describes O’Donnell as an “anti-abortion, anti-masturbation, anti-premarital-sex, anti-stem-cells, anti-gay-marriage, dubious-about-evolution Christian conservative.” That sounds like qualifications for my ideal candidate. And since she thinks J.R.R. Tolkein’s female characters are good role models for women , she gets points for having geek cred too.

But in her multiple appearances on Politically Incorrect with Bill Maher(!), she made some peculiar comments about dabbling in witchcraft and . . . other weird stuff:

I dabbled into witchcraft — I never joined a coven. But I did, I did . . . . I didn’t join a coven, I didn’t join a coven, let’s get this straight . . . I dabbled into witchcraft. I hung around people who were doing these things. I’m not making this stuff up. I know what they told me they do. [ . . . ]

One of my first dates with a witch was on a satanic altar, and I didn’t know it. I mean, there’s a little blood there and stuff like that. . . . We went to a movie and then like had a little midnight picnic on a satanic altar.

That’s a bit weird, but the next clip is even more disturbing:

O’Donnell says that if Hitler was searching for Jews should would not lie about hiding them. Her reasoning: God would find a way to help her in that situation without lying.

Dabbling in witchcraft is one thing, but dabbling in a Kantian deontological moral system is truly twisted.

(And no, I’m not joking (okay, I’m half joking). As a virtue ethicist I believe it would be immoral to not lie in that situation. But even a Kantian should follow the Rahab Categorial Imperative : If your hiding some of the Chosen People from enemies who want to kill them, it’s your duty to lie to protect them.)

(Via: Patterico’s Pontifications )