Brian Tashman's blog

Liberty Counsel chairman Mat Staver announced yesterday that he will be hosting a presidential candidate forum at Florida Awake in Orlando on January 28, three days before the Florida primary, at the Aloma Baptist Church in Orlando.

Staver also participated in the 2008 Values Voter Presidential Debate in Florida, which featured candidates like Mike Huckabee, Ron Paul, Sam Brownback, Alan Keyes and Duncan Hunter, however, John McCain, Mitt Romney, Rudy Giuliani and Fred Thompson refused to appear. At that debate, Staver excoriated Thompson in absentia for supporting the right of state legislatures to legalize same-sex marriage, likening it to slavery, and McCain, Romney and Giuliani received similarly harsh treatment from the debate moderators over their stances on gay rights, abortion rights and campaign finance reform.

While Staver hasn’t said which candidates will appear at Florida Awake, all of the candidates save one may have a reason to avoid Staver’s forum: the very same day he announced his presidential candidate forum, he was named National Co-Chair of the Gingrich Faith Leaders Coalition. Staver said that Gingrich is the “clear choice” to lead “a new conservative resurgence” against Obama, and joined fellow Religious Right leaders like Don Wildmon, Jim Garlow, George Barna and Tim LaHaye in backing the former Speaker.

While GOP candidates besides Gingrich have actively worked to capture the vote of social conservatives, it is odd that Staver would expect candidates to attend his debate when he is the co-chair of one of their opponent’s campaign coalitions.

UPDATE: The Orlando Sentinel reports that Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum have both committed to participating in Staver’s forum.

Rick Perry today appeared on WallBuilders Live with right-wing pseudo-historian David Barton and his cohost Rick Green, where he spent most of the time railing against President Obama’s spending policies while also criticizing his proposed cuts to the Defense Department budget. According to Perry, “America is paying a huge price” for electing someone who “is a socialist or was trained by socialists”:

Perry: Here’s what I tell people, I said, listen, if you’re looking for the best debater, we got a great debater in the White House right now, America is paying a huge price because they were enamored with hope and change and this president, who I truly believe is a socialist or was trained by socialists, put America in peril. Put America in peril from an economic standpoint, put America in peril from a military-preparedness standpoint, put America in peril from the standpoint of foreign policy.

Barton and Green went on to say that not only have they worked with Governor Perry but also with Michele Bachmann, Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich, who recently appeared on WallBuilders Live, surely to inform them that Jesus opposed the minimum wage and the capital gains tax while pastors are under the threat of arrest because of hate crimes laws:

Green: Look, I know we’re talking about all the positives on Perry, I know a lot of our listeners, we got folks who support Newt and support Bachmann, and we support those guys too, they’re good folks.

Barton: I’ve already helped a whole bunch of these guys in the campaign, I have worked directly with several of them at their request and I’m happy to do that.

Green: Yeah sure, and they stand for all the right things. But we just got to be honest about Governor Perry’s record and what he did. When we went up there to Iowa and we both went and spoke at some caucuses there, it forced me to really sit down and think, why, if I got to pick somebody to vote for, how do I measure these guys? I started thinking for me it’s got to be that they both believe what I do, they got my values, but they can also be effective. So I think some people do discount him a little be when they shouldn’t and they’re going to be surprised, if he gets the momentum back—there’s some good candidates in the race, we’ll see what South Carolinians think.

Barton: We’ve always taken the position we’ll help people who have the right values, so even when I went to Iowa and spoke for Governor Perry at one of the caucuses, I was right beside Michele Bachmann’s husband Marcus and we had a great time because I had just done some media interviews on behalf of Michele.

Green: That’s right, and I went out to Iowa in August for Michele for the straw poll, and we’ve both helped Newt and Santorum, so yeah there are good people running.

Barton: There are good people running and this is fine and we’re not taking positions, but we are pointing out positive things.

