No one is asking Lance Roberts to ‘apologize' for being a Christian

“I never apologize for my faith and won’t start now,” Fairbanks Borough Assembly candidate Lance Roberts wrote, replying to a letter to the editor that did not question his faith, but whether he deserves to be elected to the borough assembly.

Roberts is running against Kristin Kelly.

The letter Roberts found fault with was about his political attitudes, such as his claim that feminism is a great heresy.

Roberts, an engineer at GVEA, makes it a habit to claim he is being attacked for his faith when he is questioned about his opinions on history, society, the economy and how others should live and be treated.

He believes minimum wage laws are “theft and a breaking of God’s law,” that a Christian woman should not be “slaving herself out to another man” by working outside the home, that “The Bible’s pretty clear that women are not to be in authority over men” and one of the “major sins is being effeminate.”

In 2013, shortly after he was elected for the first time to the assembly, Roberts said the same thing about not apologizing when challenged about his enthusiasm for the late Rousas Rushdoony, who wanted Biblical law established in the United States.

“A reconstructed America would mean that the state would execute people for blasphemy, propagating false doctrine, homosexuality, and other deviations from biblical law,” reviewer Mark Larson wrote about a 2015 history of “Christian Reconstruction” and Rushdoony’s place in it.

"I have no problem quoting a Christian like him, as I am a Christian and won't be apologizing for being one," Roberts wrote to the Alaska Dispatch in 2013, defending his practice of plugging all things Rushdoony on his Facebook page.

Rushdoony believed in a theocracy. “Christianity and democracy are inevitably enemies,” Rushdoony wrote in “The Institutes of Biblical Law.”

On a short-lived blog of Bible studies, Roberts wrote that Rushdoony brought “common sense” with his call for a biblical standard.

In a 1988 interview with Bill Moyers, Rushdoony said the death penalty for adultery or homosexuality is God’s law and that every word of the Bible is literally true.

"I'm saying that this is what God requires," Rushdoony said. "I'm not saying that everything in the Bible, I like. Some of it rubs me the wrong way. But I'm simply saying, this is what God requires. This is what God says is justice. Therefore, I don't feel I have a choice."

In the “Institutes of Biblical Law.” Rushdoony wrote about his opposition to interracial marriages.

“The burden of the law is thus against interreligious, interracial and intercultural marriages, in that they normally go against the very community which marriage is designed to establish,” Rushdoony wrote.

There is a small industry of people, which includes Rushdoony’s son, who took over the family business, who are dedicated to claiming that the sentence above does not mean what it says.

Mark Rushdoony says that his dad, though “he personally was not sure he liked the idea,” conducted one interracial marriage, as if that proves something.

Regarding Rushdoony’s opposition to interracial marriages, Roberts is also an apologist.

“I had heard that wasn’t Rushdoony’s complete thought and that he conducted at least one interracial marriage,” Roberts wrote four years ago.

Rushdoony claimed the number of Jews who died at the hands of Hitler’s regime, 6 million by reputable accounts, has been greatly exaggerated by historians to make Germany look bad.

"The false witness born during World War II with respect to Germany is especially notable and revealing. The charge is repeatedly made that six million innocent Jews were slain by the Nazis, and the figure--and even larger figures--is now entrenched in the history books,” Rushdoony claimed. He preferred to support for those who said that the death toll was between 896,292 and 1.2 million.

He said tens or maybe hundreds of victims had been tortured. Here is a summary of his claims by Michael Joseph McVicar, an associate professor of religion at Ohio State University.

Rushdoony also claimed that many of the deaths were from epidemics. He denied the scale of the Holocaust.

Rushdoony, “The Institutes of Biblical Law,” 1973.

In 2013, Roberts told the Alaska Dispatch that Rushdoony was “an extremely accurate historian; if he has a take on different numbers, then that bears looking into. I've never bothered to study those numbers."

Fairbanksan David James wrote a letter to the News-Miner in 2013 in which he said that Roberts posted a claim on the News-Miner story saying Rushdoony had ”quibbled” with the death toll numbers.

Disputing five million deaths is not quibbling.

Roberts responded on the News-Miner site with a brief quote from Rushdoony issued a quarter-century after his claim about the “false witness” regarding the Germans and his charge of inflated death tolls.

Roberts did not present the full quote from Rushdoony, however. Rather than retract what he had written—his clear claim that the death toll had been exaggerated by millions—Rushdoony said what he was really getting at was the practice of inflating death tolls for effect, which he said was a lie.

Failing to admit his lie, he said he didn’t want to debate the numbers, a convenient choice since he had chosen to debate the numbers. He didn’t back off from his claim of “false witness” against Germany.

Rushdoony, 2000