Religious Right

Whenever I see articles like this one about Dakota Ary, a fourteen year-old Texas student who was suspended for reportedly saying in class that, as a Christian, he believes homosexuality is wrong, I am always reminded of the story of Raymond Raines or, more recently, the eight year-old Massachusetts student supposedly suspended for drawing a picture of Jesus.

These absurd stories are almost always generated by the Religious Right legal groups who have been hired to represent the families of the "victims" - does anyone remember Edwin Graning? - and the resulting stories inevitably present only their version, often because school systems have policies of not commenting on specific student-related cases.

And that is exactly what is happening with Ary as he is being represented by Liberty Counsel and every article written about the situation presents only that side of the story as Ary's school district is refusing to comment.

And so it just serves up a prime opportunity for Bryan Fischer to renew his "gays commit hate crimes" campaign and trot out his "The Nazis were all gay" claims:

One can be forgiven for asking what in the world a German teacher is doing talking about homosexuality in his classroom in the first place. Apparently the tenuous link was that the teacher brought up the topic of homosexuality in Germany.

Fine. Does this teacher tell his students that Adolf Hitler was a homosexual, and developed a police record as a homosexual prostitute on the streets of Vienna? Does he tell his students that the Nazi Party started in a homosexual bar in Munich? Does this teacher tell his students that virtually all of the Brownshirts, the Storm Troopers who served as Hitler’s thugs and enforcers, were themselves homosexuals?

Does he tell his students that students in German schools are taught these things because they never want a repeat of the Nazi horror?

Thanks to the intervention of Liberty Counsel and attorney Matt Krause, the school has backed this Gaystapo teacher down and rescinded this Nazi-esque suspension in time for this honors student to play in the school’s next football game.

As a culture, we must come to grips with the simple truth that we are going to have to choose between the homosexual agenda and freedom because we cannot have both. There is no room in the homosexual lobby for freedom of religion, conscience, speech, press or even association.

Quite simply, we must choose between homosexuality and liberty. Let’s be sure we make the right choice.

Before heading to this week’s Presidency 5 conference in Orlando, Rick Perry named two Religious Right leaders to his Florida Presidency 5 campaign leadership team: John Stemberger and Pam Olsen. While Stemberger’s anti-choice, anti-gay and anti-Muslim activism is well known, Olsen is a far more obscure figure, but no less extreme. Olsen has said that same-sex marriage will lead to God’s judgment, preached Seven Mountains dominionism, and even claims that she, as a prophet, will have the power to raise the dead in the End Times.

Olsen heads the Tallahassee branch of the International House of Prayer, whose members helped organize and preached at Perry’s The Response prayer rally in August. The Response emcee Mike Bickle, who once claimed that Oprah is the harbinger of the Antichrist and that gay marriage is “rooted in the depths of hell,” is the founder and director of IHOP. As reported by Sarah Posner, Olsen was inspired to found IHOP Tallahassee after extremist self-proclaimed prophet Cindy Jacobs prophesied over her.

In July, Olsen warned that God’s increasingly severe judgments will come on the church and America for legalizing same-sex marriage in the form of natural disasters:

We are under judgment. Do you know how many of the denominations now are suddenly saying, ‘Oh ok we think it’s ok now to have gay marriage, we think it’s ok to have gay preachers, we think it’s ok.’ Whole denominations! The Episcopalians fell off the planet, they think it’s ok to have gay priests. We’ve got other groups, one of the Presbyterians, they’re looking at voting, we’ve got other ones, they’re all of the sudden going, ‘Oh in the name of tolerance,’ and they’re forgetting God’s word completely in whole denominations. You know what, God is not one that’s gonna wink at sin, He will come and shake at everything that can be shaken. God is a God of judgment, He is. If we think we’re not gonna be judged…He judged Israel? Are we better than that? And sometimes I think we think we are, but we’re not. And God is shaking. If anybody looks at the news and has just seen what’s been happening recently with the floods, the fires, the tornadoes, God is shaking. Yeah I think you have God shaking, sure you have the Enemy shaking, you have both and I don’t want to say oh that’s the judgment of God or that’s the Enemy. But the reality is God is judging us, and I think it’s going to get worse.