While Religious Right leaders themselves might be fractured on who to support in the race, Republican candidates for president all seem to agree on who to pander to: David Barton.

Today on Grounded, Ryan Dobson was joined by Jeff Myers of Summit Ministries. Wright succeeded David Noebel, who has recently claimed that Obama is trying to “sodomize the world” and that gay-rights is responsible for the Penn State child abuse scandal, to lead Summit.

While the two spent the beginning of their program talking about Right Wing Watch which reported that Dobson, whose father is Focus on the Family James Dobson, compared homosexuality to alcoholism, they quickly moved on to using the Penn State case to argue that while gays and lesbians are really victims of abuse, they refuse to condemn sexual abuse against children. Dobson and Myers insist that by reporting on anti-gay activists, Right Wing Watch is trying to quash any debate over homosexuality, and then went into push the myth that gays molest children in order to recruit them.

Myers said that “60 percent of the males who end up proclaiming a homosexual lifestyle were abused as children,” even though according to the American Psychiatric Association, “no specific psychosocial or family dynamic cause for homosexuality has been identified, including histories of childhood sexual abuse. Sexual abuse does not appear to be more prevalent in children who grow up to identify as gay, lesbian, or bisexual, than in children who identify as heterosexual.” MaleSurvivor also called such a claim a “myth,” noting that “experts in the human sexuality field do not believe that premature sexual experiences play a significant role in late adolescent or adult sexual orientation.”

Wright also argued that gay-rights groups must go on record to condemn child abuse, as if their position on the subject is ambiguous and unknown, saying that “it is especially important for those groups to do it because they have aligned themselves so closely in the past with groups that do on purpose promote adult-child sex.”

Myers: This is something that Right Wing Watch has a real problem with, there are some issues they don’t want to have discussed, there are some topics they don’t want to have brought up, because to bring them up is to point out the fundamental hypocrisy and deceptions behind so many of these worldviews. The topic that shall not be named, if you were just to talk about any issue relating to homosexuality or anything of that nature, you are going to be in the hot spot because that’s not an issue that you’re supposed to be talking about, that’s not supposed to be discussed.

Dobson: Correct, I’m not allowed to talk about it.

…

Myers: We know about Jerry Sandusky and the whole child abuse scandal he’s involved in so I went to the website for GLAAD, the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, and they said on their website there is no link between pedophilia and homosexuality. I will agree—I don’t think—there is nothing about homosexuality that causes people to prey on children. There are homosexual predators and there are heterosexual predators who prey on children. But 60 percent of the males who end up proclaiming a homosexual lifestyle were abused as children.

Dobson: Oh! OK, OK.

Myers: There is a link, but it’s not what a lot of people expect. So here’s what we did, we sent out information to 600 different gay groups and said, ‘we encourage you to condmen the sexual abuse of children, you need to do this, everybody needs to be thinking about protecting children, that children should not be abused is an absolute truth, so we need for everybody who agrees with that to say so.’

Dobson: You’re not saying join us, and make a statement on your website saying ‘we’re going to join with Summit and Jeff Myers.’

Myers: No, they don’t have to kowtow to anybody. We just want them to say, ‘we oppose the abuse of children.’ And it’s especially important for those groups to do it because they have aligned themselves so closely in the past with groups that do on purpose promote adult-child sex.

Gary Bauer yesterday told members of the Campaign for Working Families that President Obama is going to try to “portray our candidate as an extremist” and “exploit religious bigotry” by attacking the religion of his Republican opponent:

I have been saying for months now that this election is going to be brutal. Obama can't run on "hope and change" again. It's going to be fear and smear in 2012. This week we got another indication of where the Obama campaign is headed.

In California this week, Obama's chief political strategist David Axelrod defended Barack Obama's former pastor, Jeremiah Wright. According to the report, Axelrod dismissed the 2008 Wright controversy by saying it was nothing more than "ninety seconds of vitriol plucked from thirty years of sermons by some enterprising opposition researcher."

