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Garlow: Civil Government Cannot Recognize Marriage Equality Because God Is The Foundation Of All Government

Submitted by Kyle Mantyla on June 30, 2011 - 3:43pm

Jim Garlow was on "In The Arena" with Eliot Spitzer earlier this week where the two engaged in a rather tense and spirited debate over the marriage equality law passed by the New York legislature last week.

Garlow refused to say whether he agreed with Pat Robertson's assertion that no society that has "embraced homosexuality" can survive, though he did not disagree with it either, saying that great harm is done whenever God's word is violated.

Spitzer later asked Garlow if he recognized the right of civil governments to establish definitions of marriage that do not necessarily correspond to the Biblical definition, a distinction that Garlow refused to accept on the grounds that such claims are really nothing more than attempts to keep Christians out of the political process before finally asserting that God is the foundation of all forms of government:

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Garlow: "Your Land Has Cancer"

Submitted by Kyle Mantyla on June 6, 2011 - 10:10am

For years now, Jim Garlow's wife has been battling cancer and recently had a setback that prompted Garlow to consider canceling his scheduled appearance at the Faith and Freedom Coalition Conference over the weekend.  Ultimately, at his wife's insistence, he kept his commitment and traveled to Washington DC where he delivered an address in which he likened marriage equality to children losing their parents on 9/11 and declared that America has cancer and that, come 2012, he hopes to be able to say that not only has his wife survived, but the nation has as well:

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Gingrich Claims To Have Never Heard of Seven Mountains Dominionism

Submitted by Kyle Mantyla on May 16, 2011 - 1:21pm

Last week we noticed that Newt Gingrich seemed to have the support of a lot of people who endorse the dominionist Seven Mountains theology.

Gingrich has been prayed over by Lou Engle, who supports it, and has promised David Barton, who also supports it, that he'd play a key role in his presidential campaign, and he personally chose Jim Garlow to run his Renewing American Leadership organization, who also supports the theology and even made it the centerpiece of his Pray and ACT electoral effort last year.

Yet despite all of this, Gingrich claims that he has never even of it:

Several of Gingrich's high-profile associates, including pastors Jim Garlow and Lou Engle and historical revisionist David Barton, espouse "Seven Mountains" theology (—) a belief that government, business, media, education and other "spheres of influence" are dominated by Satan's minions, and that Christians are obligated to seize control of all areas to herald the second coming of Jesus.

Gingrich says he doesn't have any knowledge of the idea.

"I have no idea what you're talking about it, and I can't comment on it because I've never heard of it before," he said. "Neither Garlow nor Barton nor anybody else has ever mentioned it to me."

Really, maybe Gingrich ought to ask Garlow about it because he openly endorses it:

And, as we have pointed out on more than one occasion, the goal of Seven Mountains Dominionism is to create a "virtual theocracy" so that Christians can "present the nations of the world to the Lord" and bring about the return of Christ.

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Will Money Help Gingrich Win Over The Religious Right?

Submitted by Brian Tashman on May 9, 2011 - 10:00am

The Wall Street Journal today features an extensive profile on Newt Gingrich’s vast network of political organizations, including American Solutions, Renewing American Leadership (ReAL), and Gingrich Productions. The paper reports that Gingrich’s “network has amassed more than 1.7 million voter and donor contacts and raised $32 million between 2009 and 2010—more than all his potential 2012 rivals combined.” Gingrich also helped steer $150,000 to American Family Association Action to help defeat three Iowa State Supreme Court justices that ruled in favor of marriage equality. Along with ReAL, which is led by anti-gay activist Jim Garlow, and his support for the AFA, Gingrich has made overtures to other Religious Right groups and leaders including John Hagee, Bryan Fischer, Janet Porter, Liberty University, Liberty Counsel, The Family Leader and the Minnesota Family Council.