In an April service, Olsen preached Seven Mountains dominionism, the radical theology that demands fundamentalist Christians take control over the seven critical spheres of society: government, business, media, arts and entertainment, family, media, education, and religion. Towards the end of the service, Olsen also states that in the End Times she will be capable of raising the dead:

We talk a lot about the seven centers of power or the seven mountains, asking God to come. If you are ever in any intercession set here at the house of prayer, you will find us often crying out God move on the hearts of the family; awaken the church in the West, in this city awaken the church; we cry out for the government, we’re in capital city and we better be crying out to the government; pray for the campuses and the youth to be moved; that God will move and change the media’s heart that He would begin to cause them to speak truth; that He would come and move in the marketplace and awaken and bring His people the finances to literally fund the Kingdom of God; that He come and move in every area in arts and entertainment. Those are the seven mountains of influence that God would begin to move, and we cry out for that because God wants to come, the Holy Spirit wants to come and it is like hot molten lava that He would literally sweep over every area.

…

Man I tell you what, we better know God’s word in this hour with what’s coming, we better know God’s word, and we better be saying, God I want to partner with your heart, whatever’s coming I want to be prepared as an End Time messenger who has walked in the fire and knows You and knows how to say, God that person needs to be raised from the dead and I’m gonna say, in Jesus’ name rise up and walk, and I’m gonna pray that in and see the dead raised!

Anti-Muslim activists have been making the rounds in Religious Right media recently, including Frank Gaffney’s weeklong love fest with Rick Joyner, Robert Spencer’s and Pamela Geller’s appearances on Janet Mefferd’s show, and Steve Emerson’s interview with Jerry Newcombe of Truth in Action Ministries. Yesterday, Spencer joined Newcombe on his show Truth that Transforms, where the two conflated progressives’ support for civil rights for Muslims with support for extremism. Spencer told Newcombe that “the left doesn’t really like America or western civilization” so they “see in Islam” an influential “ally.” He made a similar argument on The 700 Club with Pat Robertson, when he asserted that the supposedly liberal media “hate” everything “that’s American, that’s Western, that’s Christian, that’s Judeo-Christian.”

Listen:

Newcombe: I find it a phenomenon right now in our culture at large if you look at a lot of liberals and so-called progressives and so forth, let’s say even organizations like the ACLU, that supposedly are in favor of women’s rights and so forth, and yet these liberals by and large embrace Islam more than they do historic, traditional Christianity.

Spencer: It is ridiculous but it is very commonplace. I mean what we have really is that the left doesn’t really like America or western civilization and so I think that they see in Islam an another entity that doesn’t like western civilization and so they see it, in it an ally, and that’s essentially what’s going on.

Last week we noted that John Stemberger of the Florida Family Policy Council was hinting that he was going to be endorsing Rick Perry for President, despite the fact that Michele Bachmann had recently headlined a fundraising event for his organization.

Today, the Perry campaign issued a press release announcing that Stemberger would be serving as co-chair of his leadership team for the upcoming Florida Presidency 5 event:

Texas Gov. Rick Perry today announced his leadership team for Presidency 5 (P5), with Speaker Dean Cannon serving as chairman. Gov. Perry will participate in Florida P5 this week, including the P5 debate, CPAC and straw poll in Orlando, Fla.

...

In addition to Speaker Cannon, conservative activists John Stemberger and Pam Olsen will serve as co-chairs.

Stemberger was Chairman of the Florida4Marriage.org campaign which outlawed marriage equality in Florida in 2008 and was deeply involved in the Rifqa Bary saga in 2009.  In fact, his actions during the Bary case resulted in Stemberger eventually facing misconducted charges and a ten million dollar lawsuit, though the complaint was eventually dismissed and the lawsuit was dropped.

