Family Research Council

Always on the lookout for anything they can churn into a controversy that suggests that God is somehow under attack here in America, the Right has latched onto the opening of the new Capitol Visitor Center, which they are accusing of intentionally slighting God and the role that Christianity played in the founding of our nation:

Protests by conservative lawmakers led architects to promise to add "In God We Trust" as the national motto and to engrave the Pledge of Allegiance in the new $621 million Capitol Visitor Center.

Sen. Jim DeMint, a South Carolina Republican, had threatened to delay Tuesday's opening of the marble-and-stone center that took seven years to build at triple the original cost … Despite winning a months-long battle to highlight the importance of religion in American life, DeMint said the center still misrepresents American history by downplaying the faith of the Founding Fathers and other prominent figures.

"The current Capitol Visitor Center displays are left-leaning and in some cases distort our true history," DeMint said. The center's "most prominent display proclaims faith not in God, but in government."

DeMint, rated the most conservative senator by several think tanks and advocacy groups, also protested an engraved statement near the center's entrance: "We have built no temple but the Capitol. We consult no common oracle but the Constitution."

That quote was uttered by Rufus Choate, a Massachusetts lawyer who represented his state in the House of Representatives in the 1830s and in the Senate the following decade.

"This is an intentional misrepresentation of our nation's real history and an offensive refusal to honor America's God-given blessings," DeMint said.

Republican Sens. Tom Coburn of Oklahoma and Roger Wicker of Mississippi, along with Republican Rep. Randy Forbes of Virginia, joined DeMint in the protest.

There is likewise a new article in The National Review complaining that not only is the new center hostile to God, it’s also overflowing with “liberal bias”  

[M]any conservatives were startled by its mere existence — and they observed that it came in the wake of a trend toward the effacement of religion from the public squares of Washington. David Barton, a historian who heads WallBuilders, an Evangelical organization, had tried to call attention to it. The FDR Memorial, dedicated in 1997, contains no mention of God. Neither does the World War II Memorial, opened in 2004. Carved on one of its walls is a short D-Day message by Dwight Eisenhower, but the quote ends just before Ike seeks “the blessing of Almighty God upon this great and noble undertaking.” Barton is convinced this isn’t accidental: “It’s hard not to see the bias. Religion is completely scrubbed out” … When Sen. Jim DeMint, Republican of South Carolina, explored the hall, he wasn’t pleased. “There was an obvious absence of any accurate historical reference to our religious heritage,” he says. He noticed the misidentification of the national motto, but the problem went much deeper — and he took it to the floor of the Senate. “In touring the CVC, I found the exhibits to be politically correct, left-leaning, and secular in nature,” he said on September 27. “There seems to be a trend of whitewashing God out of our history.” He noted that although the hall displayed a couple of Bibles, a replica of the House chamber didn’t include “In God We Trust” above the speaker’s rostrum.

…

Yet the exhibition hall still includes plenty of liberal bias. A section on FDR describes the New Deal, in rah-rah fashion, as “a creative burst of energy that initiated economic recovery” during the Depression. There’s a panel on the 19th-century impeachment of Andrew Johnson, but nothing comparable on the 20th-century impeachment of Bill Clinton (except a brief mention in a video). What’s more, conservative icons are almost totally missing. There’s a picture of Robert A. Taft, but no image of Barry Goldwater or Henry Hyde. At the same time, the CVC is full of dutiful tributes to female firsts: the first woman elected to the House (Jeannette Rankin), the first woman to serve in the Senate (Rebecca Felton), the first woman elected to the Senate (Hattie Caraway), the first woman elected to both the House and the Senate (Margaret Chase Smith), the first “woman of color” and first Asian-American woman elected to Congress (Patsy Mink), the longest-serving woman in Congress (Edith Nourse Rogers), and so on.

An alcove on modern history includes big pictures of an Earth Day rally, an ACT-UP protest on AIDS funding, and hippies at the Pentagon in 1967. It’s not as if the CVC made no attempt at balance: There’s also a black-and-white photo of Vietnam-era “pro-war demonstrators” that’s one-quarter the size of the full-color anti-war image.

But it seems that it is the perceived “religious hostility” of the center that is really irking the Right, so much so that the Family Research Council dedicated its most recent Washington Update to decrying it:

Religious Hostility on Display at U.S. Capitol

Today, the U.S. Capitol unveiled what one congressman has called a "$600 million godless pit," a palatial underground visitors' center which is at the heart of an ongoing debate over the place of America's religious heritage in the nation's capital. Not only does the basement of the House and Senate's home have new galleries, theaters, and gift shops, but, as 108 congressmen rightly argue, it should also include an honest and complete portrayal of America's religious roots.

