#2749: Dusty Deevers

Dusty Deevers is a pastor, Christian nationalist, member of the Oklahoma Senate since December 2023 and a frontman and spokesperson for the ideology and principles of Gasht-e Ershad and the Taliban (he would use different terminology himself to obscure the relationship).

 

Deevers self-identifies as a “constitutional conservative” for marketing purposes, but doesn’t actually recognize the Constitution; instead, Deevers explicitly dismisses any notion of separation of church and state, has vowed to apply “the word of God to every issue” and believes that the Bible “has prescribed governing and then He has also prescribed the means for our governing and that means is in accordance with His word. If we do otherwise, then we are essentially usurping the sovereign role of God through Christ, who has been seated above every power in Heaven and on Earth and under the Earth.” Or, if it is still unclear: “Either you’re coming under the rule of God, your Creator […] you’re going to come under the rule of the serpent. So, it’s a serpentine theocracy or a rule of God, and there’s not a space in the middle.” Indeed, Deevers have emphasized, literally, his wish to take the US back to the 1600s, well before the Constitution and that liberty thing and those ideas of inalienable rights arrived to undermine good theocracy: “Why can’t I go back to a ‘Lex, Rex’ age [1644], or a ‘Vindiciae Contra Tyrannos’ age [1579]?” asks Deevers.

 

Deevers also self-identifies as an “abortion abolitionist” and is the author (co-sponsored with Senator Warren Hamilton) of a bill classifying abortion as homicide, which would allow both doctors and mothers to be prosecuted and to potentially face the death penalty if charged with first-degree murder. The bill also allows for wrongful death lawsuits on behalf of fetuses. And for those who might be concerned about the relationship between anti-abortion measures and IVF, at least Deevers is clear: parents who use IVF are “waging an assault against God.” He also advocates ending no-fault divorce.

 

In 2024, Deevers also introduced a bill to ban all pornography, i.e. anything involving sexual acts, nudity, partial nudity, or any content that appeals to a sexual fetish, such as BDSM. According to the bill, anyone who buys, views, procures, or possesses porn would be punished by up to 20 years in prison, while anyone who poses for or otherwise assists or offers to assist in the production and distribution of such materials would be punished with a year in prison. Initially, he didn’t even bother to try to invoke the Constitution for that one, but instead lectured fellow lawmakers about how pornography is a tool of Satan and must be outlawed so people “can be set free” to give their lives to Jesus, and pointed out that anyone who views pornography knows that they are violating “the holy character of God”. This is “spiritual warfare”, said Deevers. But he also – perhaps dimly aware that someone who is a self-proclaimed “constitutional conservative” should pretend to care about the Constitution – eventually went on to claim that “Our Constitution says this very thing: We get our rights from God” (it most certainly says no such thing but “constitutional conservatives” are not the kind of people who care about distinguishing the Constitution from imprecise allusions to the Declaration of Independence), and that therefore God’s law, as Deevers interprets it, supersedes what the Constitution actually says. He has elsewhere proudly explained how the justification for bills he introduces is built entirely on provisions from the Bible.

 

As you might expect from someone like Deevers, he is also rabidly anti-vaccine and not afraid to deploy every anti-vaccine gambit and conspiracy theory in the book, no matter how silly. Deevers is particularly inclined to going Godwin, and he hasfor instance compared vaccine mandates to the Nuremberg laws. Before being elected senator, Deevers also claimed that governments were pushing the vaccine under the cover of utilitarianism, and “these were the same equations, the same moral principles that were used in the 19th and 20th centuries to immunize the society against becoming infected with bad genes, Jewish genes, low IQ genes” (it most certainly was not) – note also the presupposition that governments are intentionally using vaccines to kill people – before invoking the Nuremberg Code, which antivaxxers like doing but which Deevers seems to understand not much better than he understands vaccines: “You do understand what road this is heading down,” said Deevers. “If they can force you by utilitarianism to take a jab for a disease, they can force you to do it to protect you from people whose IQ is lower than yours or people whose skin color is different than yours,” just like governments being able mandate seatbelts (or restrict access to porn) means that they can also force you to commit genocide or put people in concentration camps, just like that. “And they’ve done it over and over.”

 

Of course, Deever is not alone – indeed, the Oklahoma state legislature have been plagued by frothingly insane religious fundamentalist anti-vaccine conspiracy theorists for a while, such as governor Kevin Stitt, the aforementioned Warren Hamilton, state senator and creationism advocate Nathan Dahm and state senator Jake Merrick, former pastor at Tulsa’s Living Rivers Millennial Church (led by the militant anti-vaccine activist Paul Brady), all of whom, like Deevers, spent time others could have spent doing good in the legislature pushing for abortion bans and laws to block vaccine mandates.

 

Diagnosis: In fairness, Deevers is, as a senator, doing exactly what he promised he would do as a senator during his campaign. Unfortunately, what he promised to do was fighting for a kind of raw theocracy that would make hardened Taliban veterans blush. Completely insane.