Texas “Patriot Pastors” organizer Rick Scarborough has been holding rallies across Missouri this summer, featuring Alan Keyes, to build opposition to the state’s upcoming vote on stem cell research. At the recent “Values Voter Summit” in Washington, D.C., Scarborough said that Missouri wasn’t the only state he was worried about: if voters in Missouri approve stem cell research, and voters in South Dakota reject a total ban on abortion, then “we may have stepped over the line with” God.
So Scarborough and Keyes are taking their act on the road again, with a series of rallies across South Dakota this week. They also feature Laurence White, a Houston pastor who founded the Texas Restoration Project. In Rapid City on Monday, speakers railed against both abortion and same-sex marriage, although only the former is on the ballot. According to Keyes, the former presidential and senatorial candidate, the two defining issues of the modern Religious Right are inseparable because they are “one and the same issue.” “Abortion does at the physical level what homosexual marriage does at the institutional level,” he explained.
And yesterday, Scarborough told a crowd in Aberdeen that the referendum is “both a promised blessing” as well as “a certain assurance of a curse” – if voters do not approve the ban. White said that approval of the ban would augur “the beginning of a new awakening in America.”