In addition to being a Religious Right activist, Stemberger is also a personal injury attorney who has, in this capacity, put forth some rather novel legal arguments:

An attorney suing Dollar Rent-A-Car has apologized for filing a lawsuit that characterized the Irish as hopelessly tethered to pubs and pints and unfit to drive the highways of America.

John Stemberger admitted he made a mistake and promised Wednesday to rewrite the negligence lawsuit he filed in March.

The suit was filed on behalf of the family of Carmel Elizabeth Cunningham, an Irish woman who was killed last year when her boyfriend, Sean McGrath, crashed their rental car. He is also Irish.

Prosecutors say McGrath, 33, was drunk at the time of the crash and have charged him with manslaughter. A warrant has been issued for his arrest.

In the suit, Stemberger claimed Dollar "knew or should have known about the unique cultural and ethnic customs existing in Ireland which involve the regular consumption of alcohol at `Pubs' as a major component to Irish social life.''

He went on to charge that Dollar "knew or should have known that Sean McGrath would have a high propensity to drink alcohol.''

Update:  Sarah Posner reports that the other co-chair, Pam Olsen, is a Cindy Jacobs associate and the founder of the Tallahassee International House of Prayer:

Olsen founded the Tallahassee International House of Prayer after she "received a prophetic word through Cindy Jacobs that God was going to use her as a mighty weapon against the enemy through the prayer movement and that He was going to raise up a physical location that would be a place of refuge for people, pastors and missionaries to come and pray."

Only a few years ago Religious Right groups and Republicans were running as far as possible away from the Personhood Colorado campaign, the effort to pass an extreme anti-choice measure that was twice handily defeated by Colorado voters. Last year, the National Right to Life Committee, Americans United for Life, Colorado Citizens for Life all refused to back the Colorado personhood amendment, and the Colorado Eagle Forum called the personhood campaign a “disaster.”

But now, the Personhood Mississippi campaign –which is nearly identical to the Colorado effort – has received the support of prominent Republican leaders including Mike Huckabee and anti-choice groups such as the American Family Association, Liberty Counsel and the Family Research Council.

The campaign to pass the personhood amendment, called Amendment 26, is led by the head of the extreme Mississippi Constitution Party and a member of Christian Exodus, which wanted to have states secede from the U.S. in order to form a new theocratic system of government. Designed to challenge Roe v. Wade, the amendment would criminalize abortion in all cases and also ban the treatment of ectopic pregnancies, in vitro fertilization, stem cell research and certain forms of birth control.

Huckabee addressed a fundraiser for the personhood campaign and urged activists to give money because pro-choice activists only want to “make people rich” by keeping abortion legal. “This isn’t about elevating women,” Huckabee said, “this is about elevating wealth on behalf of those who profit from the sale of death.”

Watch:

But here’s what I don’t assume. I do not assume that you comprehend the battle you’re gonna face over the next couple of months in this fight for Amendment 26. You have no idea how many millions of dollars are likely to be poured into your state and it’s not stimulus money and economic development and job creation, it is hardcore political money that is designed to preserve the abortion industry which is a multimillion dollar industry specifically designed in order to terminate life and make people rich. Let’s not kid ourselves; this is not about elevating women this is about elevating wealth on behalf of those who profit from the sale of death.

…

The reason that America is more pro-life than it ever has been is because the younger generation of Americans are more pro-life than their mothers and their grandmothers. And do you know why? Because science has affirmed what God has been trying to scream to us all along: that is a human life! Thank God for the science that’s affirmed it.

On today’s WallBuilders Live, David Barton responded to a Houston Chronicle report that from 2000 to 2009, Rick Perry gave just $14,243 of his of $2.68 million fortune to churches and religious organizations. Barton, who claimed throughout the show that people who support social justice efforts are less likely to support charities, tried to defend Perry by pointing to the fact that the Texas governor has given away all the proceeds from his books:

Governor Perry’s getting his brains beat in because look how little he gave to charity. Time out! There’s another story there. Number one he does not itemize his deductions so you don’t know how much he gave to charity. Number two is he writes entire books and gives 100% of the proceeds to charity which doesn’t show up on his income sheet. He gives millions to charity but because he does not itemize and because he does entire books and signs the rights over there’s a lot going out that doesn’t show.