Initially, planners had scrubbed references to "In God We Trust," the Pledge of Allegiance, and the Founders' faith. The Architect of the Capitol, who is responsible for the renovations, came under fire from the building's own residents, the U.S. Congress, for omitting such basic references to the Almighty. Although some of the concerns were addressed before the center opened this afternoon, dozens of leaders and organizations like FRC are still troubled by the politically correct nature of the exhibits, which are historically incorrect.

for the chairmanship of the Republican National Committee.One of the prevailing themes of the Republican Party at the moment is rampant finger-pointing in which just about every faction of the party is blaming every other faction of the party for the fact that they keep losing elections. 

First you had moderates blaming the Religious Right while the Right was blaming the Republican leadership for being insufficiently committed to the right-wing agenda and others were blaming the anti-immigration "nativists."

Now comes the Family Research Council complaining that Rep. Pete Sessions, incoming Chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee, dared to meet with the Log Cabin Republicans and warning that any moves toward treating them like a legitimate element of the party will only undermine the GOP's efforts to reach out to Black and Hispanic voters and will ultimately doom the Republicans to being in the minority for the foreseeable future:

According to a press release from the pro-gay "marriage" group, Log Cabin Republicans, one of the first stops for the newly elected Chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC), Congressman Pete Sessions (R-Texas), was the fundraising dinner for the homosexual organization. The release states that Representative Sessions said that the GOP cannot win elections and reach out to voters if it continues to oppose the issues that Log Cabin stands for, presumably including same-sex "marriage." My team sought clarification from Sessions' office and was told he did speak to the Log Cabin group, but that a copy of his remarks was not available. If the Log Cabin portrayal is true, it is disturbing on a number of accounts. One, Sessions' new position as the head of the NRCC is to train and recruit new candidates for the Republican Party. If this is his idea of "campaign advice" then the Republicans better prepare for a longer term in the minority then they faced prior to 1994. Secondly, if the GOP is serious about reaching out to new voters, especially African-Americans and Hispanics, then it should look closely at the exit polls on issues important to families. Both minority groups strongly support traditional family values that embrace life and protect marriage, two things the Republican Party once stood for also. Under these circumstances, pro-family voters should reserve judgment about giving their financial support to either political party.

FRC might soon actually have a lot more say in these sorts of matters now that Ken Blackwell, one of its own Senior Fellows, is contemplating his own run for the chairmanship of the Republican National Committee.

The Family Research Council is getting fed up with suggestions within the Republican Party that its best hope for winning future elections is to jettison the Religious Right base of the party and are warning that efforts to actually do so will all but spell doom for the GOP :

To those of us in the pro-family movement, the Establishment's diatribe is a familiar one. When the GOP succeeds because of social conservatives, our importance is ignored. When the party fails for overlooking us, values voters are somehow to blame. With the exception of Gov. Sarah Palin and some hollow overtures by the Democratic Party, the 20 percent of voters who cited "moral values" as their first or second priority in this election had no real horse in this race. Maybe that explains why believers were less active in this election cycle. More than four million Americans who go to church more than once a week and voted in 2004 stayed home on November 4. Those voters would have made up half the difference between McCain and Obama. As the members of the Republican party jockey for position in this brave new Congress and sort out their internal leadership, a commitment to life and marriage is non-negotiable. Without it, the prospects of a Republican revival are bleak.

It is interesting that FRC focuses on the decline among voters who attend church more than once a week as evidence that it was the demoralization among "values voters" that doomed McCain because, while exit polls from 2004 and 2008 do show such a decline, they also show that the number of voters who attend church "weekly" actually increased by nearly half a million (though as an overall percentage of the voting population such voter were down slightly from 2004, there was an increase in actual numbers due to greater turnout.)  And among those voters, Barack Obama did substantially better than did John Kerry. 

So one way to interpret that is to say that, despite all their talk, the Religious Right and the GOP cannot claim to be the sole political representatives of religiously active voters.  Of course, that would only end up undermining the very case that FRC is trying to make which is why they chose to highlight this specific subgroup as "proof" that the GOP needs to wed itself to the so-called "values voters" if it wants to win elections.

It looks like the Religious Right will have a new enemy to fight in their annual “war on Christmas” now that the American Humanist Association has announced its new ad campaign:

"Why believe in a god? Just be good for goodness' sake," proclaims a new holiday ad from the American Humanist Association. Already appearing today in the New York Times and Washington Post, the message will soon be blazoned on the sides, taillights, and interiors of over 200 Washington DC Metro buses.

