Voting

First, the activists behind Colorado's Amendment 62 tried to generate support for their effort by running a radio ad featuring a "former slave" speaking out against abortion.

Then they upped the ante with a web video calling President Obama the "Angel of Death."

So, of course, the next logical step is to invoke the Nazis:

A volunteer for the “Yes on 62” campaign is using graphic pictures of dying Jews in concentrations camps to get you to vote yes on the anti-abortion measure.

The Facebook page was created earlier in October; at first Parenthood Colorado told TARGET 13 that they were aware of the site and no one on staff took part in its creation.

“I’ve seen the comparison before,” said Roberto Garcia-Jones, Director of Personhood Colorado. When asked if he agreed with the concept, Garcia-Jones said, “I support the notion that what Nazis did to Jews is like what were doing to pre-borns today.”

At first Garcia-Jones was unaware of the person behind the postings, but when asked about key staffers and supporters who “liked” the site, he told us he would get one of the supporters we asked about to call us back.

A few minutes later, TARGET 13 received a call from Keith Mason, co-founder of Personhood USA. He admitted to TARGET 13 that it was one of campaign’s volunteers who created the site. Mason said, “This is not what we are about.”

Mason also said he was unaware that key staffers were made administrators of the Facebook page. After the calls, any tie to Parenthood Colorado was taken down from the Facebook page and Mason said key staffers no longer had administrative privileges.

Not surprisingly, these over-the-top tactics don't seem to be working, as even anti-choice news outlets like LifeNews.com are reporting that the effort appears poised to suffer another crushing defeat:

A second poll shows Amendment 62, the personhood amendment that would ban all abortions in the state if upheld in court, will likely lose when voters head to the polls next week.

SurveyUSA conducted a poll or 540 voters from October 19-21 for the Denver Post and 9-NEWS and the survey has about a 4/2 percent margin of error.

The poll shows just 20 percent of Colorado residents support Amendment 62 while 56 percent say they are opposed to it. Another 25 percent of Colorado voters were still undecided, even as early voting began in the state. 

In 2008, a similar effort received only 27% support, and it looks like it might actually do even worse this time around.

Watching his once formidable lead in the polls crumble, Pennsylvania Senate candidate Pat Toomey asserted, “It’s very clear. The person who is the extreme candidate that is so far out of touch with Pennsylvania is Joe Sestak.”

A huge part of Pat Toomey’s campaign strategy seemed to be based on remaking his image to come across as a moderate Republican. In an election year with the likes of Ken Buck, Sharron Angle, Christine O’Donnell, and Joe Miller, even solidly conservative Republicans could come-off as “moderate” due to the elevated extremism on the Right.

But Pat Toomey is certainly no moderate on either economic or social issues:

• Pat Toomey was rated one of the most right-wing members of Congress: “more conservative voting record than J.D Hayworth, Jim DeMint, and was about as conservative as Jesse Helms,” and “had a considerably more conservative voting record than Rick Santorum.” Toomey is so far to the Right that he even felt that Mike Huckabee was too moderate.

• An anti-choice zealot, Pat Toomey called for doctors to be thrown in jail for performing abortions. Furthermore, Toomey doesn’t just want a Constitutional Amendment to ban gay marriage, but even tried to prohibit gay and lesbian couples from adopting children.

• He led the Club for Growth for four years, a vehemently pro-corporate advocacy group that recently exclaimed: “Privatize Social Security? Hell Yeah!” Toomey himself has worked to privatize Social Security throughout his career.

• Back in 2006, Toomey described his pro-corporate advocacy as “all about protecting our Christian heritage” and “a culture that is under assault.” For Toomey, “protecting our Christian heritage” also includes preventing oversight on Wall Street’s reckless “derivatives trading.” Not only is Toomey a staunch opponent of Wall Street Reform, but worked a derivatives trader.

• He stood with Phyllis Schlafly, Tony Perkins, James Dobson and Tim LaHaye to support the Family Research Council’s Kenneth Blackwell to become Chair of the Republican National Committee. When leading Focus on the Family, James Dobson enthusiastically campaigned for Toomey when he ran for Senate in 2004.

