Oklahoma Attorney General: "Godless America" Needs a God-based Justice System

John O'Connor can't be trusted to defend a secular Constitution.

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The Attorney General of Oklahoma, John O’Connor, said on Friday that a “godless” justice system was inherently a broken one and that our country needed to be run under a Christian-based value system.

He made the comments to the Rotary Club of Sand Springs as part of a list of three issues that America needs to resolve in order to “find itself” once again. After complaining about how individual rights are supposedly being overtaken by federal rights, and before he attacked the supposed scourge of Socialism, he went after secularism.

Reporter Sharon Bishop-Baldwin of the Sand Springs Leader has the transcript:

“And the second thing is a godless America,” O’Connor said. “I can tell you right now, there’s no such thing as an ideal godless America.

“America is not based on really majority vote laws,” he said. “America has at different times made colossal mistakes which have been voted on by the majority.”

O’Connor noted that at various times, a majority of the Supreme Court has ruled that Black people were property, that women were not capable of voting and that separate but equal universities were acceptable.

“There have been times in America when majority vote has been dead wrong,” he said. “So our system has to be based on a deeper set of principles, and I submit to you that that’s God the creator.”

He later added:

O’Connor said a God-based country isn’t one in which “everybody is forced to believe the same thing. It means we acknowledge that there’s a God who has values and endows us or imbues us with those values that are not granted to us by the government, They are granted to us by God.”

O’Connor failed to mention that most of the justices who made those “colossal mistakes” were Christians themselves — or that the Christian justices on the Supreme Court today are making many of the exact same colossal errors.

And there’s no real distinction between forcing people to believe the same thing (which he opposes) and demanding that they all acknowledge his personal God as the One True God who gives us proper values (which he supports).

He’s actually right that there’s no “ideal godless America” because one of the underlying principles of the Constitution, in the Preamble, is that we’re always working toward a “more perfect Union.” That is, one that’s always far from perfect but striving to get better.

He implies, however, that a God-based system would be a better one. That’s never been true — in any country. The beauty of our very flawed justice system is that it’s independent of any religious text. Our laws grant people more rights than the Bible ever did, and our system can, in theory, override the will of conservative Christians when they’re wrong.

O’Connor swore an oath to uphold the Constitution, not the Bible. His one job is defending a secular — literally godless — justice system, not injecting his broken religious ideology onto others.

He gave a perfect example of this later in his speech when he railed against vaccine mandates in the name of individual freedom — ignoring science and suggesting that everything would be far better in his faith-based utopia where health-care workers and teachers and other employees could refuse vaccines, put themselves at far greater risk of hospitalization and death, and spread the virus to those whose bodies don’t have the ability to fight back.

This guy isn’t a candidate for attorney general. He is the Attorney General. The top lawyer in Oklahoma is someone who wholeheartedly rejects the basis of the laws he’s supposed to defend.

In case you’re wondering how he got the job, O’Connor was appointed (not elected) to the position by the state’s Christian Nationalist Governor Kevin Stitt after the resignation of the previous AG, Michael Hunter, who left office in May after details of his extra-marital affair became public knowledge.

O’Connor was previously nominated to be a federal judge, but that nomination faltered after the the American Bar Association unanimously rated him “not qualified” in the areas of professional competence and integrity.

Naturally, then, he was appointed Attorney General by Stitt, who isn’t interested in either of those qualities.

Now we’re seeing clear evidence of why O’Connor can’t be trusted to do his job. He doesn’t care about the law. He only cares about pushing Christianity on everyone else.

(Screenshot via YouTube)