Religions > Atheism > More Evidence That Phony Boloney Republicans Are Losing Their Religious Base And Are Running Scared
| Topic: |
Religions > Atheism |
| User: |
"Michelle Malkin" |
| Date: |
11 Mar 2006 07:57:21 PM |
| Object: |
More Evidence That Phony Boloney Republicans Are Losing Their Religious Base And Are Running Scared |
Date: Thu, 09 Mar 2006 20:24:02 -0800
From: Zepp <zepp@finestplanet.com>
Subject: "When Would Jesus Bolt?" by Amy Sullivan
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2006/0604.sullivan.html
When Would Jesus Bolt?
Meet Randy Brinson, the advance guard of evangelicals leaving the GOP.
By Amy Sullivan
The Republicans were filibustering the Bible bill. On a Tuesday
afternoon in early February, Republican legislators in Alabama took to
the crimson-carpeted floor of the state house to oppose legislation that
would authorize an elective course on the Bible in public high schools.
The recommended curriculum for the course had been vouched for by
Christian Right all-stars like Chuck Colson and Ted Haggard, but so far
as Republicans were concerned, there was only one pertinent piece of
information about the bill: It was sponsored by two Democrats. And now
Republicans were prepared to do everything in their procedural power to
stop it, even if that meant lining up to explain why they could
not-could not!-stand for this attempt to bring a class about the Bible
into public schools.
When I came to Montgomery to watch the debate over the Bible literacy
bill, I had expected something pro forma, a Bible love-fest. Alabama is,
after all, God's country. On the drive from Atlanta, I sampled some of
the area's many Christian radio stations to catch up on the Christian
rock that doesn't get played as often in Washington-some classic Amy
Grant, a little Third Day, and a new group, Jonah 33 (think 3 Doors
Down, but with more Jesus lyrics). Outside, it looked like the good Lord
could have reached down and molded Adam out of the red clay. This is the
state that produced Judge Roy Moore and the Ten Commandments statue.
Martin Luther King Jr., pastored his first church here, Dexter Avenue
Baptist. In Snead, a convenience-store owner offers free coffee or soda
to anyone who recites the Bible verse of the month, and people do it
because it's a two-fer: Learn the Bible and get a free Dr. Pepper.
As far as people around here are concerned, you can always use a little
more Bible. It's not taught in the schools very often because the
Supreme Court ruled in 1963 that public schools couldn't hold devotional
classes, and many school boards-unsure of how else to teach about the
Bible-don't want to get sued. But when some local leaders learned last
summer about a curriculum package produced by the Bible Literacy Project
out of Fairfax, Va., the problem seemed to be solved. The course
presents the Bible in a historical and cultural context-giving students
a better understanding of biblical allusions in art, literature, and
music. More importantly, it has been vetted by conservative and liberal
legal experts to withstand constitutional challenge.
One of the leading advocates of the Bible course, Dr. Randy Brinson, met
me at entrance to the state house. Brinson, a tall sandy-haired
physician from Montgomery who speaks with a twang and the earnest
enthusiasm of a youth-group leader, is a lifelong Republican and founder
of Redeem the Vote, a national voter registration organization that
targets evangelicals. Since discovering the Bible literacy course, he
has successfully lobbied politicians in Florida, Georgia, and Missouri
to introduce bills that would set up similar classes. But it is here at
home that he's encountered the most resistance. "You should see who's
against this thing," he told me, shaking his head.
Indeed, when Brinson and the other supporters-including several
Pentecostal ministers, some Methodists, and a member of the state board
of education-entered the state house chamber to make their case, they
faced off against representatives from the Christian Coalition,
Concerned Women of America, and the Eagle Forum. These denizens of the
Christian Right denounced the effort, calling it "extreme" and
"frivolous" and charging that it would encourage that most dangerous of
activities, "critical thinking." The real stakes of the fight, though,
were made clear by Republican Rep. Scott Beason when he took his turn at
the lectern. "This is more than about God," he reminded his colleagues.
"This is about politics."
Actually, it's about both-a fight over which party gets to claim the
religious mantle. Nationally, and in states like Alabama, the GOP cannot
afford to allow Democrats a victory on anything that might be perceived
as benefiting people of faith. Republican political dominance depends on
being able to manipulate religious supporters with fear, painting the
Democratic Party as hostile to religion and in the thrall of secular
humanists. That image would take quite a blow if the party of Nancy
Pelosi was responsible for bringing back Bible classes-even
constitutional ones-to public schools.