But will Gingrich’s financial influence, religious documentaries and appeals to prominent Religious Right figures translate to real support from activists who might be wary of backing a thrice-married adulterer? Fischer remains a skeptic, but Iowa’s Bob Vander Plaats, who coordinated the anti-judge campaign, is still grateful for Gingrich’s significant monetary aid:

Mr. Gingrich hasn't run a truly competitive campaign in 21 years. He is given to public gaffes, most recently criticizing President Barack Obama for failing to back the rebels fighting Col. Moammar Gadhafi, only to reverse himself after Mr. Obama ordered U.S. planes into Libya. He resigned from Congress in 1998 under an ethics cloud, after his party suffered a historic midterm loss. It was later revealed that he was having an affair with a congressional aide.

Even groups that have allied with him, such as the conservative American Family Association, aren't poised to back him, citing his two messy divorces and three marriages. "He is brilliant, and has much to offer. But he isn't what we need in the Oval Office," said the AFA's director of issue analysis, Bryan Fischer.

…

Wearing an array of organizational hats, he has met repeatedly with pastors, trained local candidates, consulted with doctors on his proposed health-care innovations and met with local refiners to tout ethanol. After raising money through one of his groups, Mr. Gingrich funneled $150,000 in seed money to a successful campaign last fall to oust three Iowa Supreme Court judges who supported gay marriage.

"Newt's role was quiet and very low key, but it was pivotal," said Bob Vander Plaats, a well-known Iowa conservative who led the anti-judges campaign.

…

The heavy emphasis on religion is part of his long push to atone for his multiple divorces, according to people who know him. "He was very direct about this," said Rev. Brad Sherman, a prominent Iowa evangelical leader, recounting a session Mr. Gingrich had last year with a small group of Iowa religious leaders. "He said he had deep regrets, and asked our forgiveness."

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Gingrich-Founded Group Says Black Community Will Never Accept Marriage Equality

Submitted by Kyle Mantyla on May 4, 2011 - 11:28am

A few weeks back, Jim Garlow announced that, due to Newt Gingrich's possible presidential run, Gingrich and Rick Tyler had stepped down from their roles of leadership in Renewing American Leadership – leaving Garlow in control as Chairman, CEO & President.

Ever since, the updates from ReAL have taken on an even more pronounced Religious Right tone, with Garolw announcing things like the formation of a ReAL prayer team and now sending out messages like this one from Vivian Berryhill, founder/president of the National Coalition of Pastors' Spouses, announcing that the "Black faith community" will never accept marriage equality:

America is now witnessing a bold, organized and calculated assault on families in the move to redefine what constitutes marriage in our culture. As a wife, mother, grandmother, and religious leader, I have drawn a line in the sand, as I say, “Enough is Enough.” And I am standing with other religious leaders across America in declaring, “Leave the 5,000-year-old definition of marriage alone for the preservation of the family!”

...

Now, the homosexual lifestyle and agenda is not new to the Black church community. However, the inclusion of “same-sex” marriage as acceptable and biblically “okay” is both new and dangerous. It is no surprise that on any given Sunday in some Black church in the US, a Black preacher continues to extirpate that message by reiterating to his flock that “God made Adam and Eve… not Adam and Steve”.

That message has been so steeply ingrained… it is no wonder that the very concept of same-sex marriage is soundly being rejected, and continues to be viewed as taboo in the majority of Black churches ... In spite of what the polls and political pundits are saying, Black folks by and large are not embracing legalizing homosexual marriages as an accepted way of life––even those of us who have covert or overt homosexuals within our own families.

To the notion that “two moms,” living together, raising their children and openly flaunting that relationship in the Black church community will be endorsed as the norm anytime soon, I say: FUHGEDDABOUTIT! It will not happen for two reasons: there remains a large portion of African-American parishioners who view the gay lifestyle as sinful and an abomination, and the majority of God-called, God-fearing, Bible-believing clergy firmly believe they must answer to God for that which they support and exegete from their pulpits.