Really? Why then did Barack Obama feel it was necessary to throw Wright under the bus and repudiate his outrageous statements and blatant racism? David Axelrod is not a dumb man, so why on earth is he opening up this can of worms now?

I truly hope I am wrong, but I fear this is a signal by the Obama campaign to their media allies that they are prepared to make a candidate's faith an issue in this year's campaign. They know going down this road will invite questions about Wright. That is why Axelrod may have pre-emptively signaled it was really "much ado about nothing" and that the Obama campaign is prepared to refight that battle.

Why? Because no matter the faith of the GOP nominee, radical secularists will portray our candidate as an extremist, and left-wing activists are prepared to exploit religious bigotry in an attempt to get Obama reelected. In fact, the polling data already indicates that for all the hype about religious intolerance on the right, there is more bigotry on the left!

Pre-emptively lashing out at the Obama campaign for fomenting “religious bigotry” about “the faith of the GOP nominee,” with zero evidence to substantiate his claim, may sound more credible if Bauer himself in 2010 hadn’t stoked fears about President Obama’s beliefs in a column Understanding Obama’s Islamophilia by claiming that he is part of a secularist-Islamist movement motivated by “their common disdain for Christianity” that seeks to herald in the “destruction of the Judeo-Christian philosophy that is the foundation of Western civilization”:

Obama’s left-wing progressivism varies with Islamism on many issues. But their adherents find common cause in a common enemy: the Judeo-Christian worldview at the heart of Western democracy.

…

Progressives and Islamists are indeed on the same side. Their common disdain for Christianity explains why left-wing judges in America find any inkling of Christianity in the public square unconstitutional, while Islamist judges in the Middle East deem it executable.

Their common view that life is expendable explains the left’s embrace abortion-on-demand and why the Islamists don’t hesitate to deploy their own children for homicide bombings.

Their common totalitarian impulse explains why each group has as its governing objective to render its subjects entirely dependent on the state for everything in their lives, from education to healthcare.

…

This alliance explains why the Obama State Department is spending taxpayer money to send Rauf to the Middle East on a goodwill tour. And it is why it will spend nearly $6 million of your tax money to restore, among other things, mosques and minaret around the world.

There’s a reason Obama won the Muslim American vote by more than nine to one, and why it is suspected that he received millions of dollars in contributions to his presidential campaign from Muslims abroad. It’s not because Muslims thought Obama would fight for gays in the military. It’s because they knew he’d treat Israel as more of an annoyance than an ally, and because he’d be sure to diminish America’s stature in the world. And they were right.

More fundamentally, left-wing progressivism and Islamism both hold that religious belief and reason are at odds. Of course, Islamists embrace faith and reject reason, while progressives value reason to the exclusion of faith. Eventually these groups may have to address their basic differences.

But there will be time for that later. For now, there’s a greater goal to achieve: the annihilation of moral accountability and individual liberty and the destruction of the Judeo-Christian philosophy that is the foundation of Western civilization.

Is the Religious Right beginning to coalesce behind Newt Gingrich? Yesterday, the former Speaker hosted a conference call with the members of his Faith Leaders Coalition: American Family Association founder Don Wildmon, Religious Right pollster George Barna and pastor Jim Garlow. Now, Gingrich is racking up additional endorsements from Religious Right figures just days before conservative activists are set to meet in Texas to see if they can get behind one of the presidential candidates.

Tim LaHaye, the author of the Left Behind series on the End Times and founder of the Council for National Policy, and his wife Beverly, the founder and chairman of Concerned Women for America, endorsed Gingrich, warning that America may “end up being like the godless socialist countries of Europe,” as did Mat Staver, the chairman of Liberty Counsel, one of the country’s most stridently anti-gay groups, and the dean of the Liberty University School of Law. “America will be unrecognizable if Obama is elected for four more years,” Staver said. “We need a strong leader with domestic, international and political experience who can inspire a new conservative resurgence in the line of Ronald Reagan. Speaker Gingrich is the clear choice.”

