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During the drive in to work this morning I listened to a story on NPR about how polls in rural Lincoln County Missouri show that the presidential race there is a toss-up.  NPR reported that the outcome of the Lincoln County vote has mirrored the national vote in the past twelve presidential elections. 

The reporter interviewed several voters for the story, but the two that really got my attention were Thomas Burkemper, a lawyer in the Lincoln County seat of Troy and chairman of the county’s Democratic Central Committee; and Carol Wessel, a real estate agent who serves as chairwoman of the Lincoln County Republican Central Committee.

“Locally, people were afraid to run as a Republican. But nationally they would vote Republican,” says Carol Wessel. …  “They would come up to me and say, ‘Carol, I’m really a Republican. But … because I want this position, I’ve got to run as a Democrat.’”

Wessel says local Democrats and Republicans share strong conservative beliefs opposing abortion, gay marriage and gun control.  They also share values based on religion.  They’re Catholics and Baptists, and they go to church.

And the newcomers “increased substantially the church attendance,” according to Burkemper, who asks and answers this question:

“How hard will the churches come out and swear that we either vote for McCain or go to hell? I don’t think that the churches are going to cut the same swath in this election as they did in 2004 and 2000.  Because the people are hurting. … The people are angry about the economy.”

…

Wessel has confronted conservatives who cite the economy when they tell her they won’t vote for Republican John McCain.

“I tell them ‘I’m a Christian first,’” Wessel recalls. ” ‘And if you vote your true Christian values and vote for the candidate that you think is ethically right and has the [right] values, that will take care of the economy.”

Aren’t these conservative Christians the same people that voted for George W. Bush because he professes to be a born-again Christian and supposedly shares their values?  Hasn’t the Bush Administration been in charge for the past eight years?  Aren’t we now facing the worst financial crisis since The Great Depression?  Does Carol Wessel even hear herself when she speaks? 

Howard Berkes, the NPR correspondent, didn’t bother to ask her these questions or if she shared some of the same values of Barack Obama, also a Christian.

I’ve never met President Bush and I hope I never do, so I can’t judge if he is sincere about his religious beliefs.  All I can go by is what he says and how he governs, and he governs like a man with the morals of a laughing hyena.

He pushed through tax cuts for his extremely wealthy base.  He started an unnecessary war and lied about why he started it.  He hasn’t raised one tax to pay for the trillion dollars it has cost so far.  He authorized the use of torture.  He suspended habeus corpus for anyone he used his unitary executive power to label an “enemy combatant,” and he authorized secret renditions of innocent people to foreign countries where they were secretly tortured.

This is a man who shares the values of conservative Christians in Lincoln County?  I don’t really think so, so I hope they vote their economic interests this time, because their morality based votes haven’t worked out so well for them.

Oh, and shortly after hearing that story, I read today’s Progress Report that was centered on the story of Joe the Plumber.  The article reports on how the Right jumped on the story to promote the myth that average people do better under Republican economic policies than Democratic policies.  The article then points out:

President Bill Clinton decided early in his term in office that expanding the middle class — not tax cuts for the rich — would be the engine of economic growth, while his successor, President George W. Bush, argued the opposite. But the as the results have shown, a progressive tax policy enacted by President Clinton achieved far superior results for the economy. By the end of Clinton’s second term, unemployment stood at very low 3.9 percent while today it has risen over 6 percent. The poverty rate was lower in 2000 than it is today. The median household income (adjusted for inflation) was over $3,000 higher eight years ago. Bush inherited a $237 billion federal budget surplus, which he has turned into a $482 billion deficit (and growing fast).

Jerry Falwell collapsed and died today in Virginia at the age of 73.  I can think of no better way to remember this man that was so filled with hatred and disgust for those who did not believe as he did than through some direct quotations.  Here you go…

“I hope I live to see the day when, as in the early days of our country, we won’t have any public schools. The churches will have taken them over again and Christians will be running them. What a happy day that will be!”

“The idea that religion and politics don’t mix was invented by the Devil to keep Christians from running their own country”

Actually I think it was Thomas somebody from Virginia that invented that.  Jefferson?  Paine?  probably both…

“Grown men should not be having sex with prostitutes unless they are married to them”

“AIDS is not just God’s punishment for homosexuals; it is God’s punishment for the society that tolerates homosexuals”

“Billy Graham is the chief servant of Satan in America”

Say what?

“If you’re not a born-again Christian, you’re a failure as a human being”

“The ACLU is to Christians what the American Nazi party is to Jews”

Hmmm… I’m not born again and I am a member of the ACLU.  I don’t feel like a failure… haven’t gassed or burned any Christians… Perhaps I’m not living up to my potential…

“The Bible is the inerrant … word of the living God. It is absolutely infallible, without error in all matters pertaining to faith and practice, as well as in areas such as geography, science, history, etc. “

“The whole (global warming) thing is created to destroy America’s free enterprise system and our economic stability”

and of course this famous hate filled rant following 9-11

“…throwing God out of the public square, out of the schools, the abortionists have got to bear some burden for this because God will not be mocked and when we destroy 40 million little innocent babies, we make God mad…I really believe that the pagans and the abortionists and the feminists and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People for the American Way, all of them who try to secularize America…I point the thing in their face and say you helped this happen.”

What a nice old man Jerry was.  So loving and tolerant… just like Jesus.   Not.

Have a Nice Trip…

Go here to read what his arch-nemesis Barry Lynn had to say upon hearing of his passing.

Bush ally Rev. Ted Haggard is proving to be a hypocrite and a huge gift to the Democrats, who are anxious to talk about anything but Senator Kerry’s recent remarks.

This video via KUSA in Denver is a great tidbit. What do you think? I think he is a terrible liar. I figured that, since his entire life appears to be a huge lie, he would be better at maintaining the facade.