Pat Toomey’s ultraconservative views have made him a darling of pro-corporate groups and the Religious Right. His plan to come across as a moderate is as absurd as it is scary.

The Family Research Council and National Organization for Marriage today announced the launch of a "Judge Bus Tour" that will travel across Iowa as part of the campaign to remove three Supreme Court Justices: 

Family Research Council Action and the National Organization for Marriage today announced the "Judge Bus Tour" that next week will make 20 stops, travel over 1,300 miles, and pass through 45 of Iowa's 99 counties.

Former Senator Rick Santorum, U.S. Rep. Steve King (R-IA), Family Research Council Action President Tony Perkins, National Organization for Marriage President Brian Brown and other state and national leaders will urge Iowans to restore the constitution by voting "no retention" on activist judges who last year forced same-sex "marriage" on the state. The tour will kick off on Monday, October 25 at the state capitol and conclude at a Thursday evening rally in front of the Iowa Supreme Court building.

Family Research Council Action President Tony Perkins made the following comments:

"The Iowa Supreme Court ruled as irrelevant millennia of tradition and the views of a large majority of Iowans that marriage is and always should be between one man and one woman. This is not the court's role. The legislature makes the law. The governor executes the law. The job of the courts is to apply, not reinterpret, the law.

"If the Iowa Supreme Court will do this to marriage, every one of our freedoms, including gun rights and private property, is in danger of being undermined by activist judges who are unelected officials. Most Americans believe that government is out-of-control. Now is the time to take a stand against the radical judicial activism of the Iowa Supreme Court.

"On Election Day, we believe Iowans will vote to restore the constitution by voting 'NO' on activist judges Marsha K. Ternus, Michael J. Streit, and David L. Baker," concluded Perkins.

If you are are Black and a Christian and have always supported Democrats, what do you do when God tells you that he is angry with your voting patterns? 

If you are Keith Carl Smith, you start a movement to spread the word and you call it the "Frederick Douglass Republicans" because you can't use words like "conservative" and "Republican" as they are synonymous with "racist" ... and then you get profiled on "The 700 Club":

"I'm not a black conservative. I am a Frederick Douglass Republican," Ret. U.S. Army officer Keith Carl Smith said.

Smith described himself as a political agitator. He said he knew three things about himself his entire life -- he was black, a Christian, and a Democrat. However, one night he decided to change the way he voted.

"God spoke to me that night and said, 'Keith, I want a public relationship with you, not a private affair,'" Smith told CBN News. "I said, 'Lord, what do you mean?'"

"He said, 'I'm not pleased with the way you're voting. The way you're voting is inconsistent with your Christian worship,'" he said.

Smith started identifying himself as a Frederick Douglass Republican and started a movement in his home state of Alabama. He believes in individual responsibility, limited government, respects life and the U.S. Constitution.

"The federal government today is the modern day slave master because it is so large and powerful it is the most immediate threat to our God-given rights," he explained.

In some black communities, Smith said the word "conservative" or "Republican" is synonymous with "racist." But if you invoke the name of a well-respected black family member like Frederick Douglass, he explained that you can trump the race card.

"It takes race off the table and you can get to the issues. That's what our enemies and our opponents don't want. They don't want us to get to the issues because conservatives will win the argument of ideas. We have the best ideas," he said.

I am used to seeing right-wing leaders claim that gay marriage or abortion or atheism or voting Democratic or what-have-you will destroy America ... but I have never an explanation quite like the one Rick Santorum gave to World Magazine about how health care reform will destroy the US by forcing massive cuts in military spending, just like "the left" always wanted: 

Q: Will this spending have an effect on our military? No European socialist country has any military to speak of, because they can't afford it. We spend $650 billion a year on the military. You're going to hear in the next year or so that we must dramatically cut the military because we can't pay for it: "We can't afford to be the policeman of the world. America's role has to change." The Chinese and the Russians are sitting there licking their chops. This is exactly what the left would like to see, since they see America as an oppressive imperialist country.

Q: The long-term consequences of the healthcare law . . . It will destroy the country.