Tim LaHaye has claimed that President Obama is a socialist and not a Christian who is bringing America “closer to the Apocalypse,” and Staver has referred to Obama as a tyrant who is making the U.S. “one of the world’s immoral leaders” by opposing countries that criminalize homosexuality. 

Gingrich even appeared in TV advertisements for Liberty University School of Law, and LU ran ads featuring Gingrich in Iowa right before the caucus. While appearing on David Barton’s radio program WallBuilders Live, Gingrich said he would look to graduates of Liberty University when making appointments to the judiciary.

The LaHaye’s, Staver and Wildmon all endorsed Huckabee in the 2008 election. While Rick Santorum has picked up the support of social conservative figures such as Gary Bauer, Maggie Gallagher and Bob Vander Plaats, it appears that Gingrich is winning over Religious Right leaders who are desperate to defeat Mitt Romney.

UPDATE: The Gingrich campaign released this statement from Tim LaHaye:

“During the last three years our nation has been led by liberal secularists who have tried their best to remove God from our public square and the elimination of the Biblical principles our founding fathers built this nation on” said LaHaye.

“Please prayerfully consider going to the polls on January 21 and help elect Newt Gingrich, a proven conservative who has the best chance of replacing the present occupant of the White House with a man with a proven record of appointing conservatives to office that can return this country to the constitutional principles that God has chosen to bless for over two hundred years” he said.

Pastor LaHaye also pointed to Speaker Gingrich’s qualifications as the best candidate to defeat President Obama as one of the reasons for his endorsement.

“It seems apparent the Republican candidates have come down to two possible winners,” LaHaye said. “As my friend, the late Dr. Jerry Falwell told me personally, ‘Speaker Newt Gingrich is the most qualified man in America to run as president of the United States”… We agree!’”

"I am honored to have Tim's endorsement. His work as both a minister and author is truly unmatched," said Gingrich. "Tim will be a terrific partner for the Gingrich Faith Leaders Coalition as we work to combat the influence of radical secularism and activist judges."

Newt Gingrich today joined a conference call with members of his campaign’s Faith Leaders Coalition including Pastor Jim Garlow, American Family Association founder Don Wildmon, and Religious Right pollster George Barna where he urged social conservative voters to coalesce behind his candidacy. During the call, Gingrich repeated his claim that religious charities are losing their rights because they refuse to follow codes that prevent taxpayer-funded services from discriminating against people such as married same-sex couples. He even warned that America might go the way of Europe where Gingrich claimed that reading parts of the Bible regarding homosexuality would be a “hate crime”:

Gingrich: The state governments, for example in Massachusetts, which has literally driven Catholic adoption services out of the state, the District of Columbia, which has literally driven Catholic services out of taking care of the poor, the degree to which if you aren’t pro-gay, pro-abortion and pro-secular, you don’t have any rights. If you watch Europe right now, there is an increasing risk of speech becoming illegal, there are sections of the Bible you can’t read anymore in some European countries because it involves homosexuality and the act of reading it from the pulpit would be considered a hate crime.

As he told John Hagee’s Cornerstone Church that America may soon become “a secular country, potentially one dominated by radical Islamists,” Gingrich argued that atheists and Islamists are both waging war against Western civilization by trying to “drive God out of our lives” and “make America safe for Islam and militant religion.” He went on to call for the restoration of the “Church Militant” so civilization can “survive”:

Gingrich: We’re in a two front war for our civilization. At one front are the secular atheists who would seek to drive God out of our lives, and on the other front are radical Islamists who would seek to make America safe for Islam and militant religion. I think that we have to recognize how truly serious a crisis this is for our civilization, I find when I talk that there is a need for the Church Militant once again if we are going to survive. I really do believe that we are in a two front war over the very potential of our society being preserved.

