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Once upon a time, Janet Folger declared that the only hope Christians had of not being rounded up and sent off to prison was to support Mike Huckabee.  It was that sort of passion that landed her a position as co-chair of Mike Huckabee’s Faith and Values Coalition, whom she had anointed the “David among Jesse’s sons” after the Values Voter Debate she organized back in 2007.

In essence, God had chosen Huckabee and it was Folger’s job to make it clear that those with firm Christian principles must refuse to support anyone else:

There are sheep, and there are shepherds. Sheep follow the pundits, the polls, political expediency and promised perks. Shepherds follow principle. Gov. Mike Huckabee is such a man. So are those who stand on principle with him.

So wedded to Huckabee was Folger that she even started a front-group that ran ads against both Mitt Romney and John McCain:

Senator John McCain favors forcing taxpayers to fund embryonic stem cell research, which the National Right to Life Committee says: "requires killing human embryos."

McCain violated our Free Speech rights with the notorious McCain-Feingold Act, and personally sued Wisconsin Right to Life for communicating with their members prior to an election.

John McCain is one of only seven Republican senators who voted against the Marriage Protection Amendment supported by President Bush.

…

John McCain:  Against protecting life.  Against protecting free speech.  Against protecting marriage.

But that was then.  Once God’s candidate failed to secure the nomination, Folger changed her tune, declaring it imperative that those with firm Christian principles now support John McCain. 

Folger was blasted by Gordon Klingenschmitt for selling-out in the pages of WorldNetDaily, but that obviously didn’t silence her, as she has returned to the pages of WND - this time to blast WND founder Joseph Farah for his own staunch refusal to support McCain, beseeching him to put aside his own principles for the greater good:

Here's the bottom line: If McCain is elected, we WILL get the judges we need to bring this slaughter to an end. All of our efforts and all of our labors that have taken us this far will have been worth it. If Obama is elected, we will not only see the court stacked against us with life-long appointments, we will lose every single advance we have ever made in every state, city and county.

You want to protest? Get a sign and march. We're out of time. Besides that, I'm sick of marching – I want to win: I want to restore protection to children in my lifetime.

I've given my life to the pro-life movement, and I don't have another life to give it. Neither do the 50 million children whose lives were stolen from them. If we don't take what may be our last chance, I don't believe we're going to see another one. If we choose protest over influence, Obama will not only make sure that another 50 million children lose their lives, but he'll make sure we won't recognize what's left of our nation when he's through with it.

…

I urge you to choose life, that we and our children may live. That choice is John McCain. Any other choice will be lethal … literally.

In the course of six months, Folger has gone from a militantly principled Huckabee activist who was convinced that he was God’s chosen candidate to a vocal supporter of John McCain, whom she was recently proclaiming was against protecting life, free speech, and marriage and therefore utterly unacceptable.

For today’s edition of WorldNetDaily, Alan Keyes penned an 11,000+ word essay dedicated to laying out the religious, moral, and philosophical grounds upon which James Dobson has succumbed to moral relativism in suggesting a few weeks ago that he might consider supporting John McCain after earlier saying that he would never do so “as a matter of conscience.”   

In typical Keyesian fashion, he spends the first 1500 words comparing his essay to Thomas Paine's "Common Sense" and explaining that its crushing length is necessary to wake the American public out of their intellectual stupor.  But when he finally gets down to business, he peppers his tome with the sorts of quasi-philosophic ramblings for which he is known, such as this explanation of the dangers of gay couples getting married and how “disregarding the natural basis of family leads to tyrannical government:  

By nature the child has the right to a kind of natural dominion over its progenitors, including the opportunity at least to try out the appeal that its helpless condition makes to their natural sensibility. Moreover, a child systematically deprived of any knowledge of at least one of its biological parents cannot fulfill the filial obligations that arise from the natural connection, or avoid the oedipal risks connected with such ignorance.

…

In this respect, just as abortion suppresses the child's right to life, homosexual marriage suppresses the child's natural belongings, the first rights of property in the primordial sense of the term. But once we abandon respect for the authority of nature as it establishes the rights of the child, we have in principle abandoned that respect when it comes to any human beings whose situation makes them as helpless or vulnerable as children with regard to their superiors in power. Thus the issue of homosexual marriage actually poses the question of our allegiance to the principle of natural human equality, the principle from which we derive the form of government meant to secure our liberty.