It's the first ad campaign of its kind in the United States, and the American Humanist Association predicts it will raise public awareness of humanism as well as controversy over humanist ideas.

Needless to say, right-wing leaders and activists have already swung into action to warn unsuspecting Americans of the dangers of this new advertising campaign:

Peter Sprigg, vice president of policy at the conservative Family Research Council (FRC), told CNSNews.com that sustainable morality is grounded in a belief in a higher being.

“I don’t think it’s possible to sustain long-term morality without religion,” Sprigg said. “If there is no higher being obliging humans to act morally and ethically, why should we do it?”

Sprigg emphasized he thinks that atheists can act morally, but he also said that society would shift towards greed and selfishness without a belief in a higher power.

And you just knew that Bill Donohue was going to have something to say about it:

Codes of morality, of course, have always been grounded in religion. For those of us in Western civilization, its tenets emanate from the Judeo-Christian ethos. By casting this heritage aside, and replacing it with nothing more than the conscience of lone individuals, we lay the groundwork for moral anarchy. And that is because there is nothing that cannot be justified if the only moral benchmark is what men and women posit to be right and wrong. Indeed, every monster in history has followed his conscience.

The danger is so great in fact that even the moribund Christian Coalition was obligated to speak out against this effort to “ban Christmas and God from the public square,” saying the AHA “has an elitist contempt for Americans believing in God” and urging their “millions of supporters to call the city of Washington, DC and Congress to stop this un-Godly campaign." Even Mat Staver weighed in to call the campaign "insulting" while American Family Association president Tim Wildmon called it "stupid."

We had mentioned a group called In God We Trust once before when they inexplicably demanded that Barack Obama publicly denounce a series of “Imagine No Religion” billboards that the Freedom From Religion Foundation had placed around the country … and so it is no surprise that they would weigh in on this latest affront and do so by attempting to link the AHA to the Right’s most-hated nemesis – the United Nations:

"These ads are a deliberate attack on American traditions, beliefs and customs by a United Nation's affiliated group that espouses a radical anti-American agenda and is funded by an zealot who believes that the U.S. is a backwards nation full of imbeciles," says In God We Trust Chairman Council Nedd.

…

"This ad campaign is yet another attempt by America-hating snobs to mock and attack our nation's traditions and culture" says Nedd. "The AHA is not some harmless little atheist group. These people hate America and they are working with our nation's enemies to attack our heritage."

I've been having a bit of difficulty putting together a post regarding what the Right has to say about their anti-gay amendment wins in Florida, California, and Arizona not because I don't know what to say about it, but because they don't seem to know what to say about it. 

As of this writing, aside from ProtectMarriage.com thanking supporters and voters and insisting that their victory in California "doesn’t discriminate or take rights away from anyone," no major Religious Right groups have had much to say about any of this.  Powerhouse groups like Focus on the Family, the Family Research Council, Concerned Women for America, Eagle Forum, and the ACLJ have all been oddly silent. 

In fact, the only things I've really been able to find have been Richard Land crowing that "if traditional marriage can win in California, it can win in any of the 50 states when it's put to a vote of the people" and Ken Blackwell saying if Prop 8 "hadn't passed, we would have seen a floodgate opened in terms of same-sex marriage. Now, we've closed that gate." 

Of course, you can always count on Matt Barber to having something to say about it and he does not disappoint by providing his unique spin which suggests that Barack Obama's historic victory last night means he is now obligated to embrace the Right's anti-gay agenda:  

The passage of these three state constitutional amendments is an indicator that Obama, who has pledged full support for every single demand of extremist homosexual pressure groups, must recalibrate his far-left positions on these and other social issues if he wishes to be an effective leader ... The institution of legitimate marriage is a cornerstone of any healthy society. If you introduce counterfeit money into society, it devalues the dollar. By the same token, if you introduce counterfeit "gay marriage" into society, it devalues the institution of natural marriage. President-elect Obama owes his African-American supporters and the rest of America assurances that he will work to protect the cornerstone institution of legitimate marriage and reject the free-speech killing, religious liberties chilling agenda of the radical homosexual lobby."

Among the myriad of excuses the Religious Right will roll out tomorrow should John McCain lose will be the idea that McCain just didn’t energize the base and so they stayed home.  That may very well be the case, but it certainly won’t be because right-wing leaders sat on the sidelines and didn't do everything in their power to mobilize their base.  

Case in point: the God TV Election Special, which has been airing in constant rotation over the last several days.  

Because it is my job to watch these things so that you don’t have to, that is exactly what I did and I can say that I have never seen one program that included so many high-profile Religious Right leaders coupled with such egregious nuttiness.

