Alabama

Sen. Rand Paul isn’t the only prominent Republican hanging out with birthers these days. Next month, RNC chairman Reince Preibus and Wisconson Sen. Ron Johnson will travel to Alabama to headline a dinner hosted by state GOP chairman Bill Armistead. Armistead raised eyebrows last year when he publicly recommended “Dreams From My Real Father,” a “documentary” that promotes the alternate birther theory that President Obama somehow inherited a Marxist worldview from his “real father” Frank Marshall Davis. Somewhat unbelievably, Armistead stated that he had “verified that it is factual, all of it.”

Interestingly, Priebus and Johnson will be stepping into the middle of a fight over whether Armistead will keep his job. (He faces a challenger backed by his longtime rival, state House Speaker Mike Hubbard.) Charles Dean at the Birmingham News reports that Priebus might be attending as a political favored to Armistead:

Some saw Tuesday's late announcement by Armistead that Priebus had accepted the invitation to attend the dinner as a sign that maybe Armistead had convinced the GOP national party chairman to support him.

Late last week Armistead announced that he was supporting Priebus for a second term as Republican Party Chairman. So far Priebus is unopposed for a second term but rumors have persisted for months that a challenger might step up.

UPDATE: The RNC tells the Birmingham News that Priebus is not taking sides in the party chairmanship race.

The New York Times recently reported that there were lots of Republicans in Alabama who were concerned about the possibility of seeing disgraced "Ten Commandments Judge" Roy Moore return to his seat on the state Supreme Court after being removed from that very position back in 2003.

The Times reports that "many in the Alabama business and legal establishment, a community that is overwhelmingly and faithfully Republican, are privately despondent over the prospect of a Moore victory and its effect on the state’s image," and it is easy to see why, since Moore is the sort of politician who shows up at anti-abortion rallies, as he did this weekend, and proceeds to tell the audience that "Satan is out to destroy everything that God has created" and has convinced many in this nation to support things like abortion and gay marriage, which is why God "has a controversy with the inhabitants of this land, and until we reject those evils, we shall suffer accordingly": 

Speaking to a Republican women’s group in Alabama yesterday, state GOP chairman Bill Armistead recommended to his audience a fringe birther movie that claims that President Obama’s real father is American labor activist Frank Marshall Davis, according Mobile Press-Register political editor George Talbot, who was reporting the event on Twitter:

 The movie Armistead reportedly recommended, “Dreams From My Real Father,” represents a breakout fringe of the birther movement. The film, according to its director Joel Gilbert, “presents the case that Frank Marshall Davis, a Communist Party USA organizer and propagandist, was Obama's real father, both biological and ideological, and indoctrinated Obama with a political foundation in Marxism and an anti-White world view.”

A trailer for the film cuts to various right-wing bogeymen including Jeremiah Wright, Bill Ayers and ACORN in between misleadingly edited snippets of speeches by the president and Michelle Obama:

Gilbert’s film has divided the birther movement, since its assertion that Davis is Obama’s real father would seem to be incompatible with the theory that the president was born in Kenya. Jerome Corsi of World Net Daily, apparently untroubled by the contradiction, has embraced the film. Birther leader Orly Taitz, however, claims that by promoting the film, Corsi is “trying to kill the case by making up an American citizen father for Obama.”

Thanks to an aggressive campaign by Gilbert, “Dreams From My Real Father” has had a remarkably wide reach. In September, the New York Post ran a full-page ad for the movie. Yesterday, World Net Daily reported that Gilbert has sent 1 million copies of the film to households in Ohio and plans to send 1 million more out in swing states. Gilbert and Corsi both fault the mainstream media for ignoring their film, which Gilbert claims they’re doing “because they support national health care.”

In a National Press Club appearance this summer, Gilbert expanded on his theory, claiming that Obama and strategist David Axelrod were both “red diaper babies,” born of communist parents to carry on the cause; that Obama is pursuing Davis’s “dreams of a forced imposition of a classic Stalinist-Marxist agenda upon America at home and abroad”; and that Obama worked with ACORN to cause the subprime mortgage crisis as part of a plan to “use minorities and the poor to collapse capitalism.”