In light of the fact that we are “in the midst of the feverish crisis that marks either the recovery of the Republic, or its dissolution,” Keyes declares that both John McCain and Barack Obama are unqualified to fight the “insidious war [that] is being waged against the moral pillars of our freedom”

In light of such grim possibilities, can the issues involved in the assault on the natural family be treated as matters of political convenience or emotional whim, as John McCain and others like him do? McCain's statements on the issue of homosexual marriage, civil unions and the need to protect traditional marriage by constitutional means show no regard for the profound destruction of moral principle that will result from overthrowing the claims of the natural family. Like Barack Obama, he takes positions exclusively calculated to win votes from the constituencies he needs for political victory, no matter if they risk the soul and moral foundations of the republic. At the very least, he wants to harvest votes from people deeply concerned about the besieged moral foundations of our liberty even though he obviously lacks the understanding needed to defend them. He cannot see, or perhaps even conceive of, the connections between our moral ideas and practices and the survival of our institutions of self-government. Such a leader might be barely adequate in the "weak, piping time of peace." But when, on every front insidious war is being waged against the moral pillars of our freedom, his inadequacy is not just lamentable, it will be deadly.

Which brings Keyes to his key point – which is that James Dobson is a hypocrite and a failure as a Christian:

According to Politico, the Right is warming to John McCain’s far-right stance on judicial appointments, and with the 5-4 decisions that closed out the Supreme Court’s term, we can see the outline of McCain’s and the Right’s campaign to get the base to turn out in November on the issue of judges.

Last month’s Supreme Court decision on habeas corpus was likened by the Right a “white flag of surrender” that would cause “more Americans to be killed”; Fred Thompson, a judicial advisor to John McCain, wrote that the “remedy” was for “concerned citizens to turn out on Election Day to elect a new president.”

The more recent decision overturning D.C.’s gun ban inspired Ted Nugent to write in Human Events that “the 5-4 ruling is another painful example” of “a divisive culture war raging on, and four supreme justices frighteningly disconnected from the heart and soul of America.” Michael Reagan warned that the majority “will vanish if the liberals manage to elect Barack Obama and give his party sufficient control of Congress to guarantee that future Court vacancies will be filled with activist liberal justices who will turn the Constitution upside down.”

The Family Research Council called the Second Amendment case “a reminder for voters of just how important the elections are this fall.”

The next President is likely to name 2-3 Supreme Court justices, who will be examining the constitutionality of a variety of laws for the next few decades. Life, marriage, and religious freedom are all issues that are likely to land in front of the Supreme Court. … For fiscal, social, and national defense conservatives, judges are one issue that brings all conservatives together.

According to the Weekly Standard, a case restricting capital punishment to murderers and not rapists of children demonstrated “that the fight to turn the Court from a capricious and imperious vanguard of liberalism into an impassive umpire is far from over.” The Standard’s Matthew Continetti advised McCain to “take this opportunity to explain how his judicial philosophy differs from Obama's, and why it matters.” A National Review editorial similarly responded, “Too many of our justices are evolving away from democracy. Let’s not elect a president who will encourage them — and appoint more of them.”

Traditional Values Coalition’s Lou Sheldon wrote that the death penalty case and the habeas corpus decision “are perfect examples showing why it’s important that Americans choose the right person to assume the Presidency in January 2009.”

The person who becomes President and Commander-in-Chief of our Armed Forces will likely have to replace Justices Stevens, Ginsburg, and Souter – all liberals who use their power to impose their leftist ideology upon all Americans. …

If we fail to put a man into the Oval Office who understands judicial restraint and the rule of law, our legal system will be set back 30 years. This is especially true if a liberal President appoints young liberals to the Court and fills up the federal judiciary with more radical leftist judges.

Finally, there’s the 5-4 decision overturning the “Millionaire’s Amendment,” a part of the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law that lifted contribution limits for politicians facing self-funded opponents. Despite McCain’s role in originally passing the law, McCain supporter Hans von Spakovsky wrote that the narrow ruling “graphically illustrates just how important the next president's appointments to the Supreme Court will be to preserving our First Amendment rights in the political arena.”

“[G]iven the number of Supreme Court appointments a Democratic president will be able to make, an Obama victory will move America more radically leftward than ever in its history,” Dennis Prager summarized.

All these cases will continue to be cited by the Right in pushing its unmotivated constituency to the polls, as “are reminders that elections are not just about putting candidates in office for a few years,” as Thomas Sowell put it to those “who are thinking of venting their frustrations by voting for some third-party candidate that they know has no chance of being elected. There will be a president chosen this November, and he will appoint Supreme Court justices during his term, regardless of whether you stay home or go to the polls.”

Pope Benedict’s visit to the United States is long over, but the Washington Times continues to doggedly report on one particular angle: the many thousands receiving communion at the pope’s masses included a handful of Democratic politicians, who, like the majority of American Catholics, are pro-choice.

