Last week, a startling but seemingly familiar story emerged on the periphery of the Ukraine war: A former Washington state representative named Matt Shea, long associated with the far right, turned up in a hotel in a small Polish town with 63 Ukrainian children he apparently hoped to bring to the U.S. for adoption. For those who have followed both Shea's career and the recent history of evangelical Christian adoption advocacy, this was cause for alarm.
Over his six terms in the Washington House of Representatives, Shea maintained close ties to "Patriot" and militia groups. He became involved in the armed occupation of Oregon's Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in 2016 and proposed legislation to transform rural eastern Washington, a heavily conservative region, into a 51st state to be called "Liberty." Shea partnered with a group that ran a training camp to instruct youth in "Christian warfare," and authored a pamphlet called "Biblical Basis for War" that appeared to offer advice to Christian "patriots" readying themselves for war against Muslim and Marxist "terrorists" (and which included a proposal to "kill all males" who resisted the new theocratic order they'd establish). Shea has maintained that document only amounted to notes for a sermon, but he also reportedly wrote an eight-page plan for the restoration of civilization after a civil war and governmental collapse (including banning all "centralized" education and medicine, implementing "severe" penalties for anyone seeking to limit public religiosity, and reinstating the death penalty for murder, rape, "sodomy" and possibly adultery — a provision marked for discussion).
