Politics

• PFAW: Romney Still Thinks Corporations are People. They Still Aren’t.
• Kate Sheppard @ Mother Jones: Inside Virginia's Abortion Crackdown.
• James Crugnale @ Mediaite: Rick Santorum Contacted Google Over His Search Engine ‘Problem.’
• Jillian Rayfield @ TPM: Ted Haggard Appearing On Celebrity Wife Swap With Gary Busey.
• Andy Kopsa: Ultrasounds on Capitol Hill: latest in anti-choice tactics.
• Chris Rodda: I Want David Barton To Sue ME!

Back in July, we reported Lou Engle’s prophesy that the deadly tornado in Joplin, Missouri, was God’s punishment for legal abortion. This week, Engle got together with Rick Joyner of The Oak Initiative to promote The Call: Detroit with Transformation Michigan, an affiliate of The Oak Initiative. They took advantage of their time together to make a video discussing Engle’s Joplin prophesy. In the video, Engle tells Joyner that he received a message in a dream that President Obama has the potential to be the next Abraham Lincoln if he bans abortion through his very own "emancipation proclamation."

Watch:

President Obama is now presiding over a nation under the judgments of the shedding of the innocent blood, of 52, 54 million babies; I believe he is a Lincoln-type president. And wouldn’t it be God, that a man from Illinois would be elected president to release an emancipation proclamation for the blacks, and now a black man could be a president from Illinois that if we pray for him rather than point the finger at him we could actually break through the racial issues, we could find our black brothers and sisters in a realm that’s beyond politics and division. And actually if we pray for him as strong as we prayed for President Bush maybe God would loose a healing in our nation and he could become a pro-life president who would release an emancipation proclamation to end the shedding of the innocent blood and that the black voice in America would rise up maybe, because abortion started with racism with Margaret Sanger, would the black voice would arise and call this whole thing down, the shedding of innocent blood. This is a profound dream encounter; you just can’t treat it lightly.

Jim Bakker, following the collapse of The PTL Club and a stint in jail for twenty four counts of fraud, seems to be having something of a revival. He has launched a new television program and founded Morningside, a Christian community in Missouri modeled after his failed and fraudulent Heritage USA project (Heritage USA is now the home of Rick Joyner’s MorningStar Ministries).

Now Bakker is out with a new book, “Big Book of History.” Promoting the book on his blog, Bakker explains that the courts and President Barack Obama “kicked God out of schools and eventually we even kicked Him out of the entire nation.” Bakker points to the 1962 Supreme Court case which found mandatory school prayer to be unconstitutional as the moment when America began to reject God and consequently went into decline, an argument made by many Religious Right activists. He goes on to say that liberal politics and secular society made a generation of “kids [who] are self-willed, insolent, and morally depraved,” which he calls a sign of the End Times. Bakker writes that as a result of the Church’s silence, “An anti-christ spirit is masquerading in our world as a champion of human rights”:

How many people do you think understand that rebellious children are a sign of the Last Days? I don’t think too many Christians actually do equate a rebellious generation with the soon coming of the Lord, but that is, in fact, one of the signs. It’s easy to spot the other signs: earthquakes, wars and rumors of wars, famines, pestilences, etc.

…

Isaiah 30:1 NCV “The Lord said, how terrible it will be for these stubborn children. They make plans, but they don’t ask me to help them. They make agreements with other nations, without asking my Spirit. They are adding more and more sins to themselves.”

This is the USA!

We are just as much the rebellious children of God who did not take council with the Lord!

I have a new book that I am making available to everyone that’s called “Big Book of History” that outlines the truth about history from the creation days until today. This is a children’s book, but even adults today need to be reminded about the things in our history that contributed to the situation we currently find ourselves in with this generation of rebellious children.

The following events and timeline are outlined in the “Big Book of History”:

1947 – Pres. Harry Truman declares the U.S. is a Christian Nation.

1948 – Dead Sea Scrolls discovered. Modern State of Israel created.

1962 – Prayer removed from state schools in the U.S. by order of Supreme Court.

1963 – The bible is removed from state schools in the US.

2005 – The Ten Commandments removed from public buildings in the US.

2010 – Pres Barack Obama declares the US is no longer a Christian Nation.

In the last 50 years, we have kicked God out of schools and eventually we even kicked Him out of the entire nation and then wonder why our kids are self-willed, insolent, and morally depraved! In all reality, we have sometimes inadvertently assisted the anti-christ spirit in its ability to proliferate. Even much of the Church seemed to be asleep when all of this happened.