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Garlow: The Left's "Ideological Radiation" Is Poisoning America

Submitted by Kyle Mantyla on March 21, 2011 - 12:46pm

Last week, Cindy Jacobs, Rick Joyner, and Chuck Pierce all weighed in on the tragedy in Japan to explain that God was seeking to break the "stronghold of spiritism" that gripped the nation in order to free them from the "grip of idolatry" while warning that the earthquake was a sign that demonic Nazism was going to engulf the United States.

Over the weekend, Jim Garlow who, in addition to running Newt Gingrich's Renewing American Leadership also has close ties to Jacobs, Lou Engle and the entire movement of self-proclaimed prophets and apostles, took to his Facebook page to say that while there may be some cause for alarm about radiation from Japan reaching America, the real threat to this nation is the secular left:

As one who lives on the West Coast, I am concerned about potential radiation drift from Japan, as well as the failures of our own nuclear reactors in earthquake-prone California.

But as one who lives on the Left Coast, I am infinitely more concerned about the lethal ideological “radiation” that has been leaked into our “atmosphere” for forty years from the radical secular left. It is killing our nation.

This is not a future threat. It is a present day struggle of life and death – now. In fact, a faulty understanding of the beginning of life has resulted in the deaths of 52,000,000 persons in the womb. After all, when do human rights begin?

But that is only one small part of the ideological damage from radical secularism. They would, if they could, destroy the very concept of a mother and a father leading a home. They will, if they can, spend us into oblivion, destroying the future for our children.

We will all be safer when we come to the realization that the anti-biblical secular philosophies are, at this moment, a greater threat to our nation’s existence than our nuclear reactors.

We can examine, alter and improve our aging and vulnerable nuclear reactors. And we should. They are old and need attention.

But secularism’s largely undetected toxic political ideology is poisoning us and our children. America needs a massive dose of “political, historical and theological potassium iodide” to protect us from the radical left’s destruction. And we need it quickly. Morally, America has been getting closer to a Chernobyl-like “level 7” condition for over two years.

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Gingrich Group Funneled $125K To AFA To Remove Iowa Judges

Submitted by Kyle Mantyla on March 15, 2011 - 2:41pm

Earlier this month, the Los Angeles Times reported that Newt Gingrich had quietly help raise $200,000 for the right-wing effort to remove three sitting Supreme Court justices in Iowa over their ruling in favor of marriage equality.

The Times article didn't provide many details about the effort, but today the AP fills them and reveals that Gingrich's group, Renewing American Leadership, funneled the bulk of the money to the American Family Association:

Potential presidential candidate Newt Gingrich quietly lined up $150,000 to help defeat Iowa justices who threw out a ban on same-sex marriage, routing the money to conservative groups through an aide's political committee.

Gingrich, the former U.S. House speaker who has aggressively courted the conservatives who dominate Iowa's lead-off presidential caucuses, raised the money for the political arm of Restoring American Leadership, also known as ReAL.

That group then passed $125,000 to American Family Association Action and an additional $25,000 to the Iowa Christian Alliance — two of the groups that spent millions before last November's elections that removed three of the state's seven state Supreme Court justices. The court had unanimously decided a state law restricting marriage to a man and a woman violated Iowa's constitution.

The financial transfers, which appear to comply with campaign finance laws, were part of a steady flow of cash into Iowa from conservative groups such as the National Organization for Marriage and the Family Research Council.

During the campaign, the AFA's resident spokesbigot Bryan Fischer regularly bragged that his group was spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on the effort in Iowa.  Now we know that a significant portion of that money came from Newt Gingrich's organization.

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Prop 8 Leader Supports Thrice-Married Adulterer

Submitted by Kyle Mantyla on March 3, 2011 - 3:12pm

Jim Garlow was one of the, if not the, key Religious Right leaders helming the fight to pass Proposition 8 in California.  And the reason he did so is because those who seek marriage equality are driven by "an Antichrist spirit" as part of an effort by Satan to "destroy the definition of marriage" so that people will fall away from God.

