Idaho Values Alliance

• The American Family Association will be webcasting the Values Voter Summit live - you can watch it here.
• Several Religious Right groups have "delivered 20,000 petitions from Americans to the Republican leadership in Congress demanding that it feature family values in its soon-to-be-released legislative agenda."
• Some rare good news: people don't think that Glenn Beck should be in a position as a religious leader.
• The insanity regarding Texas textbooks just never stops.
• Mike Huckabee has endorsed Rand Paul.
• Rob Schenck and Pat Mahoney secured all the copies of the Koran that Terry Jones intended to burn and transported them back to Washington, DC for safe-keeping.
• The Terri Schindler Schiavo Foundation has changed its name to the "Terri Schiavo Life & Hope Network."
• Marco Rubio teams up with David Barton.
• The new head of the Idaho Values Alliance doesn't want to talk about Bryan Fischer.
• Finally, I have to say that all of the revelations about Christine O'Donnell that are coming out are not really all that surprising.  After all, what do you expect from someone who worked at Concerned Women for America, which was founded by a woman who believes that "Christian values should dominate our government. The test of those values is the Bible. Politicians who do not use the Bible to guide their public and private lives do not belong in office."

Do you remember Bryan Fischer, the one-time head of the Idaho Values Alliance who got called up to the big leagues earlier this year when he became the American Family Association's Director of Issue Analysis?

Well, in that new capacity, he has weighed in on the tragic shooting at Fort Hood to declare that Muslims should not be allowed to serve in the military: 

It it is time, I suggest, to stop the practice of allowing Muslims to serve in the U.S. military. The reason is simple: the more devout a Muslim is, the more of a threat he is to national security. Devout Muslims, who accept the teachings of the Prophet as divinely inspired, believe it is their duty to kill infidels. Yesterday's massacre is living proof. And yesterday's incident is not the first fragging incident involving a Muslim taking out his fellow U.S. soldiers.

Of course, most U.S. Muslims don't shoot up their fellow soldiers. Fine. As soon as Muslims give us a foolproof way to identify their jihadis from their moderates, we'll go back to allowing them to serve. You tell us who the ones are that we have to worry about, prove you're right, and Muslims can once again serve. Until that day comes, we simply cannot afford the risk. You invent a jihadi-detector that works every time it's used, and we'll welcome you back with open arms.

This is not Islamophobia, it is Islamo-realism.

And don't give us reassurances about the oaths that Muslim soldiers take to protect and defend the Constitution from all enemies, foreign and domestic. Hasan took that oath, and it proved meaningless. In fact, the more devout a Muslim is, the more likely he is to lie to you through his teeth, since lying to the infidel to advance the cause of Islam is commended, not just permitted, in the Koran.

It's time we all got over the nonsense that all cultures and religions are equally valid or worthy. They most certainly are not. While Christianity is a religion of peace, founded by the Prince of Peace, Islam is a religion of war and violence, founded by a man who routinely chopped the heads off his enemies, had sex with nine-year old girls, and made his wealth plundering merchant caravans.

And just as Christians are taught to imitate the life of Christ, so Muslims are taught to imitate the Prophet in all things. Yesterday, Nidal Malik Hasan was simply being a good Muslim.

Last week, I noted that many on the Religious Right are working to figure out how to deal with the possibility that President Obama’s nominee to replace David Souter on the Supreme Court could be gay.

For the most part, their response has been to claim that they would not oppose someone because he or she was gay, but that there would be serious concerns that their sexuality would make them incapable of being objective.

While many have been careful to avoid explicitly declaring that being gay makes it impossible for someone to be good Supreme Court justice, Bryan Fischer of the Idaho Values Alliance is not among them, as evidenced by his column entitled “Virtually impossible for open lesbian to make a good Supreme Court justice”:

An open lesbian has obviously resolved the ethical questions about sexuality in favor of the legitimacy of aberrant sexual behavior, in favor of what historically has been known in U.S. law as an "infamous crime against nature."

It's one thing for a judge to keep his orientation a private matter. There is some evidence that perhaps two Supreme Court justices of the past were homosexuals themselves. But they concealed that from the public, accepted that the laws of the day considered homosexual sexual activity a felony offense, and did not use their platform on the bench to challenge society's sexual standards.

But a judge who is quite open about his (generic use) alternative sexuality is another matter entirely. It's hard to imagine any universe in which an open lesbian would uphold any pro-family law should it be challenged in her court.

It will be absolutely incumbent upon the GOP members of the Senate judiciary committee to ask probing questions of a lesbian nominee on a host of issues that are matters of legal and constitutional dispute.

Fisher lays out a series of questions any gay or lesbian nominee must answer because, as he says, “if the public ever had a right to know about anything, it most certainly has a right to know how a lesbian judge's view of sexual morality will affect her jurisprudence” and declares that a gay nominee must be kept off the bench because the other justices “would certainly feel a strong pull to rule with a lesbian colleague on matters of sexuality just to avoid the awkwardness that otherwise would result.”

That’s right – Justices Alito, Roberts, Thomas, and Scalia will all suddenly start issuing gay-friendly rulings simply to avoid any “awkwardness” in the chambers.  

Finally, Fisher tells his allies on the Right to start making this an issue because “the quickest way to shred what remains of America’s moral foundation may be to appoint an open lesbian to the Supreme Court [and] if the pro-family community does not want to get rolled on this issue, it had better speak up and speak up now.”

When it was first revealed that Hallmark was going to start selling cards for same-sex weddings, the Right predictably threw a fit and quickly swung into action with an equally predicable boycott.

Now, a family that owns seven Hallmark stores in Idaho has announced that their stores will not carry the new cards and the Idaho Values Alliance is taking the credit:

Great news on the culture front! The owners of the seven local Hallmark stores, which all go by the name “Jordan’s Hallmark,” will not stock the corporation’s newly developed homosexual-marriage greeting cards.

The owners live here in the valley, and in a phone conversation this morning with me, they made it clear that they would not stock the card in any case because of their personal values, which are shaped by the Judeo-Christian tradition.

They were blindsided by Hallmark on this rollout, and had no idea the cards were coming until they read about in the newspapers.

Realize that if gay activists get their way, and introduce "sexual orientation" and "gender identity" protections into Idaho law, these owners could be sued for discrimination for their conscience-driven decision not to sell pro-gay greeting cards.

The best thing IVA supporters can do at this point is to make sure we buy our next special occasion card at a Jordan's Hallmark. They've felt the pinch of the slowdown in the economy like everyone else, and are also up against some big box stores which also carry Hallmark cards.