Matthew Yglesias comments on the Washington Post OP/ED by Harold Meyerson. They both ask why if the the words in the Christian Bible are so full of peace and love, that the Christo-Fascists are so mindlessly selfish, punitive, violent, and warlike.

Meyerson mentions the punitive nature of their immigration positions, which favor punishing children of illegals.

It’s not just Bush whose catechism is a merry mix of torture and piety. Virtually the entire Republican House delegation opposed the ban on waterboarding. Among the Republican presidential candidates, only Huckabee and the not-very-religious John McCain have come out against torture, while only libertarian Ron Paul has questioned the doctrine of preemptive war.

But it’s on their policies concerning immigrants where Republicans — candidates and voters alike — really run afoul of biblical writ. Not on immigration as such but on the treatment of immigrants who are already here. Consider: Christmas, after all, celebrates not just Jesus’s birth but his family’s flight from Herod’s wrath into Egypt, a journey obviously undertaken without benefit of legal documentation. The Bible isn’t big on immigrant documentation. “Thou shalt neither vex a stranger nor oppress him,” Exodus says the Lord told Moses on Mount Sinai, “for ye were strangers in the land of Egypt.”

Yet the distinctive cry coming from the Republican base this year isn’t simply to control the flow of immigrants across our borders but to punish the undocumented immigrants already here, children and parents alike.

So Romney attacks Huckabee for holding immigrant children blameless when their parents brought them here without papers, and Huckabee defends himself by parading the endorsement of the Minuteman Project’s Jim Gilchrist, whose group harasses day laborers far from the border. The demand for a more regulated immigration policy comes from virtually all points on our political spectrum, but the push to persecute the immigrants already among us comes distinctly, though by no means entirely, from the same Republican right that protests its Christian faith at every turn.

I would add the death penalty, support for Iraq, opposition to social programs.

I do not know the whys of this. I am not a Christian, and I have read little of the Christian theological works, so my understanding of this cognitive dissonance is limited.

By the same token, I am not in the least surprised. While I am not a student of Christian theology, I AM a student of Jewish history, and the behaviors that they are all so very shocked about have long standing historical precedents.

History shows that the use of the Christian texts to promote hate is the rule rather than the exception.

More happened in 1492, for example, than Columbus going to America.