The holy skirmish down in Alabama, with its "GOP blocks votes on Bible
class bill" headlines, may seem like just a one-time, up-is-down,
oddity. But it's really the frontline of a larger war to keep Democrats
from appealing to more moderate evangelical voters. American politics is
so closely divided that if a political party peels off a few percentage
points of a single big constituency, it can change the entire electoral
map. To take the most recent example, African Americans, who represent
11 percent of the electorate, cast 88 percent of their ballots for
Democrats nationally. But Bush was able to get those numbers down to 84
percent in key states like Ohio and Pennsylvania in 2004-and kept the
White House as a result. Republican strategists recognized that a
significant number of black voters are very conservative on social
issues but have stayed with the Democratic Party because of its
reputation for being friendlier to racial minorities. The GOP didn't
need a strategy to sway the entire black community; it just needed to
pick off enough votes to put the party over the top.
Democrats could similarly poach a decisive percentage of the GOP's
evangelical base. In the last election, evangelicals made up 26 percent
of the electorate, and 78 percent of them voted for Bush. That sounds
like a fairly inviolate bloc. And, indeed, the conservative evangelicals
for whom abortion and gay marriage are the deciding issues are unlikely
to ever leave the Republican Party. But a substantial minority of
evangelical voters-41 percent, according to a 2004 survey by political
scientist John Green at the University of Akron-are more moderate on a
host of issues ranging from the environment to public education to
support for government spending on anti-poverty programs. Broadly
speaking, these are the suburban, two-working-parents,
kids-in-public-school, recycle-the-newspapers evangelicals. They may be
pro-life, but it's in a Catholic, "seamless garment of life" kind of
way. These moderates have largely remained in the Republican coalition
because of its faith-friendly image. A targeted effort by the Democratic
Party to appeal to them could produce victories in the short term: To
win the 2004 presidential election, John Kerry needed just 59,300
additional votes in Ohio-that's four percent of the total evangelical
vote in the state, or approximately 10 percent of Ohio's moderate
evangelical voters. And if the Democratic Party changed its reputation
on religion, the result could alter the electoral map in a more
significant and permanent way.
That's why, insiders say, the word has gone forth from the Republican
National Committee to defeat Democratic efforts to reclaim religion.
Republicans who disregard the instructions and express support for
Democratic efforts are swiftly disciplined. At the University of
Alabama, the president of the College Republicans was forced to resign
after she endorsed the Bible legislation. A few states away, a Missouri
Republican who sponsored a Bible literacy bill came under criticism from
conservatives for consulting with Brinson and subsequently denied to a
St. Louis Post-Dispatch reporter that he had ever even heard of Brinson.
But as for Brinson himself, he's already gone. "Oh, they're ticked at
me," he says. "But it's because they're scared. This has the potential
to break the Republican coalition."
Willing to play ball
Three years ago, Randy Brinson would have been the first to tell you
that he was an unlikely political player and an even less likely
Democratic collaborator. While his father had been a classic southern
Democrat who shifted with George Wallace and made the leap to the
Republican Party with Reagan, Brinson, who grew up in Jacksonville,
Fla., had come of age in the new Republican South. He had worked on the
campaign of the first Republican to be elected governor in South
Carolina when he was in boarding school there and was an early Reagan
supporter at college in Georgia in the mid-1970s. When Brinson moved his
family to Montgomery after medical school, he naturally got involved in
local politics, and in the late 1990s, he was a health-care advisor to
the Republican governor Fob James.
But he was essentially an unknown figure until, in 2003, he figured out
a way to combine his three passions-religion, politics, and music. He
had already been part of a group that started WAY-FM (as in, "I am the
way, the truth, and the life"), a Christian radio station based in
Montgomery and carried in 44 markets. With an upcoming presidential
election, Brinson realized that a religious version of MTV's Rock the
Vote would have the best chance of reaching young evangelicals and
getting them involved in politics. Using his own money at first, he
created a non-profit called Redeem the Vote and hired the media firm
that marketed Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ, giving him instant
access to their contacts throughout the evangelical world. Through
partnerships with more than 30 Christian music acts and summer concerts
like Creation East and Spirit Coast West (the Christian equivalents of
Lilith Fair or Lollapalooza), Redeem the Vote registered more voters
than all of the efforts of the Christian Right heavyweights-Focus on the
Family, the Southern Baptist Convention, American Family Association,
and the Family Research Council-combined.
Suddenly, Brinson was on the radar of national media like The Washington
Post and "Nightline," and catching the eye of fellow conservatives. With
such an impressive showing his first time out and direct access to young
evangelicals, the most coveted of resources, Brinson could have been on
track to become a major player in the Christian Right. The old
guard-figures like James Dobson, Chuck Colson, Don Wildmon, James
Kennedy, Phyllis Schlafly-are all in their 70s; the future of the
movement lies with people like Brinson, who are 20 or 30 years younger
and have credibility with the grassroots.
