"It's the Will of God"

The following are excerpts from the controversial best seller, When Washington Grabbed It's Ankles: Death of the Ecotopic Daydream, published by Raptorial Press, 2010). The book details the events leading up to the Great Christian Secession of 2008. Author Gus Danube spent more than 10 years of his life working on this project during and after the historical event. Since publishing it, he has been banned from setting foot in his home state, the former US state, of Washington.

Some say the exact beginning of the sequence of events that led up to the forming of a new nation on American soil was the Pat Robertson for President campaign of 1988. Washington State, oddly enough was Robertson's only Presidential Primary victory in that election.

Dr. Hal Brently, noted historian from the U of W, maintains the conservative swing started much sooner than that, perhaps when writer John Carlson flunked out of his high school creative writing and art courses. "If only Carlson's teachers had not given up on him," said Brently, "perhaps all of WWII could've been prevented. Or something like that." (Dr. Brently suffered a massive brain hemorrhage hours after our interview.)

The Greater Historical Society of Wedgwood claims the roots of the Conservative Christian take over of 1996 can be traced back to the early '90s when Mike Lowry shaved his beard.

Needless to say, the Washington State Legislature and Governor's office were completely taken over by the Republican Party in election '96. An overwhelming 50 percent of the Republicans were card carrying members of the national Christian Coalition.

Coincidentally, 1996 was the same year Christian Coalition president Ralph Reed started shaving. It would be two more years, however, before he would finally be able to vote in an election.

The first thing the conservative Legislature did was enact a law that "prohibited a musical concert or performance being held more than 10 miles away from the place where the majority of the audience reside." This law was put to the test several years later when Enumclaw sued Bellevue for not accepting Lollapalooza '98 as one of their own. It is precisely this law that caused country music to quietly be banned from the Seattle city limits a year later.

Former state legislator Ellen Craswell was sworn in as governor of the Evergreen State in early 1997, after a bitter Fall campaign against Mike Lowry. Soon an all out assault on environmental regulations began. National Forests dwindled and salmon runs went dry. Condominium construction pushed the edges of the suburbs up against mountain ranges and ocean. Freeways were widened as part of Craswell's "Pave the State" campaign under which all state funding of public transportation projects was halted in favor of huge asphalt purchases.

The environment was not the only casualty of this new leadership. Unions, those that were left anyway, were decimated. Public schools eased, then finally eliminated their ban on school prayer. Sensible and successful regulations that had protected people for decades began to fall one by one.

In 1998, the Washington Legislative Hotline became the WA State Legislative Prayer Line, the phone # of which was flashed at the bottom of the screen during all WaSPAN (WA State Puritan Affairs Network) broadcasts.

These drastic changes would continue well into the first gubernatorial term of Linda Smith, four years later.

The individualistic impulse that once expressed itself via body-piercing and tattooing had gone a step further. Permanent body scarification was coming into vogue around the end of Governor Lowry's term. This trend continued under Governor Ellen Craswell. When Linda Smith took office in 2000, the underclasses and mindlessly trendy were into partial, and even full, mutilation of appendages in the name of fashion. Ears, noses, fingers, either partially or fully removed to express a rejection of the conservative values sweeping the state.

(An interesting point here... throughout history angry people have been apt to track down those who were pissing them off, capture them, then remove ears, fingers and heads as they saw fit. However, in the confused 1990s and early 2010s, we find the people who were pissed off mutilating themselves, as if they feared having to challenge the establishment with words, ideas, or voting block power.)

When Washington state made self-mutilation, body scarification and multiple piercing illegal in 2003, the individuals who practiced these acts were not hard to find and arrest.

It was Governor Ellen Craswell's TV campaign that forced members of Soundgarden to apologize for taking their shirts off in public. Governor Craswell was also responsible for the Sky Cries Mary public service announcement against LSD and dancing. Among Craswell's many extreme remarks as governor of Washington were her comments about professional sports in Seattle: "Of course all your teams are losers and get knocked out in the first round of the playoffs!" She hollered one day during a press conference. "Of course your stars break their bones when the team needs them the most! How can a city win a championship when it's the heroin capitol of the country? Do you think God would ever allow that? I certainly don't."

Craswell's successor, Linda Smith, is best remembered for the outlawing of the long-running late night comedy show "Almost Live" because it "made fun" of her supporters in Kent. As gubernatorial candidate, Linda Smith promised to track down Kurt Cobain in the afterlife and make him publicly admit he now believes in God.

It has been said by people who were close to them that both Smith and Craswell meant well. Hell, it can be argued that, deep down inside, even Hitler meant well. But how did it get so bad? Bad enough to lead to the first successful succession in United States' history? We can only guess why President Quayle provided no opposition and wished "best of luck to our new Christian neighbors", but why did the progressive population of the former Washington State practically do the same thing by right of its own inaction?

The truth is, opposition organizations were intimidated from day one. Over the years, as right wing Christians bullied their way into public discourse and began dominating issue-oriented discussions outright, those of progressive inclinations found themselves unable to establish a popular position against the so called "will of God" response. This dreaded response came up mainly when conservative candidates were asked tough questions during debates or talk radio phone-ins. Unfortunately "It's the will of God" was one argument which became easy to sell to the voting public.