Traditionally, when you see people like James Dobson and Tony Perkins, people like Pat Robertson and “prophetic intercessors” like Cindy Jacobs are nowhere to be found.  But in the case of the God TV Election Special, they have all come together to plead with Christians to pray, fast, and above all, vote:

GOD TV's 2008 US Election Special is a passionate call for GOD TV's viewers in America and around the world to pray for the election and to encourage all American believers to exercise their right to vote. The two-hour program features many high-profile Christian leaders such as: Pat Robertson, Founder of CBN; Jay Sekulow, Chief Counsel for the American Center for Law and Justice; Bishop Wellington Boone, Pastor, Father's House Church; Luis Palau, Evangelist; Tony Perkins, President of the Family Research Council; Rick Joyner, Senior Pastor, Morningstar Fellowship Church; Jill Austin, Founder, Master Potter Ministries; John Hagee,  Senior Pastor, Cornerstone Church; Cindy Jacobs, Founder, Generals International; Lou Engle, Co-founder of TheCall; Mike Bickle, Director of the International House of Prayer in Kansas City, (IHOP-KC);  Harry Jackson, Founder and Chairman of the High Impact Leadership. Coalition (HILC); and Jim Garlow, Senior Pastor of Skyline Wesleyan Church.

Below is a ten-minute synopsis of the two hour program featuring Rick Joyner proclaiming that they will see a “dramatic victory of light over dark,” but only if the church will finally stand up; Bishop Harry Jackson saying that an Obama victory will signal that “we have not chosen God’s best” and predicting that there will be riots in Washington, DC if Obama loses; John Hagee warning that the righteous cannot get into positions of authority if the righteous do not vote; Jill Austin recounting a vision she received from the Lord of the forces of evil commiserating at a casino in the sky where they smoked cigars and drank whiskey and had the faces of dogs; Rep. Trent Franks sharing God’s blessing with the entire world; Harry Jackson (again) saying that the only way John McCain will get elected is if Christian rise up to put him in office despite his failure to adequately reach out to them, in which case he owes them big time; Cindy Jacobs getting increasingly worked up over the need to pray to let God’s will be done in America as it is in Heaven; Election Special co-host Wendy Alec lamenting to Pat Robertson that he was not running for president this cycle; Tony Perkins explaining that we are in a “spiritual battle”; James Dobson asking for worldwide prayer because “absolutely everything” is on the line; and finally Lou Engle, well, being Lou Engle.

So while you are waiting for the polls to close and the election results to start rolling in, sit back and enjoy ten minutes of unfettered Religious Right hysteria (or at least fast forward and watch the Jill Austin and Cindy Jacobs portions):

Just yesterday I was writing about Lou Engel and his prayer warriors, noting that in this election cycle he had become far more openly political and had started linking up with DC's Religious Right insiders like Tony Perkins and Mike Huckabee.

And now today comes word that James Dobson himself is set to participate in Engel's rally of prayer and fasting this weekend in opposition to gays getting married in California:

On Saturday, tens of thousands of people will gather at San Diego's Qualcomm Stadium for corporate prayer and fasting for the protection of traditional marriage and the soul of our nation.

Family advocates from across the nation are expected to travel to California to be a part of the day of prayer and worship. Joining them will be Dr. James Dobson, founder and chairman of Focus on the Family.

"It is not a festival, it is a fast," Dr. Dobson said on Wednesday's radio broadcast. "It's a day of concerted prayer from 10 o'clock in the morning till 10 o'clock at night."

Dr. Dobson said he hoped thousands would join him at the free gathering.

Jenny Tyree, marriage analyst for Focus on the Family Action, said Dr. Dobson's presence in California is significant.

"Dr. Dobson is a recognized champion of marriage," she said. "His listeners know his heart for nurturing marriages, as well as his passion for strengthening the definition of marriage in our laws.

"His steadfast stance in support of traditional marriage gives strength to voters in California and across the country who share his esteem for our most pro-child institution."

The San Jose Mercury News has more:

"This vote on whether we stop the gay-marriage juggernaut in California is Armageddon," Charles Colson, the former Nixon administration official turned evangelical leader, said in a video that is being quoted by pastors around the state. On Saturday some of the nation's best-known evangelical leaders are hoping to fill Qualcomm Stadium in San Diego for a rally on behalf of the proposed ban.

Lou Engle — the charismatic founder of TheCall, an evangelical 12-hour gathering of prayer and fasting with a strong following among young people — will be one of the evangelical leaders at the rally, along with James C. Dobson, founder of Focus on the Family, and Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council.

