Values Voter Summit

I think that I am just going to start regularly posting the Family Research Council's suggested prayers that it sends out regularly to its "Prayer Team" because it provides a good insight into just what the FRC considers its key priorities at any given moment.

The most recent update contains prayers aimed at the Values Voter Summit:

Pray that God will mightily bless; that next weekend's VVS will have a life-changing impact on attendees and a nation-changing impact on America.

As well as the stem-cell research lawsuit:

Praise God for strict constructionist judges like Royce Lamberth and this ruling to protect human life. Pray that God would raise up more men and women to serve as judges who will "Hear the disputes between your brothers and judge fairly [and not] show partiality in judging for judgment belongs to God."

And even recommnds prayers to prevent Democrats from passing any legislation during a "Lame Duck Congress":

May God move American citizens to refuse any effort to force unwelcome legislation upon them by Congressmen who have been voted out of office. May God grant the minority leadership wisdom to prevail against any such effort

Most interestingly, FRC also asks activists to pray for the success of the Pray and ACT effort:

May this and other prayer efforts be used to move once-passive Christians to become informed active, praying citizens who will make a difference.

And, going a step further, offers a guide to "Combined Prayers for Revival and Elections " [PDF]:

Pray for all Americans to take their vote seriously. Pray they will understand that God holds them directly responsible for the stances of those they elect.

Pray for quality people to decide to run for public office. Pray for wisdom, effectiveness and power in the campaigns and decisions of those you feel (personally) led to support. Pray for strong funding and support.

Pray for God’s guidance and empowerment in campaign ads, interviews and public debates. Pray that the press and media will be accurate, thorough and unbiased with all candidates.

Pray that all believers will do their civic duty by seriously seeking God and turning out to vote in strong numbers. Pray that voter fraud will be exposed and prevented in both parties.

Pray for all Americans to recognize the profound, lasting implication of major elections. Pray for voters to have the wisdom to see through political rhetoric and clearly understand truth. Pray for evil to be exposed and integrity to be revealed. Pray that all voters will clearly see the good and evil of the various beliefs and philosophies in either party.

Pray for a mighty resurgence of Americans who will honor God and stand boldly for absolute moral truths and historic American principles. Pray that a great majority will awaken to wrong directions and bad leaders in either party.

Pray that God’s Spirit will miraculously over-shadow voting booths across America. Pray that voters will hear and follow God’s guidance, not political parties or human reasoning.

Pray for God to raise up a standard against evil and restrain the forces of moral and spiritual evil. Pray for God to send forth a mighty wave of truth and understanding.

Pray for sweeping revival in the Church and spiritual awakening across America and the world. Pray for an explosion of purity and revival in Christ’s Church. Pray for a sweeping evangelistic harvest around the earth. Pray for Jesus to come quickly.

Ever since Barack Obama started running for the White House, we've seen occasional pieces wondering if he was the Antichrist. In December 2008, Mat Staver of the Liberty Counsel said he did not think that Obama was, in fact, the Antichrist but that it was entirely understandable that people were worried that he was:

No wonder, then, that Obama triggers such fear in the hearts of America's millennialist Christians. Mat Staver, dean of Liberty University's law school, says he does not believe Obama is the Antichrist, but he can see how others might. Obama's own use of religious rhetoric belies his liberal positions on abortion and traditional marriage, Staver says, positions that "religious conservatives believe will threaten their freedom." The people who believe Obama is the Antichrist are perhaps jumping to conclusions, but they're not nuts: "They are expressing a concern and a fear that is widely shared," Staver says.

I wonder if Staver's views have changed since then because it sure sounds like he's convinced that Obama is out to make himself some sort of global dictator because today he and Matt Barber, LC's Director of Cultural Affairs, dedicated their radio program to explaining how Obama, from the very beginning, has been focused on systemically weakening America so that he could ultimately position himself to take over the entire world:

Staver: When President Barack Obama was running for president, when we became president, I've long since stated that his end game has and is not President of the United States of America; that he has a broader worldwide agenda. And that's why he's to go to places around the world and down the United States of America, because he thinks that's going to gain him popularity in some of the other foreign areas. And that's really where I think his eyes are focused, not on [being] President of the United States.

Barber: Now here's the scary thing, I believe that that is true, but in order to have a post-American world, you have to have a post-America. And that's why his policies are pushing us into a post-American world. He is destroying American exceptionalism and is trying to do away with our free market system here in the United States. He's trying to create the climate where we have a post-American world.

Staver: Well, because America is always going to be, or at least it has been up until now, world player. And for him to be on the world scene, he's going to have to bring America down to the level of some of the European and some other countries with regards to commonality. And America always had the exceptionalism and you can't really have worldwide influence if you've got the America exceptional nation because you're going to have to have them all basically on the same level.