Ted Haggard is a married, antigay, conservative who speaks not only to God, but to the White House in a weekly conference call. He is also apparently a methamphetamine user and frequent client of male escort services.

Harper’s has an article from 2005, Soldiers of Christ, which explores Rev. Ted Haggard and his megachurch. An interesting tidbit from the article, “He staked out gay bars, inviting men to come to his church…” Hmmm, a pretty good cover story.

So, what exactly are his views on homosexuality? Here is a quote from a letter to the editor of the Arizona Christian News:

“All of us were in sin. All of us needed redemption,” said Haggard. “If a person has homosexual tendencies… they need to practice abstinence just as a single heterosexual would need to practice abstinence. The difference would be that the single heterosexual could get married and become sexually active with their heterosexual partner whereas, the homosexual would have to practice spirit control and self-restraint throughout the balance of their lifetime.”

In I Corinthians 6:9-10 it clearly puts the issue of homosexuality on the table. In the New International Version of The Bible it says that “homosexual offenders” will not inherit the Kingdom of God. It would be easy for someone to say that homosexuals will not inherit the Kingdom of God. However, The Bible doesn’t say that. The Bible says “offenders”. Therefore, if someone claims to have been born a homosexual, they are not committing homosexual sins until they have comitted a homosexual act or “offense”.

This story from today’s Los Angeles Times might come as a surprise to the rubes who voted for Republicans thinking that the party might actually believe in their cause, but it’s no surprise to many of us secular types who watched in disgust as the mixing of religion and political campaigning grew into an ugly monster over the last six years or so.

A new book by a former White House official says that President Bush’s top political advisors privately ridiculed evangelical supporters as “nuts” and “goofy” while embracing them in public and using their votes to help win elections.

The former official also writes that the White House office of faith-based initiatives, which Bush promoted as a nonpolitical effort to support religious social-service organizations, was told to host pre-election events designed to mobilize religious voters who would most likely favor Republican candidates.

The assertions by David Kuo, a top official in the faith-based initiatives program, have rattled Republican strategists already struggling to persuade evangelical voters to turn out this fall for the GOP.

Some conservatives lamented Thursday that the book, “Tempting Faith: An Inside Story of Political Seduction,” also comes in the midst of the scandal involving former Rep. Mark Foley, another threat to conservative turnout in competitive House and Senate races.

…

In the book, Kuo, who quit the White House in 2003, accuses Karl Rove’s political staff of cynically hijacking the faith-based initiatives idea for electoral gain. It assails Bush for failing to live up to his promises of boosting the role of religious organizations in delivering social services.

White House strategists “knew ‘the nuts’ were politically invaluable, but that was the extent of their usefulness,” Kuo writes, according to the cable channel MSNBC, which obtained an advance copy.

“Sadly, the political affairs folks complained most often and most loudly about how boorish many politically involved Christians were…. National Christian leaders received hugs and smiles in person and then were dismissed behind their backs and described as ‘ridiculous’ and ‘out of control.’”

Curiosity got the best of me today, so I went surfing around the right-wing web sites to see if I could find any outright condemnation of Robertson’s remarks. Granted, I don’t spend a lot of time on the wingnut sites, but I am familiar with a few of them.

I started at the web site for The Christian Coalition – the organization founded by Robertson after his failed run for the presidency in 1989. Roberston stepped down from his post there in 2001. I was curious to read what this religious organization might have to say about their founder’s call to assassinate Chavez. I found this:

“What Robertson was basically arguing is that it’s time to deal with this problem,” the MRC [Media Research Council] spokesman [Rich Noyes] offers. “I think ‘assassination’ was an unfortunate word [for Robertson to use]. On the other hand, it seemed to get this conversation going in a way that it hasn’t before.”

Not much of a condemnation…

Are any of you out there familiar with The Christian Coalition? According to an article by Bill McKibben titled “The Christian Paradox” the August edition of Harper’s Magazine:

The Christian Coalition of America – founded in 1989 in order to “preserve, protect and defend the Judeo-Christioan values that made this the greatest country in history” – proclaimed last year that its top legislative priority would be “making permanent President Bush’s 2001 federal tax cuts.”

I’d say they’ve strayed a bit from their original mission. I’ve already digressed, so let me digress a bit more. Over the past few months, Harper’s has published some excellent articles about the role of religion in America. I have previously commented on them here and here. Read them if you have the time…

I also visited James Dobson’s Focus on the Family site and found nothing at all. Same for Billy Graham’s website.

I then visited the Right’s equivalent of Common Dreams, TownHall.com, and found one column by Marvin Olasky in which he said:

The televangelist should have remembered Spiderman’s message that “with great power comes great responsibility.” By his blurting, Robertson aided Venezuelan autocrats such as Vice President Jose Vicente Rangel, who sarcastically said that assassination advocacy was “very Christian” and went on to argue that “religious fundamentalism is one of the great problems facing humanity.”

If you read the whole column you’ll find that Olasky doesn’t think Christian fundamentalism is a great problem, but that Muslim fundamentalism is a great problem. I have a problem with any kind of fanatical fundamentalism so I wrote him a note asking him to read Luke 19:27. I used this verse as an example of ahow anyone can cherry pick quotes from another religious text and make it appear worse or more violent than his own religion. Olasky actually responded to my email, but it was an incredibly lame response. (More about that later.)

So I did a little surfing to the right expecting to find outright condemnations of Robertson’s crazy call to assassinate the president of a country we aren’t even at war with, and I didn’t find any strongly worded articles. They were all soft.

Conservatives have no problem throwing roundhouse punches to the face of anyone on the Left, but they sure have a problem landing a blow on one of their own who really deserves it.