Later, Garlow and Wildmon ended the call by warning that Mitt Romney would inevitably lose to President Obama if nominated because he would have lukewarm support among evangelical voters, which would doom America and “be the beginning of the end for Western civilization as we know it”:

Garlow: I really, truly believe that this nation is on a very short fuse and the reason I threw my lot in beside, behind Newt Gingrich is that I believe what he brings in the table is what is needed in this particular moment to break through and to be able to keep us from having a candidate like Romney. If we have a candidate like Romney, the evangelical participation will drop, probably from a 2010 level to a 2008 level, that would be from 28 percent to 23 percent, and that would result in the reelection of President Obama and our country cannot possibly, morally and economically, survive that. It would spell, in my opinion, the end of the United States of America as we have known her and consequently the end of Western civilization. Don Wildmon, you’ve heard me say these words, am I overstating the case Don Wildmon or do you believe that is within the range of accuracy?

Wildmon: Jim, I’ve been thinking in the last few weeks, about forty years ago I’ve became travelling a good bit in Europe and I saw what was happening in Europe and the shape that they’re in now and that’s where we’re headed. Let me say this, this is not just another election, and I’m not one to try to blow things out just to get attention. If we lose this election, then it will be the beginning of the end for Western civilization as we know it.

During his speech at David Barton’s Pro-Family Legislators Conference, Daniel Lapin claimed that Islam and homosexuality are both cultures of “barbarism” that are diametrically opposed to civilization. Lapin, who has called for the quarantine of homosexuals to combat AIDS and claimed that men are becoming “hideous hermaphrodites” because of liberalism, tried to explain that while he doesn’t think gays or Muslims are themselves barbarians, he claims they participate in a “culture” of barbarism that “venerates death”:

Lapin: Civilization struggles to protect life, civilization struggles to feed life and generate life. Barbarism has no respect for life at all, actually, barbarism venerates death. Homosexuality, which side is that on? Civilization or barbarism? It’s got to be—see, please understand I’m speaking about the cultures and the ideas, I’m not saying that any particular Muslim is a barbarian, I’m not saying any particular homosexual is a barbarian, I’m saying the culture—and the answer is very simple, civilization has sex in the life-giving birth canal, and barbarism has sex in the canal through which dead, useless, waste material is excreted. It’s a fundamental difference, you can tell.

Last year at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), the group Youth for Western Civilization hosted a panel with anti-immigrant activist Bay Buchanan, former congressman and presidential candidate Tom Tancredo (R-CO), former congressman Virgil Goode (R-VA) and Pennsylvania congressman Lou Barletta (R-PA) which focused on the purported persecution and marginalization of white Americans due to what Tancredo called “the cult of multiculturalism” that is a “dagger pointed at the heart of Western Civilization.” It appeared that Republican leaders and CPAC had no problem giving credence to an extremist group with ties to European neo-fascists whose founder, Marcus Epstein, was arrested and pled guilty to a hate crime after karate chopping a black woman on a street while calling her a “nigger,” in fact, Youth for Western Civilization is a co-sponsor of CPAC 2012.

On Monday, Youth for Western Civilization announced a new campaign called, “Stop the Boer Genocide,” which claims that black South Africans and the South African government have “orchestrated the systematic slaughter of the white community.”

The group paints a rosy picture of the Apartheid system that was in place between 1948 and 1994 where a tiny white elite controlled the government and economy and violently repressed the country’s black majority, praising the racist government for efforts “against rampant gambling and homosexuality stopped the spread of moral decay” and for “promoting the family” and “strong Christian values.”

Youth for Western Civilization called Nelson Mandela, the first president of a democratic South Africa who won a Nobel Peace Prize for his anti-Apartheid activism, a “terrorist” who “has far more in common with the thugs behind the Rwandan genocide than the heroic freedom fighter he is touted to be.” “At the hands of mobs led by the ANC and murderers like Nelson Mandela who are hell bent on the rape and murder of every white in South Africa,” the group writes, “the Afrikaners are at a crossroads.”