Garlow is close friends with Newt Gingrich, who carried on an affair with the woman who would become his second wife while he was still married to his first ... and then proceeded to do the very same thing to his second wife with the woman who would become his third.   And since Gingrich is so very, very sorry for his past indiscretions, he has been forgiven and so his presidential aspirations now have Garlow's approval:

Jim Garlow, the pastor of Skyline Church, a congregation in a San Diego suburb, called Gingrich "the strongest possible candidate" for the GOP nomination. Garlow led the effort in 2008 to pass Proposition 8, which outlawed same-sex marriage in California.

Last year, Garlow agreed to serve as chairman of Gingrich's faith-based nonprofit, for which he receives what he called a "small stipend." Since then, he has provided Gingrich with entree to evangelical circles nationwide.

...

Garlow agreed to head ReAL after a private meeting at which Gingrich acknowledged his past marital failings and began to weep as he spoke of his love for his two daughters.

"In my bleakest days when I was doing wrong, I knew it was wrong," Garlow quoted Gingrich as saying. "There was no attempt to justify his actions."

As Garlow explained several months ago in a video recorded for Cindy Jacobs' "Reformation Day" election prayer event, he supports Gingrich because Gingrich wakes up every day and asks "what can I do today to save Western Civilization?":

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Gingrich Group Calls For Elimination of Ninth Circuit Over Cross Ruling

Submitted by Kyle Mantyla on January 12, 2011 - 11:05am

Yesterday, it was announced that Jim Garlow, chairman of Newt Gingrich's Renewing American Leadership, would be participating in a protest against the Ninth Circuit's ruling that the Mt. Soledad Cross was unconstitutional:

Said Dr. Jim Garlow, Senior Pastor of Skyline Wesleyan Church in San Diego, and Chairman of Renewing American Leadership located in Washington DC, "These revisionist judges consistently confuse the historic recognition of the role that the Christian faith -- embraced by 90% of our citizens -- and Christian symbols have played and continue to play in our national life with the 'establishment' of religion. Not one truly informed person driving by the Mt. Soledad Veterans Memorial has ever assumed that they are required to embrace Christianity as an 'established,' government sponsored religion."

I am not sure exactly what steps Garlow is going to advocate for remedying this outrage at the protest, but Rick Tyler, his colleague at ReAL, is already claiming the ruling is an attempt to impose a "a secular-socialist agenda on the United States" and therefore the Ninth Circuit Court needs to be, quite literally, eliminated: 

[T]hose whose policies are unable to win at the ballot box are seeking to build a stronghold of government power in the courts, without needing to garner a single vote. Just as it did in 1803, the Executive and Legislative branches could take action today and ”reorganize” the Ninth Circuit Court right out of existence! Not only is there precedent for such an action, we wouldn’t need to be nearly as radical as Jefferson – we wouldn’t have to eliminate half of the federal bench, just the Ninth Circuit! It’s time for this country to ask: “If they’re so out of touch with the First Amendment, why are we continuing to employ them as judges?”

It’s time to think out of the box, and we can succeed. Just this past year, we notched a huge victory in Iowa against the three judges that superseded the will of the people by imposing their own agenda upon the Constitution. Christians have a warrior in Bob Vander Plaats, who led the fight that resulted in sending three judges home after they grossly overreached their constitutional role in redefining marriage. We must show other judges who have forgotten the constitutional constraints that there are consequences for their actions.

Make your voice heard. Watch your email for our ReAL Action Alert. We’re going to tell the Ninth Circuit that their services are no longer required.

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Garlow: Satan Is Attacking Marriage and Gingrich Is Saving Western Civilization

Submitted by Kyle Mantyla on November 2, 2010 - 10:54am

In my last video of highlights from Cindy Jacobs' "Reformation Day" election prayer event, I included a short clip of a video that Jim Garlow sent to them to be played during the evening because he could not be there in person. 

But I wanted to highlight a few things from Garlow's video separately because he is, in many respects, the linchpin tying self-proclaimed apostles and prophets like Lou Engle and Cindy Jacobs with the more traditional Religious Right leadership like Newt Gingrich and the video he recorded provides a perfect example.