Which charities have the proceeds of Perry’s books gone to? He donated the proceeds of his first book, about the Boy Scouts, to the Boy Scouts of America. And he declares in his most recent book, the policy blueprint Fed Up!, that “all of the author’s net proceeds from the sale of this book will be donated to the Foundation to support the work of the Center for Tenth Amendment Studies.” The Center for Tenth Amendment Studies is a division of the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a right-wing think tank allied with Perry that was founded by James Leininger, who is now the group’s Chairman Emeritus.

Leininger is one of Perry’s biggest political bankrollers – he has donated and loaned millions of dollars to Perry’s political campaigns for over a decade and just so happens to be a close business partner of the governor. Columnist Molly Ivins dubbed Leininger “God’s sugar daddy” because of his prolific financial support for Religious Right activists and the Texas Restoration Project, including an Austin “Pastors’ Policy Briefing” to celebrate Perry’s reinauguration in January of 2007. The Texas Restoration Project was a pet project of Perry’s – Wayne Slater of the Dallas Morning News notes that “the governor helped create a network of ‘patriot pastors’ in Texas called the Texas Restoration Project, which worked for passage of the gay-marriage ban in 2005 and Perry's reelection a year later.”

Most recently, Leininger hosted a summit to introduce Religious Right leaders to Perry shortly after he announced his candidacy for president. Notable guests at Leininger’s ranch included James Dobson, Richard Land, Harry Jackson, Jim Garlow, Rick Scarborough… and, of course, David Barton.

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.

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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"?

As we noted a few weeks ago, Jim Garlow has become the face and leading activist on behalf of the Alliance Defense Fund's "Pulpit Initiative," which encourages pastors to speak out on political issues and even endorse or oppose candidates during their sermons in a direct challenge to the IRS.

Yesterday, Garlow was a guest on James Dobson's radio program where he outlined just what sort of sermon he plans to preach on "Pulpit Freedom Sunday" to urge his congregation not to vote for candidates that do not share his values and then compared the effort to Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German theologian who resisted the Nazis and was ultimately put to death:

Garlow: But here's the kind of phrasing that I would likely use on that Sunday. I would say the following candidates have the following positions as ti relates to abortion, as it relates to the definition of marriage, as it relates to their view of that national debt - because the national debt is a moral issue, thou shall not steal from future generations. And, that being the case, here's the following candidates that hold these various views of these three and perhaps many other topics.

Having said that, here's what the Scripture teaches specifically about that. And, after I go through that, as fully-devoted followers of Jesus Christ, we would not want to elect individuals - given the fact that the Bible has a great deal to say about economic, or life principles, or the definition of marriage in a scriptural context - we would not want persons who are in defiance of God's will in positions of authority over us. What fully devoted follower of Christ would want to defy God's will for how national and community life is to be ordered according to the Scripture?

Dobson: It essentially comes down to "use it or lose it," right? we've had rights in the past and we were willing to allow the IRS and the government to silence us and we didn't complain. Or not enough complained. Or not enough defied the order, which is just unconscionable when you consider we're drawing our information for our understanding and interpretation of the Scripture and the somebody in Washington can tell me that I can't say that? That's what happened in Sweden, it's what's happening in Canada and in other parts of the country. This is a movement that threatens the very life of the church. And, man, I'm preaching it now Jim and I'm not even a pastor.

Garlow: April the ninth, 1945, a man was stripped of all his clothes, taken outside and hung by a piano wire. His name was Dietrich Bonhoeffer. We celebrate how great that man was and what an incredible human being he was and the martyr he became. Why do we celebrate his life? It is because he was a man of God who refused to succumb to the powers of the government that tried to control what he would do and say in the pulpit and in his ministerial and pastoral life. And so we're attempting to see, before it's too late, before it's too late in America, to raise up a generation of Dietrich Bonhoeffers.