Iowa

Facing a barrage of negative ads and a severe drop in support among Iowa voters, Newt Gingrich today held a conference call with Iowa pastors to build up his support among the state’s social conservative voters. Religious Right leaders Don Wildmon and Jim Garlow, both of whom have endorsed Gingrich, were featured on the call, and David Brody of CBN News obtained Wildmon’s letter sent to Iowa pastors. In the letter, Wildmon stressed Gingrich’s “thrust to remove elitist judges,” including the Iowa justices who “voted in 2009 to impose homosexual marriage on all Iowans;” in fact, Gingrich helped bankroll a campaign led by Wildmon’s American Family Association to remove three justices from the Iowa Supreme Court. Wildmon says that Gingrich is “the one person who can lead us out of the awful environment created by the present occupant in the White House”:

Dear Iowa pastors and friends:

I am inviting you (and select Christian Iowa Leaders) to join me on a Conference Call with Former Speaker Newt Gingrich this Friday, December 30, 12 Noon (CST).

Dr. Jim Garlow will emcee the call, pastor Skyline Church San-Diego, founder of the California Pastors Rapid Response Team, a group of several thousand pastors who led the successful charge for Prop. 8 in 2008, a Constitutional Amendment to ban same-sex marriage in California.

These are important and critical days in which to live and serve the Lord. I'm praying that the Lord is doing something dramatic in our time, and Iowa is leading the way on January 3rd.

Newt is leading the thrust to remove elitist judges who ignore the American people, like the 3 Iowa Supreme Court Justices who voted in 2009 to impose homosexual marriage on all Iowans.

On the call we will hear directly from Newt about this historic undertaking and hopefully have a chance to ask him about his plans for his "21st Century Contract With America."

I have been impressed with Newt and have come to the conclusion that Newt is the one person who can lead us out of the awful environment created by the present occupant in the White House. As Newt has expressed it, "America’s exceptional nature is based on the self-evident truths contained in the Declaration of Independence. Our rights are endowed by our Creator and they are unalienable." This is the type of understanding and strong leadership America needs.

Our Nation requires courageous, principled conservative leadership now more than ever.....from someone who understands that our rights as Americans are a gift from God, not government.

Please join me on this conference call with Newt Gingrich. Your participation is important to our future.

Thank you for your active participation in these critically important times.

Don Wildmon

American Family Association

Following a series of debate gaffes and blunders that have pushed him out of his spot as a frontrunner in the presidential race, Texas Gov. Rick Perry has tried to win back support by stressing his social conservative credentials. He is kicking off a bus campaign around Iowa focusing on “faith, family and freedom” and has framed himself as a victim of the media, claiming he is being “criticized for standing up for the values Jesus Christ talked about.” In one ad he discusses alleged liberal attacks against his faith and in another attacks openly gay soldiers while lamenting President Obama’s supposed “war on religion.” While Perry has won praise from Religious Right leaders for his ads that vilify gays while stoking fears about President Obama’s handling of religious freedom, at least one right-wing talk show host is angry at the candidate—because he hired a gay pollster.

After the governor’s gay-baiting ad was released, the two leaders of the gay conservative group GOProud tweeted that a high-level pollster on the Perry campaign, Tony Fabrizio, is himself fact gay. Fabrizio has previously worked for pro-gay rights causes, including the campaign to stop Florida’s constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage.

Steve Deace, an influential Iowa radio host, condemned Perry on his radio show yesterday for hiring an openly gay staffer, who  to work on his campaign for president, likening it to hiring a pedophile or a rapist: “When you put someone in place in your organization, regardless of whether they’re a practicing homosexual, a polygamist, a pedophile, a thief, a rapist, or any other form of behavior that violates the natural law, you are empowering people within your organization that are lawbreakers.”

Deace argued that Perry cannot claim to stand opposed to gay rights while working with people who are trying to “redefine” marriage and that Perry’s decision to hire Fabrizio “repudiates everything that his campaign is supposedly based on.” He went on to say that Perry either “didn’t know” or “didn’t care” about Fabrizio’s sexual orientation, which shows why “despite the fact he’s got $50 million, he’s got six percent more of the popular vote in the polls than I do”:

Deace: So what happens is here is the homosexual deviation from the script, from a public policy standpoint presents challenges to a culture that the rest of the deviations do not. It demands by its very nature, or its violations of nature, it demands that you change the definition of what nature is on everything, across the entire board. So therefore—what is the legal system in America? Well, let’s again go back to our founding document; our founding document says we are governed by ‘the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God,’ the natural law. Like, gravity is the natural law, it just is, whether you accept it or not, this is the natural law. So if this natural law is one man and one woman procreating and perpetuating the next generation, and so we’ve set up an entire standard in our system based off of this defined law, if we attempt to redefine that law, we are going to have to redefine everything else.