This is the first we’ve heard of a political leader embracing Gilbert’s conspiracy theory. Armistead is a former state senator who a became the Alabama GOP Chairman last year.

UPDATE: Talbot has posted some more of the context of Armistead's remarks:

“We have to win this election. This is about our country. Our country will not be the same,” Armistead said. “I’m convinced, if Obama wins, our children and grandchildren will not live under the same conditions that we’ve lived in these wonderful years. Obama has a different ideology than we do.”

Armistead suggested that audience members see the movie '2016: Obama’s America,' a documentary by conservative commentator Dinesh D'Souza that is critical of the president.

“If you haven’t seen it, you should,” he said. “But I’m going to tell you about another movie. The name of it is ‘Dreams From My Real Father.’ That is absolutely frightening. I’ve seen it. I verified that it is factual, all of it. People can determine.”

Alabama’s Roy Moore, the Republican Party’s nominee for Chief Justice of the state Supreme Court who in 2003 was removed from the same post after he refused to move a Ten Commandments monument he installed in the courthouse rotunda, spoke to Steve Deace last week to register his disapproval with the Supreme Court’s rulings on Arizona’s anti-immigrant SB 1070 and the health care reform law.

He maintained that the Court, by striking down parts of SB 1070 while upholding the Affordable Care Act, have given undocumented immigrants more rights than citizens. “I’m curious what would happen if an Arizona policeman arrests an illegal alien going to a health care facility without a green card and find out that they haven’t paid the individual mandate, are they to be detained or released or what?” Moore asked, even though undocumented immigrants are not covered in the law. “Steve, do we have less rights than people that have no right to be here?” he continued.

Later, he warned that “false religions” are taking hold in America and as a result “Christians are being persecuted while people of a religion foreign to our country are doing what they want.” Moore, who earlier warned that secular government leads to Sharia law, appeared to twist Thomas Jefferson’s Bill for Religious Freedom, where Jefferson said that governments throughout history have established and imposed religions forcibly on their people, to attack non-Christian minorities:

Moore: Thomas Jefferson in his Bill for Religious Freedom said that would happen, when men presume to restrict your freedom then they will allow false religions to come into your country and it all began when he said ‘well aware that the opinions and beliefs of man depend not upon their own will but follow involuntarily the evidence proposed to their minds that almighty God hath created the mind free.’ You see he recognized that God gives him that freedom of conscience and when men come in and try to restrict it what happens is false religions come in and that’s what’s happening in our country today. Christians are being persecuted while people of a religion foreign to our country are doing what they want.

Roy Moore was removed from his job as chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court in 2003 after he disobeyed a court order to remove a Ten Commandments monument he placed in his court house, but last Tuesday he won the Republican nomination for the position, making it extremely likely that Moore will soon have his old job back. Moore celebrated his victory today with Sandy Rios of the American Family Association, where he urged Congress to impeach Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg, among other judges he would like to see removed from office. The Religious Right went off the rails after Ginsberg suggested in an interview that Egypt look to the South African constitution when drafting its new constitution, acknowledging that what works in the US may not work in Egypt, and ignoring her immense praise for the Constitution in the same interview. Rios even suggested that progressives wanted to do away with the Constitution altogether:

He also told Rios that America has always been based on a “biblical standard” and warned that “if you take away that standard then you have same-sex marriages, marriages between two and three people, or whatever.”

Moore: There is no standard without the biblical standard that we’ve lived under for 225 years. If you take away that standard then you have same-sex marriages, marriages between two and three people, or whatever. You don’t have a standard and moral atheists may want to hold on to the past without any basis of doing so, they’ve got to recognize the basis of why they have the right to believe in whatever they want to believe in and that right comes from God, it is not from government. You can go to governments over in Southeast Asia or the Mideast and you find governments that restrict what you believe and what you think and how you worship and that is because that is what governments will do when you don’t have this freedom.

Moore went on to claim that he doesn’t know the faith of President Obama, a committed Christian, adding he thinks the President does “favor the Muslim faith” and is trying “to remove any acknowledgement of a particular God” in America.

Moore: We have people like Barack Obama who do favor the Muslim faith and there is a reason for this. Do I believe he is a Muslim? I don’t know his faith but he certainly doesn’t represent what this nation is founded upon. He is typical of secular humanists in government that try to remove any acknowledgement of a particular God and say they grant religious freedom and that is entirely opposite to what this country is founded upon.