“The people who wrecked swathes of property, burned vehicles and terrorized communities have no moral compass to make them susceptible to guilt or shame” said British journalist Max Hastings in an article titled “Years of liberal dogma have spawned a generation of amoral, uneducated, welfare dependent, brutalized youngsters.” The “liberal dogma” Max speaks about can be further explained in a Christian sense when we go a little deeper: an anti-christ spirit is masquerading in our world as a champion of human rights.

 

Not long after Gov. Rick Perry's "The Response" prayer rally ended, the American Family Association sent out an email to everyone who had registered to attend the event or watch it on line, urging them to support an effort called "Champion the Vote" which seeks to "mobilize 5 million unregistered conservative Christians to register and vote according to the Biblical worldview in 2012."

We didn't know much about the Champion The Vote effort; only that it was an initiative of United in Purpose, which was the group responsible for the Rediscover God In America conference in Iowa earlier this year.

Today, the LA Times provides a bit more information about the organization and reports that United in Purpose is funded by Silicon Valley venture capitalists and Rick Perry supporters seeking to mobilize Christian voters:

The group operated largely out of public sight until last month, when Don Wildmon, founder of American Family Assn., sent an email promoting Champion the Vote to people who had registered to attend Texas Gov. Rick Perry's recent prayer rally.

The Rev. Buddy Smith, American Family Assn.'s executive vice president, said that Wildmon was a friend of [donor Ken] Eldred's, one of the group's financiers, but that the association was not providing it with monetary support.

Eldred, who founded companies such as Ariba Technologies and Inmac, has donated $1.1 million to Republican candidates since 2005, according to data from the Center for Responsive Politics, and is now raising money for Perry's presidential bid.

But he said in an interview that Champion the Vote did not have a partisan agenda.

"I have the audacity to believe that we can be an influence on both parties," Eldred said. "I personally believe that someday we're going to stand before God, and he's going to pull out a ballot and say, 'How did you vote in this election?' And there are going to be people who say, 'Why do you care about that, God?' And he's going to say, 'Because I created that country and I put you in charge.'"

He declined to say how much money he was putting into the project, except to note: "It's not cheap, I can tell you that."

[Bill Dallas, chief executive of United in Purpose,] a former real estate developer who said his Christian beliefs deepened while he was serving time at San Quentin State Prison for embezzlement, declined to identify the other venture capitalists financing the project, but described them as "men of deep faith." He said the group had an annual budget in the millions of dollars.

Over the next 10 years, United in Purpose aims to mobilize 40 million out of the estimated 60 million evangelicals in the United States to vote. To locate them, the organization has assembled a detailed database that pairs voter registration records with consumer information that identifies, among other things, subscribers to faith-based magazines, members of NASCAR fan clubs and people on antiabortion email lists ... The organization has already seen some early success, registering 268,000 new voters in Nevada, New Mexico, Texas and Colorado in 2010 by working with churches affiliated with the Sacramento-based National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference, said the Rev. Samuel Rodriguez, that group's president.

So the AFA paid for Rick Perry's massive public prayer rally and then used the mailing list generated by the event to generate support for Champion the Vote,  which is an effort that is being bankrolled by a donor who is currently fundraising for Rick Perry's presidential campaign ... but the prayer rally was "non-political," just as this entire enterprise is "nonpartisan"?

• How long before the GOP gives Oregon Republicans the boot for removing anti-gay language for their platform?
• Rick Perry will be speaking at Liberty University tomorrow.
• Mat Staver has been appointed to something called The Commission on Accountability and Policy for Religious Organizations.
• Apparently the Hubble Telescope discovered proof of God.
• Finally, quote of the day from Bryan Fischer: "This is not behavior that any rational society should condone, endorse, subsidize, reward, promote or sanction in domestic policy or in the marketplace. It’s a choice, and a bad one at that. It’s long past time for our culture to say a simple and direct 'No' to homosexuality and the homosexual agenda."

Last month California Gov. Jerry Brown signed into law a bill that makes sure courts can consider non-biological parents when determining a child’s legal parents, safeguarding the rights of families led by opposite-sex and same-sex couples who adopt children or conceive via a sperm donor or surrogate. Naturally, Randy Thomasson of the militantly anti-gay group Save California is outraged that the state would move to keep families intact. He told the American Family Association’s OneNewsNow that same-sex couples cannot be “natural role models” and that rights for gay and lesbian parents represent “absolute insanity”:

"AB 1349 -- giving non-biological parents, homosexuals, the right in court for kids in their custody -- that is not good, because children do best with a married mother and father and with natural role models ... not unnatural," contends Randy Thomasson, president of SaveCalifornia.com.