While this seems like the season for picking over politicians’ personal religious lives, the Right has been trumpeting this point of contention for a number of years to use as a wedge between liberal candidates and faith. In particular, John Kerry’s communion became a public issue in 2004.

In 2008, none of the major presidential candidates are Catholic. But that just means the Right has to get more creative.

Last week, Catholic League President Bill Donohue tried to jump on the Rev. Wright bandwagon with his own brand of religious policing, attacking not Barack Obama’s faith, but that of his Catholic advisory council: “If these are the best ‘committed Catholic leaders, scholars and advocates’ Obama can find, then it is evident that he has a ‘Wright’ problem when it comes to picking Catholic advisors.” Donahue’s beef? Many of Obama’s Catholic backers disagree with him on abortion, stem-cell research, and school vouchers.

The advisors complained, bringing up the existence of other moral issues besides the ones that fit the Republican platform: war, poverty, etc. Donohue responded, calling it “shocking” that one could set political priorities on par with abortion.

And then, seeing a chance to attack Obama instead of his advisors, Donohue promptly compared the senator to Hitler (for opposing a graphic bill designed by abortion opponents to establish personhood for the fetus):

“It is so nice to know that Obama thinks abortion ‘presents a profound moral challenge.’ Is infanticide another ‘profound moral challenge’? To wit: When he was in the Illinois state senate he led the fight to deny health care to babies born alive who survived an abortion. That, my friends, is not a moral challenge—it’s a Hitlerian decision.”

When he was running for president, Mike Huckabee made no secret of his displeasure with the current leadership of the Religious Right, regularly chiding them for refusing to support his candidacy.  It was, at least in part, because of their glaring lack of support that Huckabee’s campaign eventually folded, forcing him to drop-out of the race and it looks as if Huckabee is not particularly prepared to let bygones be bygones:

Mike Huckabee can't definitively explain why he couldn't win the Republican presidential nomination, but he thinks the desire of Christian leaders to be "kingmakers," media coverage and Mother Nature all had something to do with it.

"Rank-and-file evangelicals supported me strongly, but a lot of the leadership did not," the former Arkansas governor says. "Let's face it, if you're not going to be king, the next best thing is to be the kingmaker. And if the person gets there without you, you become less relevant."

Religious broadcaster Pat Robertson backed Rudolph W. Giuliani; American Value President and former presidential hopeful Gary Bauer endorsed Sen. John McCain; and Family Research Council President Tony Perkins remained neutral, even as Mr. Huckabee was wowing their supporters and winning the values voter straw polls they organized.

Huckabee seems particularly galled by Religious Right’s allegations that he was weak on foreign policy issues and didn’t fully comprehend to threat posed to this country by “Islamo-fascism,” which he says was nonsense since he was the only one who really understood the true nature of the threat:

"I was the one person who talked about this being a theological war, not just a geopolitical war [because] it was unlike a traditional war over borders and boundaries," he says.

While Huckabee remains bitter over his inability to win over the Right’s current leadership, it appears as if various other right-wing outsiders are equally bitter over the prospect of having to support John McCain and are considering defecting to the Constitution Party:

[I]is 2008 the year when a third-party candidate would find some traction among those disaffected by the abortion, marriage and national security stances found in the records of the three front-runners left in the race?

Charles Lewis, national outreach director for Christian Exodus, is one of those behind the launch of the new Save America Summit website, and believes it's not only time, it's overdue.

Among those participating in this third-party-seeking Save America Summit are Flip Benham, Wiley Drake, Bill Federer, Gordon Klingenschmitt, Howard Phillips, Chris Simcox, as well as representatives of organizations such as Gun Owners of America, the Council for National Policy, and Stop the ACLU and others who are convinced that McCain, Obama, and Clinton all plan "an EU-style unification of America with socialist Canada and Mexico during the next administration."

Sadly for Huckabee, he can't seem to get any love from these right-wing activists either, since they seem to have already narrowed down their choices for president to four people: Alan Keyes, Roy Moore, Jerome Corsi, and former Sen. Bob Smith.

For 16 years, Mrs. Shirley Dobson has served as chairman of the National Day of Prayer (NDP). This year, she has added another campaign — a call to seek God’s guidance for the elections. “As long as God is on His throne, there is always hope,” says Mrs. Dobson, wife of Focus on the Family founder and Chairman Dr. James Dobson. She spoke with CitizenLink about the two critical prayer campaigns. 1. What is so important about this election? I believe our country is at a crossroads. Whoever is elected president will play a pivotal role in determining the future of our country. It’s imperative people go to the polls and elect a candidate whose leadership will reflect a moral and principled perspective.