Rick Santorum has demonstrated, yet again, his willingness to associate with people whose views are repugnant to most Americans. This afternoon he appeared on one of the most extreme Religious Right programs in the country – American Family Radio’s Focal Point with Bryan Fischer.

David Barton’s WallBuilders is tireless in pushing its “Christian nation” version of American history.   Today it encourages its supporters to “Celebrate Columbus Day!” and to read John Eidsmoe’s Columbus and Cortez: Conquerors for Christ.  

Eidsmoe is the Christian Reconstructionist cited by Michele Bachmann as her mentor and major influence.  He is also a colleague of Roy Moore, who lost his job as Chief Justice of Alabama’s Supreme Court when he refused to obey federal court orders to remove a Ten Commandments memorial he had installed in the state courthouse.

As we have reported, Eidsmoe believes that feminists “violate the normal order” that God put in place for husbands to head households, that “homosexuality invites the judgment of God upon all of society,” that gays will turn the military into a “cesspool of immorality,” and that public education is brainwashing students to believe in secularism and evolution.  Ryan Lizza recently reported that Eidsmoe was uninvited from a Tea Party event last year after addressing an event in Alabama commemorating Secession Day and telling an interviewer that it was the state’s “constitutional right to secede,” and that “Jefferson Davis and John C. Calhoun understood the Constitution better than did Abraham Lincoln and Daniel Webster.”

Eidsmoe’s book on Columbus has an introduction by Peter Marshall, another “Christian Nation” advocate who served with Wallbuilders’ founder David Barton as an “expert” to Religious Right members of the Texas Board of Education pushing massive revisions to social science textbooks.  Marshall writes:

In his customary careful and thorough manner, John Eidsmoe has pierced through the obfuscating fog of twentieth-century humanist bias and judgments that have obscured the truth about two of the most controversial figures in American history, Christopher Columbus and Hernando Cortez. Using earlier sources, he has presented us with a well-researched, even-handed, and fair treatment of both their Christian motives for their incredible exploits, and the very real mistakes they made .This is a valuable contribution toward restoring a true Christian perspective on our American past.

WallBuilders’ Columbus Day email celebrates Columbus’ belief that he was being led by the Holy Spirit and complains that modern scholarship has denigrated Columbus specifically because of his religious motivation:

It is especially because of Columbus’ religious motivations and convictions that today he has become a villain for most modern educators and writers, who regularly attack and condemn him.

That echoes Eidsmoe’s book, which claims, “A scholarly desire to correct the historical record is not the primary reason [for modern criticism of Columbus]…No, the attack is directed toward values – biblical values and the Christian civilization that is based on biblical values.”

Eidsmoe writes:

The reason may of us find history boring is that we fail to see the sovereign hand of God at work as history unfolds. The way you look at history depends in large part upon your world view….For the Christian, history is, or should be, the unfolding of God’s plan for the human race. For the Christian, the discovery, exploration and settlement of the Western Hemisphere takes on a whole new dimension of meaning as God works through imperfect vessels like Columbus, Cortez….and others who bring salvation to the inhabitants of the Western world through the knowledge of Jesus Christ.

He decries the effort to “move this nation away from its Christian foundations” in order to “remake America into a secular or pagan society….If the Christian professions of Christopher Columbus and others can be proven insincere, if their deeds can be downplayed and their sins and shortcomings magnified, then this element of America’s Christian past can be discredited and set aside.”

After passing the Ohio State House, Janet Porter’s ‘heartbeat bill’ is now poised to have a vote in the Republican-controlled State Senate. Porter, an avowed dominionist who thinks supporters of President Obama are destined to Hell and that legal abortion is responsible for tornadoes, has been leading the fight to pass the ‘heartbeat bill,’ a patently unconstitutional measure that would “ban abortion as early as 18 to 24 days after conception.” She told James Dobson yesterday on his program Family Talk that she thinks her bill will eventually lead to the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade. “We are so close that I can see the end of abortion from here, that’s how close we are,” Porter said, “everything we have prayed is happening…God has been in this from the beginning.”