Kudos to Santorum for uncovering this secret, diabolical sixty-year leftist plot to destroy our military though health care spending all for the benefit of the Russians! 

The Family Research Council Action PAC has announced that it is spending $125,000 to air ads targeting five Democratic members of Congress - Gabrielle Giffords (D-AZ-8), Betsy Markey (D-CO-4), Carol Shea-Porter (D-NH-1), John Boccieri (D-OH-16), and Tom Perriello (D-VA-5) -for voting "for business-crushing pieces of legislation, including the new health care law that allows for taxpayer funding of abortions":

The ad features a working-class American with a man in a suit hanging on his back, representing "big government."

The American says:

"I woke up one morning and it was there: big government on my back. It's a huge problem. It's affecting everyone. They're taking over our health care, using our money to bail out big business."

"Even our kids are in trouble," the ad continues, since the government is leaving trillions of dollars in debt for them to pay off.

It concludes: "Congress supported big health care, big bailouts, big debt. Get Washington off our backs – stop big government on Election Day."

With the mid-term elections approaching, Focus on the Family's Tom Minnery has some simple advice on how to choose the correct candidate for whom to vote: vote for the Christian.

And how do you know which candidate is the true Christian? Well, it is the candidate that supports Focus on the Family's agenda, of course:

Does the candidate have a Christian world-view? Is he pro-life? A clue is whether he knows the embryonic stem-cell debate and opposes the process. Does she firmly support God’s definition of marriage, and does she oppose civil unions that give marriage benefits to same-sex couples? Does he believe that parents, rather than the state, have ultimate say over what a child learns in school? Is she hostile toward or silent on matters of faith? A candidate’s positions on all these issues are important indicators.

But beware that you can't just vote for the Christian - you have to make sure that you vote for the candidate from the right party because that determines who gets to set the agenda: 

Political Parties matter. You like the platform and values of a local candidate who’s running with the party you typically vote against. Should you cross party lines and vote for him? Don’t forget that whichever party is in the majority has control over which bills eventually reach the floor. You’re voting for more than individual candidates; you’re voting for which party sets the agenda.

Gee, since Focus on the Family is nonpartisan, I wonder what they could possibly mean by warning their activists not to "cross party lines"?

For months now, Jim Garlow has been telling anyone who will listen that they need to read the book "Money, Greed, and God: Why Capitalism Is the Solution and Not the Problem" by Jay W. Richards because it perfectly explains how economic issues should be handled from a biblical perspective.  He even dedicated a segment during the first Pray and Act webcast to promoting the book and its ideas:

If we have 535 people in Washington, DC - House and Senate - who are voting through laws that cause grandchildren and great-grandchildren of yours yet unborn to be saddled with a debt they cannot handle, that is called thievery.

There's a law against stealing: Thou shalt not steal. We have no right to steal from future generations. So the whole economic issue is a biblical issue.

Debt like we have in America is immoral. It is wrong. There should be a screaming up. This could cause a suffocation and a complete destruction of all we hold dear. The taxation is becoming oppressive.

The reason that we have these kind of bad laws passing in our Congress is very simple: what percentage of the people making the laws are attending a church where the Bible is being taught? Let me go further though: if it's a small percentage that are there, let's just pick an arbitrary number - 10%, 15%, 20% - are attending a church where the Bible is being taught, let me ask you a question, how many of them are going to a church where biblical economics is being taught so the person who goes to make the laws has the moral foundation, the biblical background, to be able to vote through the right kind of laws? We have been silent and I believe the spirit of God is stirring something at a deep level.

Garlow brought it up again the second Pray and ACT webcast and preached a sermon on it at his church last weekend:

I preached then, and in four Sunday services, on a topic about which I had never taught: the biblical economic principles related to the current crushing national debt and the oppressive taxation. The Bible has much to say about civil governance (and how peace and tranquilly can be experienced in our communities) and has much more to say about the underpinnings to our national economic situations than I had previously anticipated. If you have the time or interest, you can hear it at http://www.skylinechurch.org/skyline/?page_id=26. And, as I have stated before, I commend Jay Richard’s exceptional book, Money, Greed and God to everyone.