Another bill, SB 651, was recently introduced by homosexual Senator Mark Leno of San Francisco. That legislation would remove the requirement that a couple must live together in order to be recognized as domestic partners.

"This is basically exploding the domestic partnership thing to make it a homosexual relationship with a child, to make a homosexual relationship with people who don't even live together equal to marriage," the pro-family leader argues. "It's absolute insanity, and it is erasing all distinctions between natural and unnatural [and] marriage and non-marriage. It's sad, but this is what you get with Democrats," he concludes. "Elections have consequences."

• Sarah Posner @ Salon: The dog-whistle dictionary.
• Rob Boston @ Wall of Separation: Memo To The Religious Right: On Sept. 11, 2011, Americans Can Pray – Even Without Government Direction.
• Paul Constant @ Slog: Hateful Homophobe Orson Scott Card Thinks Hamlet Should Be More Homophobic.
• Towleroad: Connecticut Christian School Forces Student Out After Learning She is a Lesbian.
• Steve Benen: What Perry has ‘never struggled with at all.’
• Marie Diamond @ Think Progress Justice: Despite 41 DNA Exonerations In Texas In Last 9 Years, Perry Says He Never Loses Sleep Over Executing The Innocent.

Prior to Texas Gov. Rick Perry’s The Response prayer rally, we posted video of one of the rally’s official endorsers, John Benefiel, claiming that demonic spirits ruling Washington, D.C. were literally warping the minds of politicians and elected officials. Benefiel, who leads the Heartland Apostolic Prayer Network, is not alone in this view.

David Barton, the right-wing pseudo-historian who has counseled leading Republicans like Rick Perry, Newt Gingrich, Michele Bachmann and Mike Huckabee, similarly believes that demonic principalities are literally controlling parts of government and that Christians must engaged in spiritual warfare to combat them. Barton is an advocate of Seven Mountains Dominionism, which as Lance Wallnau explains, requires spiritual warfare against the demons that control the seven mountains of society.

In last year’s “In God We Trust” series, televangelist Kenneth Copeland asked Barton why politicians “change when they moved to Washington.” Citing Ephesians 6:12, Barton claimed that politics is a “spiritual battle” because demonic principalities literally “sit over” and control areas in the Capitol. These principalities, Barton says, prevent prayers from working because they are “fighting in the Heavenlies” and make politicians “think really goofy.”

Watch:

I’ll tell you one of the things too we’ll never get right until we understand this, it is a spiritual battle. We’re told in Ephesians, it’s not flesh in blood, we’re dealing with spirits. And I’ll tell you out of Daniel, praying, why did that answer get delayed for twenty-one days? Because the Prince of Persia fought against it. There are principalities that sit over certain areas.

And I can tell this in the U.S. Capitol. When I walk from the House side to the Senate side, I cross the middle line of the Capitol, I can feel a different principality because they have jurisdictions over different things. And there are principalities that sit over different government entities that cause them to think really goofy and you can’t get prayers through, they get delayed twenty-one days because the principalities are up there fighting in the Heavenlies.

Because we’re not fighting flesh and blood. And if you don’t understand this is a spiritual battle, and if you don’t understand there are really big principalities and powers sitting over places of power, whether it be banking, or education. There’s principalities that sit over schools to keep those kids from getting knowledge, there’s principalities that sit over financial institutions. They sit over households. That’s why you have principalities in powers, that gradation, you have the corporals, and you have the sergeants, and you have the lieutenants, the captains and the generals, and the generals have a bigger principality and those little corporals may have control over the house but it’s a spiritual battle.

It’s a spiritual battle and we’ll never win until we understand that.

• Michele Bachmann spoke at the Florida Family Policy Council awards banquet last night where she received the organization's "William Wilberforce Award."
• Rick Joyner says "the Obama’s extravagant lifestyle at the expense of taxpayers is far out of bounds, especially with the hard times so many are going through now."
• NOM continues to lose in its effort to flout disclosure laws.
• Religious Right activists are threatening to sue if they are prevented from praying at Ground Zero on 9/10, even though they have no reason to think that they will be.
• You know your movie is bad if you are reduced to sending out press releases announcing that someone drove three hours in bad weather to see it.
• Mitt Romney, Rick Perry and Michele Bachmann will all be attending the Faith and Freedom Coalition's Kick-Off Rally on Sept. 22.