That combination of leaders is "extraordinary. It just tells about the significance of the moment and the real need to pray," Engle, whose ministry is based in Kansas City, said in an interview Wednesday. "I spoke recently with a man from a Muslim country, who said to me, 'Lou, we're praying for you all over the world, for what you're doing, because if same-sex marriage stands in California, it will sweep all over the world.' "

Despite the votes in Arizona and Florida, "California is the focus, because everybody knows that California is the influential one," Engle said.

The global reach of Silicon Valley is another means California has to spread its influence on gay marriage, a senior leader of one prominent Christian group said.

By publicly opposing Proposition 8, companies like Google and Apple have "irritated" people across the country who buy their products, said Carrie Gordon Earll, senior director of public policy for Focus on the Family, a Colorado-based group that has donated more than $350,000 to back Proposition 8. Apple last week said it would contribute $100,000 to the No on 8 campaign, and Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page have made large individual donations.

The issue "has become national in part because those corporations have made it so," Earll said. "People may think twice about buying that iPod."

In the last several days, we’ve seen a variety of Religious Right leaders blast the National Republican Campaign Committee for pulling its advertising from the re-election campaigns of both Rep. Michele Bachmann (MN) and Rep. Marilyn Musgrave (CO), with David Barton trying to save Musgrave himself and the Family Research Council threatening the NRCC that it will cut off its own efforts to raise money on their behalf. 

Why is the Right so upset about this decision? Because, as FRC explains, when the NRCC abandons the Right’s “shining stars on the Hill,” they are abandoning the Right:

David Nammo is executive director of FRC Action PAC. He says whether it was going to give Bachmann and Musgrave money or stop running ads for them, the NRCC sent the wrong message to social conservatives by announcing it was pulling support for the two conservative lawmakers.

Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.)"What conservatives hear when they hear that is, 'Wow, the Republican Party isn't going to back people who are strong on our issues on the Hill.' And it's also going to frustrate and even confuse the people who want to support these two congresswomen," Nammo laments.

"We want people to get out and to vote for these two congresswomen," the conservative activist continues. "They are shining stars on the Hill. They stand for social conservative issues."

Robb and Robin Wirthlin are fast becoming right-wing celebrities as they turn their horror stories about what happened to their family as a result of gay marriage in Massachusetts into a warning to the rest of the nation.

You see, their son was read the book "King and King" in school and ... well, that's about it.  But that was enough to get them featured in this video about the dangers of gay marriage from the Family Research Council: 

And now they have taken their tale of woe on the road, heading down to Florida to urge its citizens to pass Amendment 2 and prevent such tragedies from befalling their own families:

Massachusetts parents Robb and Robin Wirthlin don't want parents in Florida to have the same experience as they did when their seven-year-old son was taught from a book advocating "gay marriage" in his second grade public school classroom in the wake of that state's legalization of same-sex marriages.

"It's troubling and it's disturbing. We don't want this to happen to any other family," Robb Wirthlin, joined by his wife, said at a Tallahassee news conference Oct. 22.

The Wirthlins, also joined by a Hillsborough County teacher, a First Amendment attorney, and religious leaders urged Floridians to support the Florida Marriage Protection Amendment (also known as Amendment 2 on the November ballot) to protect traditional marriage in order to avoid the negative educational and religious liberty ramifications that have arisen in other states with "gay marriage."

"If we had a million dollars to give the campaign we would because we don't want anyone to go through this-what we've been through," Robb Wirthlin said.

...

The Wirthlins unsuccessfully appealed to their son's teacher and principal to receive prior notice before such subject matter is taught or to opt-out of such lessons. Later, a federal lawsuit also failed to protect the parents' rights, and the Wirthlins have been subjected to ridicule and hostility by other citizens in Lexington.

But just in case that wasn't enough to scare Florida voters straight, Anita Staver, wife of right-wing uber-lawyer Mat Staver, issued some terrifying predictions of her own: 

Anita Staver, president of Liberty Counsel and co-author of the Florida Marriage Protection Amendment, told reporters: "We don't need a crystal ball to tell what's going to happen in Florida if Amendment 2 does not pass. Normalizing same-sex marriage will suppress speech and religion. The ultimate goal for those opposing Amendment 2 is to silence all opposition to same-sex behavior and the homosexual lifestyle."

Noting the "gay marriage" debate is "really a battle over the freedom of speech," Staver listed 10 examples in schools, churches and private businesses in which persons opposing homosexuality have been discriminated against, usually in states and countries where "gay marriage" has been legalized.

"Florida, we've had ample warning. To prevent similar travesties from coming to this state, we need to get ready. We need to vote yes on Amendment 2," Staver said.