To date, Garlow had pretty much been all alone in recommending the book and its teachings, but that looks like that is about to change as the Family Research Council has announced that they will be hosting an event featuring Richards and his book in December:

Jay Richards is a Senior Fellow of the Discovery Institute and a Contributing Editor of The American at the American Enterprise Institute. In recent years he has been a Visiting Fellow at the Heritage Foundation, and a Research Fellow and Director of Acton Media at the Acton Institute.

He has written many academic articles, books, and popular essays on a wide variety of subjects. His most recent book is Money, Greed, and God: Why Capitalism Is the Solution and Not the Problem.

I had resisted reading this because for a long time it seemed that only Garlow was recommending it, but now that it looks like it might be becoming a playbook for the movement, I guess I'll have to actually take a look at it.

On Friday I posted clips from a conference call hosted early last week by Jim Garlow, Chairman of Newt Gingrich's Renewing American Leadership, and organizer of the Pray and Act campaign, which featured the likes of Chuck Colson, Lou Engle, Maggie Gallagher, and Harry Jackson all discussing the importance of the Pray and Act effort heading into the mid-term elections.

Last night, these same leaders once again join Garlow, this time for a live webcast from Washington DC that also featured Walter Hoyle, Chuck Stetson, James Robison, Samuel Rodriquez, Jordan Lorence of the Alliance Defense Fund, Lance Wallnau, Tony Perkins, and Richard Land. 

The event itself had just a few handfuls of people in attendance, but it was broadcast by GodTV and I spent my Sunday evening watching it so I could bring you the highlights.

Most of event was standard Religious Right fare, with leaders discussing the paramount importance of fighting abortion and saving marriage as people like Colson marveled at that we are now celebrating homosexuality which, just a few decades ago, was "shameful and embarrassing":

Thirty years ago now, I was running the 1972 presidential political campaign and we were accused, those of you who remember the history of the Nixon era, we were accused of lots of dirty tricks. And one of them was that I had planted gays in the campaign of the President's opponent, Senator George McGovern. I didn't, but I was accused of it because that would have been a dirty trick.

Today, we're celebrating what just 35 years ago was considered something shameful and embarrassing. We're not only celebrating it, we're taking an institution which has been the foundation building block of society and civilized societies going back as far in history as we can go back - a man and a woman joined together as God says as one flesh - and we're saying we want to re-define that.

I don't know about you guys, but you'll never hear me say "gay marriage" again because there is no such thing. There can't be gay marriage. Marriage is a man and a woman. The fact of the matter is you can't have anything called gay marriage. From now on to me it's "so-called gay marriage" or its "civil union" or whatever you want to call it, but it's not marriage.

And then, of course, there was Lou Engle just being Lou Engle as he got revved up about how fasting and prayer can finally reverse the forty year rebellion set off in 1969 with the release of "the Stonewall homosexual movement":

I feel like this is a defining moment in American history. I feel like we're in a moment when epochs have got to turn. In the Scriptures you see the power of the forty day fast to change spiritual eras.

Moses fasted forty days and the law of God was released into the Earth.

Elijah fasted forty days at a time when they had legalized child sacrifice and homosexual and heterosexual prostitution in the days of Ahab and Jezebel. But it was in that darkest hour that God raised up its greatest prophetic movement as well.

God is not done with America. and when that spell of Jezebel ruled over the land, promoting sexual immorality all over the place, God releases a forty day fast through Elijah. With the spell of Jezebel and the discouragement of those who were reformers, God breaks that thing with a forty day fast and releases a whole new era with a movement to release the next religious leaders, spiritual leaders, and political leaders as God ripped through that land and purged Baal worship at that time.

God's the same yesterday, today, and forever. I believe we're at the end of the forty year rebellion of the Sixties. 1969: the Stonewall homosexual movement was released. 69: Woodstock. Forty years from that point, I dare to believe that if they church will take this time seriously in fasting and prayer, we can actually begin to fulfill what a generation has failed in for forty years. 