Porter has lost some allies along the way, as the Ohio Right to Life Society opposes her extreme bill and one of its chief proponents, State Rep. Jarrod Martin, who called for the bill’s passage to help the U.S. compete with Chinese children, currently faces charges of drunk driving and child endangerment.

But she has picked up one major endorsement: Texas Gov. Rick Perry. He joins other presidential candidates Michele Bachmann, Newt Gingrich and Roy Moore in backing Porter’s extreme legislation. According to the statement from Porter’s group Faith 2 Action, Perry announced his support at his meeting with Religious Right leaders at James Leininger’s ranch in Texas where he spoke “before a group of 250 pro-life and pro-family leaders”:

Texas Governor Rick Perry, who recently announced that he will seek the Republican nomination for President, has announced his support for the Heartbeat Bill. He joins three other Presidential candidates in support of the bill: Congresswoman Michele Bachmann, former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, and former Alabama Supreme Court Chief Justice Roy Moore.

“We’re grateful to Governor Perry for his strong support of the Heartbeat Bill. I don’t think there’s a bill in America with more support,” declares Faith2Action President Janet (Folger) Porter. She adds, “Come to the Statehouse Atrium on September 20 and get a glimpse of the statewide support for the Heartbeat Bill!”

At a meeting in Texas, Governor Perry announced his support before a group of 250 pro-life and pro-family leaders. His response of support to a question about the Heartbeat Bill received an extended standing ovation.

When Bob Vander Plaats and Terry Branstad were locked in a tight race for Iowa's Republican gubernatorial nomination last year, it came as quite a shock with the influential Iowa Family Policy Council publicly declared that it would never support Brandstad if he won the nomination:

The public refusal of an influential social conservative group to support the eventual GOP nominee for governor is causing long-term damage to the party and could result in a second term for Gov. Chet Culver, Republican leaders said Tuesday.

At an event originally billed as a rally to oppose same-sex marriage, Iowa Family Policy Center (IFPC) chairman Danny Carroll announced the group’s endorsement of Republican gubernatorial hopeful Bob Vander Plaats. While that news wasn’t a shock, Carroll’s announcement that the group would sit out the 2010 governor’s race if former Gov. Terry Branstad wins the party’s nomination caught many by surprise.

“[Gov. Branstad] has failed to boldly address the values that we embrace,” Carroll said Tuesday. “And even if he were to win the nomination, the Iowa Family PAC would not support him.”

Branstad eventually won the primary and the election while Carroll went on join Vander Plaats at The Family Leader where he served as a lobbyist.

Today, Michele Bachmann announced that she had secured Carroll's endorsement:

Republican presidential candidate Michele Bachmann announced today that she has received the endorsement of former Iowa Family Leader Chairman Danny Carroll.

“I’m honored to have the support of Representative Carroll,” Bachmann said. “He has been a strong leader on issues that we hold near to our hearts – strong families, pro-life, and fiscal responsibility.”

Carroll is a former Iowa legislator from Grinnell who served in the Iowa House of Representatives from 1994-2006, including two terms as Speaker Pro Tempore. He was also the Iowa co-chair for Mike Huckabee’s campaign in 2008.

“I have admired and respected Michele ever since I first met her back in the legislative session,” Carroll said. “The fact that she stood strong on the debt ceiling issue was a clincher for me. She was correct in her position on the debt limit and I appreciate the leadership she has demonstrated throughout the process.”

I am no campaign guru, but I have to imagine that courting an activist who is an avowed enemy of the sitting Republican governor might complicate Bachmann's efforts in the state.

And it should also be noted that Carroll is only supporting Bachmann because his first choice, Roy Moore, was just too much of a long-shot:

Republican Danny Carroll is no longer involved with the campaign of Roy Moore, a former Alabama judge.

“It didn’t feel like he was going to be able to raise the money necessary for a viable campaign,” Carroll said today. “He’s a great guy. I love him and respect him. He’s a hero, that’s for sure. And he’s an honorable person. I can’t say anything negative against Judge Moore. Just the reality of politics, I guess.”

I guess this makes sense - if you are looking for a more "electable" version of Roy Moore, Michele Bachmann seems like the logical choice.