As we've noted several times before, Garlow has deep ties to people like Engle and Jacobs and 7 Mountains Dominionism, which I think is amply demonstrated by the fact that he recorded this video for Jacobs' 7 Mountains-themed "Reformation Day" event because he could not be there in person.

In the first part of the video, he provided this long and rather rambling explanation of why Satan is out to destroy our understanding of marriage:

The attack on marriage is not without careful construction and thought on the part of the secularists. Why would they attack marriage?

Number one, in marriage God says I am going to create you in my image. No male by himself, it's the full image, the full spectrum of God's image. God is neither male or female. God has the strength historically associated with masculinity; God has the tenderness historically associated with femininity and the nurture capabilities. That being the case, God is neither male nor female.

So for us to have the full spectrum of who God is, his characteristics, the result is we have to have male and female come together. As male and female come together as one, they together represent the whole spectrum in the covenant of marriage of the nature of God. When he made us in his image, he made us male and female coming together and there we represent the fullness of the Godhead.

So if I were the enemy I'd want to destroy the definition of marriage so that imagery would be forever destroyed.

We go from Genesis to the end of the book, the Book of Revelation, it says Jesus and the church will get married. That's the final consummating event of all of human history. That is real marriage by the way. You and I have never seen real marriage because that has not occurred. All we have is a facsimile thereof on Eath.

Paul says that's a mystery, we can't understand Jesus and the church coming together. It's a mystery, he says. But to help us understand, God established on the Planet Earth what we call marriage with a small "m." You've never seen Capital M marriage yet, that's yet to occur. Think of the best marriage you know of on Earth and God is so gracious he says I want you to have an appetizer for the main course so I'm going to establish male and female coming together on Earth and the ecstasy and joy that you experience spiritually, physically, and emotionally, that oneness, that's a depiction of what it's going to be like because you can't grasp because it's a mystery what it's like when Jesus and the church come together.

In fact, even the delight of sexual expression, the joy of sexual expression within a covenantal marriage, that is the depiction we find in Psalms where is says at our right hard are pleasures for ever more. The day will come when the church and Jesus are united with great ecstasy and joy. People say why is there no marriage in Heaven? Because there is marriage, real marriage, in Heaven - Jesus and the church. Can't understand it, so they gave us a picture of it Earth.

People say why is there not sexual expression in Heaven? There's the delight and joy equivalency of that as we delight in, literally, the presence of God. It will be an amazing, absolutely amazing moment. That is why we use marital bed language to talk about this, we talk about the consummation of history, the climax of history. Those are languages associated with the marital bed that is now associated with history.

So if I were Satan, if I were the Devil, I'd want to destroy the imagery of male and female coming together with light and joy, covenantal marriage on Eart,h so people would not grasp what it might be like at the End Time, what it will be like when Jesus and the church come together.

And then he went on to explain that he went to work for Newt Gingrich because the entire Gingrich family wakes up every day with a mission of saving Western Civilization:

I serve as Chairman for Renewing America Leadership. It's an organization that was started by Newt Gingrich, it is based in Washington DC. And as I was sorting out whether to accepting the appointment of the Chairmanship, I met with Newt Gingrich's adult daughter who runs his operations. She flew out here along with another of Newt's colleagues and we met with them for hour after hour, people in our church met with them, because I wanted to be sure I did not compromise the Gospel by being involved, I did not compromise my pastoring, and my Christocentricity - my Jesus-centeredness.

And so we met hour after hour and I asked question and question and finally one moment, Kathy Lubbers - that's the daughter of Newt Gingrich - she stopped and she said this: "Let me just explain one thing that will help you understand exactly what we're about. Every morning, we as members of the Gingrich family, the Gingrich organization, get up, look in the mirror and ask ourself one question: what can I do today to save Western Civilization?"

That impacted me when she said that. Here is the question I ask myself and I ask you to ask yourself as I close right now: as you get up every morning, look in the mirror and say "what can I do this day to help establish the Kingdom of God, the rule of Christ Jesus on the hearts of humanity across this nation and around this world?"

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