In the very first post I wrote about Pray and Act, I noted how 7 Mountains Dominionism was at the heart of the organization's agenda and pointed to a clip of the leading 7 Mountains advocate, Lance Wallnau, explaining how Christians must take control of these specific areas in order to lay the groundwork for the return of Christ.

In case that wasn't clear enough, last night Garlow actually included Wallnau in the webcast and Wallnau made the case that Christians are in a war for control of these 7 Mountains and the object of this war is permanent occupation:

While we've been trying to preach, secular forces have been educating America. We didn't lose the homosexual argument over night. Twenty-five years, from Chuck Colson's testimony 'til now, tells me that it wasn't because of something we did, it's because of something we failed to do: we didn't influence media and arts. When you've got media and arts, you've got a pulpit going twenty-four hours a day educating your children on values. We didn't educate ourselves regarding the judiciary and so political appointments were made - and we always focus on politicians, we got ga ga at election time, forgetting politicians are the spoil of a different battle; it's the battle of influence.

We have superior weapons, a superior message, and superior power. When it comes to being able to move forward in this, we've got evidence all over the place of how transformation can happen, but it starts with this: clarity is power.

If Christians don't understand that power isn't just in us in the church, there is an authority that is in government, there is an authority in arts and media, there's an authority in family - I look at those as seven spheres where God has to raise up champions.

Napoleon's maxim is "the object of war is victory." You know what we do, we get so dumb - we're supposed to be wise as a serpent and as harmless as doves but we end up being as dumb as a doorknob in lacking the shrewdness we need. When we have elections, when we have victories, short-term victories, we go back and celebrate it like that's it. Well, here's what Napoleon says about warfare: the object of war is victory, but the objective of victory is occupation. We don't win until we occupy high places.

The way that governments and nations are formed is that minorities of people occupy strategic places of influence and they leverage that influence through leverage within networks that are closely, tightly knit together. The church has to become a Kingdom Force, leveraging its influence within greater spheres than just evangelism and then linking shields together. I believe, with prayer and fasting, we will see a freshly invigorated move of God in the United States.

Finally, I want to highlight something that Garlow has been pushing for some time now, which is to intimately link "biblical economics" to the social issues that normally motivate the Religious Right.  Garlow is impassioned about the book "Money, Greed, and God: Why Capitalism Is the Solution and Not the Problem" by Jay W. Richards and has been telling anyone who will listen to buy multiple copies of the book for themselves and their friends.  So it was no surprise that Garlow brought the subject up during the webcast:

If we have 535 people in Washington, DC - House and Senate - who are voting through laws that cause grandchildren and great-grandchildren of yours yet unborn to be saddled with a debt they cannot handle, that is called thievery.

There's a law against stealing: Thou shalt not steal. We have no right to steal from future generations. So the whole economic issue is a biblical issue.

Debt like we have in America is immoral. It is wrong. There should be a screaming up. This could cause a suffocation and a complete destruction of all we hold dear. The taxation is becoming oppressive.

The reason that we have these kind of bad laws passing in our Congress is very simple: what percentage of the people making the laws are attending a church where the Bible is being taught? Let me go further though: if it's a small percentage that are there, let's just pick an arbitrary number - 10%, 15%, 20% - are attending a church where the Bible is being taught, let me ask you a question, how many of them are going to a church where biblical economics is being taught so the person who goes to make the laws has the moral foundation, the biblical background, to be able to vote through the right kind of laws? We have been silent and I believe the spirit of God is stirring something at a deep level.

Finally, to get a sense of just how Garlow sees the interconnection between economic and social issues, he explains how legal abortion is causing today's unemployment problems:

When I find people who don't morally get it on the issue of abortion, I appeal that way you just appealed. When you consider when abortion started, how many years have passed, the people who were originally killed now would have been having children who were up to the age fifteen. So we have lost massive numbers of people [and] when I'm with unemployed people who believe in abortion, I say "one of the reasons you're unemployed is because there are no houses being bought, there are not cars being purchased, there are no schools being built for people who've been killed. You don't have a job today, in part, because of the massive slaughter of humanity."

People don't understand, it's an economic issue. There's a reason God said be fruitful and multiply. He was serious about that.