“A spiritual invasion is taking place!” shouted Rod Parsley at the “War on Christians” conference in 2006. “… Man your battle stations! Ready your weapons! Lock and load!” Parsley, an Ohio megachurch pastor and televangelist, promised to build an army of “Patriot Pastors” to march to the polls, an even bolder political machine than the one he led in 2004 that helped pass an anti-gay amendment in the state and nudge George W. Bush to reelection. Parsley’s 2006 candidate, Ken Blackwell, ultimately lost the governor’s race, but the televangelist remains an outsized political force, and his “Patriot Pastors” machine is still a model for church-based electoral organizing—as demonstrated by Mike Huckabee’s surprise win in Iowa.

Thus far, Parsley has kept his distance from the presidential race, while continuing to use his TV show to oppose abortion and hate-crimes protections. But now he’s jumped in to help John McCain lock up the Republican nomination. From the Columbus Dispatch:

McCain campaigned yesterday in Cincinnati, where he appeared with the Rev. Rod Parsley of World Harvest Church of Columbus. McCain called Parsley a "spiritual guide," while Parsley later labeled McCain a "strong, true, consistent conservative." …

Parsley shared the stage with McCain during a rally at Hamilton County Memorial Hall in Cincinnati but didn't speak.

In a later interview, Parsley said he supports McCain because the senator will be tough on national security and "protect the unborn."

The megachurch pastor, criticized in the past for mixing religion and politics, acknowledged that McCain isn't the ideal candidate for evangelical Christians, who overwhelmingly backed President Bush in 2004.

"Yet at the same time, when you put John McCain up against Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama, the ideological and philosophical differences are overwhelming," Parsley said.

While the results of next Tuesday’s GOP primary vote in Ohio are all but certain, Parsley’s intervention suggests that he may deploy his “Patriot Pastor” machine on behalf of McCain ahead of November, when the state is likely to be a closely-fought “battleground” yet again.

Recent polling suggests that no matter how much time McCain has spent recently pandering to far-right activists, he still retains the positive image of a political “maverick.” That air of bipartisanship is difficult to reconcile with McCain’s decision to campaign side-by-side with Parsley, a figure who has taken partisanship to apocalyptic levels, translating the Republican-Democrat divide into spiritual warfare.

(AP photo of McCain and Parsley.)

The infamous Dred Scott Supreme Court decision—declaring enslaved blacks to be property and presaging the Civil War—is often invoked by opponents of abortion rights, who make the analogy that Roe v. Wade is to fetuses as Dred Scott is to African Americans. Rod Parsley does them one better, arguing that Roe v. Wade is to African Americans just as Dred Scott is to African Americans.

Last week, the Ohio televangelist used his TV show to claim that reproductive health-care providers were trying to “exterminate” African Americans. On Sunday he aired a sermon version of the same argument—and paired it with a get-out-the-vote message for his viewers in Super Tuesday states. Warning that a candidate victorious in today’s primaries will likely become president, and will appoint Supreme Court justices and sign or veto abortion legislation, Parsley’s show told viewers, “Our democracy is too important for Christians to be silent any more.”

Parsley appears to have largely abstained from campaigning around the presidential election so far, but it’s hard to imagine him being apolitical in the coming year. In 2004 and 2006, Parsley and Russell Johnson, another Columbus-area megachurch pastor, teamed up to run a church-based political machine driving the successful anti-gay marriage initiative and the unsuccessful gubernatorial campaign of Ken Blackwell. Calling themselves “Patriot Pastors,” they vowed to wage war against their political opponents—“secular jihadists,” the “forces of darkness,” and the “hordes of hell.”

The Cleveland Plain Dealer caught up with Parsley’s comrade Johnson, who headed the Ohio Restoration Project alongside Parsley’s Reformation Ohio. The groups promised to save souls while moving hundreds of thousands of voters to the polls, all while hosting candidate Blackwell at events around the state. Johnson promises more “Patriot Pastor”-style organizing—but without being so blatant about it:

Johnson said he expects that Ohio's Christian leadership will become more active once primary season is over, with varying emphasis on social issues, economics and national security from a conservative point of view. …

Johnson said political activity among preachers might look a little different than it did in the past, when he and the Rev. Parsley and their Patriot Pastors movement drew accusations of violating their churches' tax-exempt status by campaigning for Blackwell. (The pastors denied that they officially backed any particular candidate.)

In any case, leaders don't want to become "an easy target," Johnson says, so they are unlikely to give themselves a moniker. But they will be spreading information through e-mail networks, creating discussion groups and voter guides, and urging people to "get registered, get informed, go vote and take somebody with you."