While there are legitimate concerns about racial violence in post-Apartheid South Africa, Youth for Western Civilization is accusing the South African government of pushing the “extermination” against whites and applauding the old Apartheid system, which the group claims “gave an honest chance to the black majority to help build a republic that respected all human rights.” With such blatant nostalgia for the violent racist system, why are Republicans and CPAC continuing to give this group a platform to spew their nostalgia for apartheid?

With Washington’s state legislature set to vote on a marriage equality bill introduced by Governor Christine Gregoire, Republican state senator Val Stevens is leading the fight against the legislation. Stevens, who in 2009 said that the state’s domestic partnership law represents an “assault on our families and American culture by the homosexuals” that would legitimize the “depraved lifestyle” of gays and lesbians, told the vehemently anti-gay American Family Association’s OneNewsNow today that the marriage equality bill “opens the floodgates” for the legalization of polygamy, incest and pedophilia. According to Stevens, the marriage equality legislation must be stopped “for the sake of maintaining our stable society”:

Governor Chris Gregoire (D) is personally introducing a bill that would legalize same-gender marriage in a state where domestic partnerships are already law. Senator Val Stevens (R) will be part of the legislative army opposing the move.

She contends, "To diminish the value of marriage between one man and one woman only opens the floodgates for who knows what might come down the road," such as polygamy, incestuous marriage, or an adult marrying a child.

…

Though there will be a fight in the legislature, Stevens says those fighting to defend traditional marriage really need pastors to step forward to educate their congregations and "get them out of the pews, calling their legislators to make certain that they will be actively opposing this movement to undermine the standard that is biblically based."

Stevens also does not understand why the governor wants lawmakers to spend their time with such a hot-button social and moral issue while the state is facing such a serious budget crunch.

In response to the governor's announcement, Stevens issued a statement that says, "Marriage between one man and one woman gives strength to society," and she points out that the state constitution "protects freedom of conscience and our religious heritage." So she pledges to oppose the legislation proposal "for the sake of maintaining our stable society."

Americans For Truth About Homosexuality president Peter LaBarbera is still livid about the traditional first-off-the-ship kiss between Petty Officer 2nd Class Marissa Gaeta kiss her girlfriend, Petty Officer 3rd Class Citlalic Snell, which the couple won in a raffle. LaBarbera earlier dubbed the kiss “indecent” and today on his radio program lamented that Navy families “are going to be forced to be exposed to, essentially, public perversion.” The anti-gay activist went on to claim that “photo will probably end up in a history book that kids will be forced to study and there will be tests on it” as the culture promotes “illicit behavior” to children:

You know we talk about this propaganda that’s ubiquitous, it’s constant now, I think it actually plays to the disfavor of the, it plays against the homosexual side because people are sort of tired of all this propaganda. I don’t know if we mentioned it last week but you got this ‘first kiss’ coming out of the Navy ship in which two, a lesbian sailor was allowed to do the traditional first kiss with her female partner. People don’t think about this. When homosexuality is celebrated in a culture and when it is celebrated by the government because the ship’s captain, the head officer of the ship, he sanctioned this, and now every time because of homosexuality being openly celebrated in the military, and recognition often translates into celebration as we’re seeing right here, now every time when you’re going to have families, when there’s a reunion or a ship comes in, you’re going to have families who are going to be forced to be exposed to, essentially, public perversion. That’s what we’re talking about.

I made the point on our website that when President Obama put this photo, which is now famous, of these two women kissing, when he put it on his Tumblr site, he was putting an indecent photo—he was publicizing an indecent photo on his page. It’s still indecent, despite what the cultural radicals are saying. Now our kids will be taught that it’s OK for two women to kiss each other, it’s OK for two guys to kiss each other, this becomes a lesson. Now we’re seeing in California of course this will be mandated, this photo will probably end up in a history book that kids will be forced to study and there will be tests on it. It’s just obscene actually that this is now being promoted in such a way when it’s still illicit behavior.