And so when you put someone in place in your organization, regardless of whether they’re a practicing homosexual, a polygamist, a pedophile, a thief, a rapist or any other form of behavior that violates the natural law, you are empowering people within your organization that are lawbreakers. We are all lawbreakers to some extent, but there’s a difference between recognizing that and going to God for grace and mercy, as opposed to saying you have to change the law and your tradition because of who I am right now, I don’t have to change, you must all change for me.

For the life of me I can’t understand why anybody who’s espousing what Rick Perry espouses in that television ad would put somebody in a place of prominence in his campaign who repudiates everything that his campaign is supposedly based on. What sense does that make? Who would do such a thing? So that leaves two options, either they didn’t know and didn’t do their own homework or they didn’t care. I’m not sure either one of those is really a good answer. That might be signs of why despite the fact he’s got $50 million, he’s got six percent more of the popular vote in the polls than I do.

Back in 2009, during the battle over marriage equality in Maine, Mike Heath of the Maine Family Policy Council was deeply involved in the fight, claiming that gay marriage was a warning sign "that our society is very sick indeed, and may be entering its final crisis" and was ever responsible for the state's bad weather:

Our crops are faring like our moods. The potato crop is blighted, and corn and fruit fields wither. In one historic building in Augusta, rain flooded the basement, as water from another source poured down through the ceiling and extinguished a century-old chandelier.

Few people would be bold enough to suggest the cause of the endless rain and gloom, that the moral climate in Maine has caused the sun to hide its face in shame.

Worse than the rain is the fact that Maine voted in homosexual “marriage.”

In May, our elected officials overturned a law of nature, and in its place paid honor to evil and unnatural practices. Our leaders allowed a cloud of error to hide the light of reason, and then the rain began. How fitting that this eclipse of human reason is mirrored by the disappearance of the sun!

What darkness equals the error of saying a family should be headed by two mothers or two fathers? What error equals saying that two women can be married, or two men? I am not saying that homosexuals or the gay rights movement are to blame for the weather. Far from it!

The fault lies with a refractory governor and Legislature who imposed an immoral law on our people.

Heath's embarrassing antics caused others in the marriage fight to cast him aside and, seeing the writing on the wall, Heath eventually resigned his position and announced that he was going to get involved in the manufacture and distribution of solar cookers in Africa.

That effort did not last very long and a few months later Heath was back in Maine, running the American Family Association's state affiliate and contemplating a short-lived run for governor.

After that, Heath fell off our radar ... until we learned today from Chris Moody that he is currently in charge of church outreach for Ron Paul's presidential campaign in Iowa:

Paul has brought several Christian conservatives onto his campaign in an ambitious effort to reach believers for his cause. Michael Heath, the campaign's Iowa director, previously worked for a New England-based group called the Christian Civic League of Maine that fought against adding sexual orientation to the state's Human Rights Act.

The national campaign has tasked Heath with leading church outreach in Iowa, where for months he has met with pastors and Christian congregations. "That's the biggest part of what I'm doing as state director," Heath told Yahoo News after a day of knocking on church doors with campaign literature. "Going to churches with a message in support of Dr. Paul's campaign that is very much faith-based and is also rooted in his commitment to a constitutionally defined limited federal government."

Yesterday we noted that Iowa radio host Steve Deace had co-written a new book entitled "We Won't Get Fooled Again: Where the Christian Right Went Wrong and How to Make America Right Again" which argues that, for too long, the Religious Right has supported the Republican Party only to be repeatedly betrayed.

Deace had homeschool guru Mike Farris on his program on Monday to discuss this topic and Farris, who is also Chancellor of Patrick Henry College (aka "God's Harvard,") said that while he is very disappointed in the Religious Right movement at the moment, he has great hopes for its future based on the students who are graduating from Patrick Henry. 

Deace agreed, saying that in the future, the social conservative movement would be less of an army and more like the Navy SEALS:

Farris: While I am really discouraged about what I am seeing in today's leaders, I get the privilege of seeing tomorrow's leaders virtually every day and it really does encourage me about what's coming because people who know the truth, who are trained to articulate it in a winsome fashion, they're going to turn this country around.

Deace: You know, it's funny you mention that; I've said to many media people I've had a chance to talk to in the last few months that this next generation of Christian political engagement will not look like the previous one. I don't know that we'll be able to mount mass offensives of people like we previously did but I do think what you're describing is what we'll have instead, which is more of a Navy SEAL sort of a unit. It will be smaller, but it will be better trained, it will be more aggressive, it will be more precise, it will be about more principle then I think trying to negotiate with the binary political party system and it might ultimately not be as big or raise as much money [but] that might be more effective.