So for him to go into this national, or global, leadership - which he wants to do - it's no wonder why he wants to make America's economy like the European economy; it's no wonder why he wants to downplay Christianity so he can up-play Islam.

This man does not respect America. He never has.

Liberty Counsel is, of course, on of the main co-sponsors of the upcoming Values Voter Summit at which Staver is confirmed as a speaker, along with Rep. Michele Bachmann, Gov. Bob McDonnell, and Mike Huckabee (and it should be noted that Huck and Staver have a close personal relationship that goes back years.)

The AFA's Bryan Fischer rips into Glenn Beck for not opposing gay marriage, accusing him of siding with "people who want to use the anus for sex" over God-fearing Christians: 

Glenn, Glenn, Glenn: if special rights are given to people just because they want to use the alimentary canal for sexual purposes, no social conservative will be able to criticize homosexual behavior on biblical or moral grounds without running the risk of legal punishment.

Goodbye freedom of speech and goodbye freedom of religion. You, Glenn, will have aided and abetted those who are out to destroy two of the inalienable rights God has given to men, and you don’t think that’s a threat to this country? Wake up and smell the toxins, my friend.

We must choose between the homosexual agenda and religious liberty, because it is impossible to have both. Every advance of the homosexual agenda comes at the expense of our first liberty, the very first right enshrined in the Bill of Rights, the right to freedom of religious expression. You have chosen the side of suppression and tyranny over the light of liberty.

...

It’s not too late to issue a mea culpa and come back into the light and be a vigorous advocate once again for the truth about marriage and the family. You have done a noble thing in calling this country back to God through your “Divine Destiny” evening at the Kennedy Center and your “Restoring Honor” event at the Lincoln Memorial.

You have done a noble thing on your radio and television programs by repeatedly calling us back to our founding history and to our foundational values as a country.

But Glenn, our “Divine Destiny” as a nation does not include societal approval for people who want to use the anus for sex. The “Laws of Nature and Nature’s God” don’t endorse such behavior. And neither should you.

Have I mentioned that Fischer is a confirmed speaker at the upcoming Values Voter Summit along with Mike Huckabee, Michele Bachmann, Mitt Romney, and Gov. Bob McDonnell?

At regular intervals, the Family Research Council sends out updates to its "Prayer Team" listing a variety of political issues that team members should make the target of their prayers.

A recent update called upon FRC's prayer activists to focus on the upcoming election because for too long America has elected politicians who lead "flagrantly godless personal lives" and "pass ungodly laws":

The American electoral process has the potential to produce qualified candidates, yet year after year we elect men and women who enter public office and pass ungodly laws. Some lead unwholesome, even flagrantly godless personal lives. Yet far too many of our pastors and Christian leaders have remained uninvolved, failing even to teach and preach about responsible Christian citizenship ... It is our duty to select leaders who respect the sanctity of human life, traditional marriage and family, and religious liberty and who oppose pernicious efforts to advance abortion, sexual immorality, socialism, profligate government spending, and now, Muslim Sharia law. Praying, fasting, speaking out and taking extraordinary action during the next 81 days, Christians must follow biblical principles (e.g., Exodus 18:21) in voting their values.

And FRC listed a specific set of issues on which the prayer team was to concentrate in order to reverse this trend - namely the Values Voter Summit, the Prop 8 ruling, Rifqa Bary, and Park 51:

- Pray that God will pour out his Spirit upon this year's [Values Voter Summit]; that it will be the best yet -- life-changing and nation-shaking.

- May God give our lawyers wisdom and may He superintend a complete reversal to vouchsafe Biblical marriage in U.S. federal judicial precedent.

- May God protect Rifqa's health. May U.S. officials help her along the road to citizenship. May God guide her education and her promising and needed ministry!

- May America reject this Mosque and the wider Islamist political agenda! May the Church stand against all false religion, while reaching out to Muslims with love.

When Elena Kagan was first nominated to the Supreme Court, rumors swirled that she was a lesbian, which was more than enough evidence for Byran Fischer, who declared that all gays are biased, deviant borderline pedophiles who do not belong in public office.

So take just one guess how he is responding to the Prop 8 ruling:

Although almost no other organizations other than the American Family Association are making an issue of this, Judge Walker should have recused himself from this case since he is a practicing homosexual. This created a clear conflict of interest, and he had no business issuing a ruling on a matter on which he had such a huge personal and private interest.

His own personal sexual proclitivies utterly compromised his ability to make an impartial ruling in this case. After all, the bottom line issue is whether homosexual behavior, with all its threats to psychological and physical health, is behavior that should be promoted in any rational society.

Judge Walker has already decided this issue for himself, and has no business putting himself in a place where his own personal value judgments could be substituted for the express will of the people of California.

He is Exhibit A as to why homosexuals should be disqualified from public office. Character is an important qualification for public service, and what an individual does in his private sexual life is a critical component of character. A man who ignores time-honored standards of sexual behavior simply cannot be trusted with the power of public office.

This, by the way, is why Elana Kagan should not be elevated to the Supreme Court. Although she has not come out of the closet herself, her lesbian partner has, and Ms. Kagan’s sexual preference is an open secret in Washington circles. Her indulgence in sexually aberrant behavior should make her ineligible to serve on the highest court in the land.

Fischer goes on to demand Walker's impeachment, saying that if conservative leaders in Congress do not take action to remove him from the bench, Religious Right voters will stop voting for them. 

And less you think this is just typical Religious Right hyperbole, rest assured that Fischer and the American Family Association are entirely serious, as they have now launched a campaign to get Walker impeached:

Judge Walker's ruling is not "good Behaviour." He has exceeded his constitutional authority and engaged in judicial tyranny.

Judges are not, in fact, unaccountable. They are accountable to Congress, which can remove them from office.

Impeachment proceedings, according to the Constitution, begin in the House of Representatives. It's time for you to put your congressman on record regarding the possible impeachment of Judge Walker.

I am going to mention just one more time that Fischer is listed as a "confirmed speaker" at the next Family Research Council Values Voter Summit as are, as of today, Rep. Michele Bachmann, Rep. Mike Pence, and Mike Huckabee.

The American Family Association's Bryan Fischer has made no secret of his hatred for Islam and his corresponding belief that Muslims cannot be loyal US citizens and must therefore be immediately deported from the country.

So it certainly comes as no surprise that Fischer would try to highlight in order to prove his point: 

Christianity, the foundation of American law, teaches that husbands are to “love their wives as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her” (Ephesians 5:25). Elsewhere, husbands are told, “[L]ive with your wives in an understanding way, showing honor to the woman as the weaker vessel, since they are heirs with you of the grace of life” (1 Peter 3:7).

In other words, Christianity teaches a husband to treat his wife with honor, respect and restraint, and never to use his superior physical strength to impose his will on his wife, who is his full equal in worth, value and dignity.

Not so in Islam, where husbands are explicitly taught that they may beat their wives into submission.

Now comes news of a disgruntled Muslim husband in New Jersey who repeatedly raped his wife, despite her tearful resistance ... Now get this. The American judge dismissed the woman’s charges of sexual assault and criminal sexual conduct on the grounds that her husband should not be punished for spousal rape because Islam permits it.

Now Fischer sees this as evidence that "it is impossible for a devout Muslim to be a good citizen of the United States or any other nation formed and shaped by the Judeo-Christian tradition" ... maybe he should tell that to Phyllis Schlafly: 

One came when Schlafly asserted women should not be permitted to do jobs traditionally held by men, such as firefighter, soldier or construction worker, because of their "inherent physical inferiority."

...

At one point, Schlafly also contended that married women cannot be sexually assaulted by their husbands.

"By getting married, the woman has consented to sex, and I don't think you can call it rape," she said.

Hey, what do you know? Both Fischer and Schlafly are confirmed speakers at the upcoming Values Voter Summit - so that would be a perfect opportunity for them to discuss this issue.

It was just one year ago that Ralph Reed announced the formation of his Faith and Freedom Coalition, a more hip, more strident "21st Century version of the Christian Coalition on steroids, married with MoveOn.org, with a sprinkling of the NRA."

And slowly Reed has been working to build it into a brand new right-wing powerhouse, teaming up with leaders like Sarah Palin and Mike Huckabee and Michele Bachmann and Richard Land and Rick Santorum while setting up affiliates in several states in order to train "Tea Partiers, home schoolers and other conservatives to give them the tools they need to identify, educate and turn out conservative voters in their area."

When Reed decided not to run for Congress earlier this year, he explained that it was because he believes that "electing 50 to 100 men and women of character and conservative beliefs to Congress and statewide office over the next two election cycles is a more efficacious way to advance the conservative agenda than seeking public office myself in 2010."

It is becoming increasingly clear that Reed is intent on recovering whatever influence and prestige he may have lost due to this close ties to disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff [PDF] by turning his Faith and Freedom Coalition into a right-wing powerhouse and recapturing his glory days with the Christian Coalition ...and that is why the FFC will be hosting its very own right-wing conference in Washington DC this fall: 

Your Faith & Freedom Coalition is growing by leaps and bounds. We now have more than 300,000 members within 50 states. We have state affiliates up and running in 20 states despite the fact that we have been in operation for only six months. And, just this last week we helped elect conservatives in New Jersey and California who are going to stand up to the liberal agenda. Conservatives across the country recognize that only a grassroots organization like FFC can harness the anti-Obama sentiment boiling in our country and channel it to stop this dangerous administration.

I’d like to invite you today to our first ever Citizen Action Leadership Summit being held in Washington, DC September 9-11 at the famed Mayflower Hotel. We’ll be bringing together activists, donors and famous conservative speakers for three days of training, networking and strategy sessions. We’ve invited a who’s who of special guest speakers, which includes:

Sarah Palin

Newt Gingrich

Karl Rove

Jeb Bush

And many others.

Please visit our website today to make reservations for this historic conservative gathering.

Interestingly, this Citizen Action Leadership Summit is being just one week before the Values Voter Summit, the annual gathering of social conservatives hosted by FRC, Focus on the Family, American Family Association, American Values and others. 

Offered without comment - the latest from Bryan Fischer:

Some of England's leading newspapers - The Sun, the Telegraph, the Daily Mail - all had feature stories yesterday about the latest Taliban terror tactic: burying dirty needles with their bombs in an effort to infect troops with HIV. They are planting hypodermic syringes below the surface with the points facing upward in hopes that bomb squad experts will prick themselves and become contaminated with hepatitis and HIV.

If the bomb goes off, then the needles become deadly flying shrapnel.

Said a member of Parliament, "Are there no depths to which these people will stoop? This is the definition of a dirty war."

If we connect the dots here, the inescapable conclusion is that gay sex is a form of domestic terrorism.

Actualy, I do have a comment: Fischer is still listed as a "confirmed speaker" at the next Family Research Council Values Voter Summit along with Rep. Michele Bachmann, Rep. Mike Pence, and Mike Huckabee.

The AFA's Bryan Fischer has made no secret of the fact that he does not like Muslims because, as he says, "devout Muslims simply cannot become good Americans."

Interestingly, Fischer's unrelenting hatred of Islam seems to suddenly be making him see the value of separation of church and state. In his latest post, he offers his comments on a WorldNetDaily article about a group of Muslims in Kansas who are requesting that city officials set apart a section of a city-owned cemetery strictly for Muslim use .. and Fischer is outraged by the idea that a religious group wants public officials to sanction their specific religious demands to the exclusion of others (Fischer's comments are in bold): 

A coalition of Muslim leaders in Garden City, Kan., has told city officials they want part of the public municipal cemetery to be set aside – with a fence or other marker – to be reserved for their use exclusively.

The key word here is "exclusively." Non-Muslims not allowed. In other words, they want city officials to participate in a blatant exercise in religious discrimination. You will note that they are aiming for sanctified property in a public cemetery, thus gaining official government recognition of Sharia law. Worrisome? Not unless you realize that Muslims will not be content to stop here. Their goal is to take over every cemetery in America and run them according to the dictates of Islam. Those who think this is hyperbolic exaggeration haven't been paying attention. The Muslim Brotherhood has made it quite plain that the goal is ultimate domination by Islam of every public institution in America. The time to stop the takeover is now.

Jim Hahn, the city's cemetery caretaker, said there used to be a number of divisions – for Catholics, Protestants and others – in the city facility, but those divisions have been removed.

"We try to accommodate everyone as best we can, and we're trying to get away from sectioning off sections of the cemetery to specific people," he told the newspaper. "The way I look at it, being a municipal cemetery, you want to stay as neutral as possible. There are a lot of different religions out there, and we try to accommodate them as best we can while fitting in with our rules and regulations."

Notice here the fundamental incompatibility of Islam with Western values, and with our national slogan, "E Pluribus Unum." While the city is moving in the direction of erasing religious distinctions in the cemetery, Muslims want to reinstitute them. They want to Balkanize American society. They want to go back to the days of segregation, which would represent a huge step backward for American society. If they are successful here, this will be but a beachhead for further and more aggressive attempts to impose Muslim concepts on compliant but misguided public officials.

But Mohamad Abdulkadir, a leader of the Somalians, told the newspaper two members of his ethnic community died in recent months and were taken to a Muslim cemetery in Wichita.

"If they deny our request, maybe we can buy some land, but we're waiting to see what (city officials) say," he told the paper.

This of course is their solution. If they want their own Muslim burial grounds in a Christian nation, then nobody is stopping them from buying a piece of property and turning it into the cemetery of their choice. What they should not expect is official governmental sanction for Sharia law.

This is qute a change from Fischer's speech last year at the Values Voter Summit when he declared that only Congress was restrained by the First Amendment's ban on the establishment of religion and that it was "constitutionally impossible ... for a city council ... to violate the First Amendment."

But that apparently only applies so long as the religion is question if Christianity.  If the religion seeking a form of establishment and sanction from elected officials is Islam, then it is an absolute outrage.