So when religious conservatives convened a meeting at the Hay-Adams
Hotel in Washington a few weeks after the election, Brinson was invited.
The room was full of men who had played some role in keeping the White
House in Bush's hands. Richard Land of the Southern Baptist Convention
sat at Brinson's table. Rick Warren, author of the bestseller The
Purpose-Driven Life, wasn't far away. Rep. Tom DeLay (R-Tex.) and Sen.
Rick Santorum (R-Penn.) came over from the Hill to talk with the group.
The mood was celebratory, but with an aggressive, hostile edge. They had
won, and now they wanted to collect.
The main item of business that day was what to do with Santorum's
colleague, the pesky pro-choice Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Penn.). Specter
held a crucial position as chair of the Judiciary Committee and had
recently outraged this group by telling the press that he would apply
"no litmus test" to judicial nominees. Now they wanted him gone, ousted,
stripped of power. When, in the midst of escalating rhetoric, Brinson
spoke up to suggest that perhaps punishing Specter wasn't the wisest
decision, the idea wasn't well received. "That," he says, "was my first
inkling that I wasn't one of them." If being a player in this world
meant calling for the heads of moderate Republicans and ginning up fake
controversies like a supposed "war on Christmas," Brinson wasn't
terribly interested.
Not long after, while Brinson was still turning the taste of
disillusionment around in his mouth, a Democrat called from Washington.
The immediate post-election conventional wisdom was that Democrats lost
because they couldn't appeal to so-called "moral values" voters.
Democrats immediately embarked on a crash course in religious outreach
and sought out people who could teach them about evangelicals. Brinson,
who had caught the attention of the Democratic youth-vote industry,
seemed like an obvious choice.
As for Brinson, when the Democratic chief of staff on the other end of
the line asked whether the doctor would be willing to meet with some
Democrats, he thought about his recent experiences with the other side
and decided "maybe it wouldn't be so bad to talk to these Democratic
people." In quick succession, the lifelong Republican found himself
meeting with advisors to the incoming Democratic leaders-Rep. Nancy
Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.)-field directors at the
Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, and aides to Howard Dean at
the Democratic National Committee. What they found is that their
interests overlapped: The Democrats wanted to reach out to evangelicals,
and Brinson wanted to connect with politicians who could deliver on a
broader array of evangelical concerns, like protecting programs to help
the poor, supporting public education, and expanding health care. It had
seemed natural for him to start by pressing his own party to take up
those concerns, but Democrats appeared to be more willing partners. They
even found common ground on abortion when Brinson, who is very pro-life,
explained that he was more interested in lowering abortion rates by
preventing unwanted pregnancies than in using the issue to score
political points.
Those Democrats who had initially been wary about working with a
conservative evangelical Republican from Alabama found Brinson
convincing. They also realized that conservatives had done them an
enormous favor. "Listening to him talk," one of them told me, "I
thought, these guys *****-slapped him, and he's willing to play ball."
At about this time, with Bush just entering his second term, his support
among evangelicals began to slip. They had turned out in record numbers
to give him nearly 80 percent of their votes. And for what? Conservative
evangelicals didn't like the fact that their demand to oust Specter was
ultimately denied. Nor were they pleased that the Harriet Miers
nomination had been bungled after it was peddled to them as a way to put
one of their own on the high court. The Abramoff scandal didn't help
either, with its manipulation of Christian Right leaders to support
gambling interests and email messages referring to evangelicals as "wackos."
For their part, more moderate evangelicals soured on Bush for many of
the reasons that lowered his approval ratings across the board: an
unpopular Social Security plan, a lack of progress in Iraq, and the
failed response to Hurricane Katrina. The right-of-center magazine
Christianity Today ran an editorial declaring that "single-issue
politics is neither necessary nor wise." One-third of the students and
faculty at Calvin College in the heart of conservative western Michigan
signed a full-page ad protesting Bush's Iraq policy when he gave a
commencement address there. Many moderates were dismayed when the old
guard refused to join protests against federal budget cuts that fall
disproportionately on the poor in favor of what James Dobson called
"pro-family tax cuts." These moderates had supported Bush despite often
disagreeing with his specific positions. But in 2005, according to an
Associated Press poll, the percentage of them who believed the country
was headed in the right direction dropped by 30 points.
Big business v. believers
The newly converted are the most zealous, sharing the good news with
gusto to any and all comers. Every few days, Randy Brinson calls me with
another revelation. Republicans? "The power structure in the Republican
Party is too entrenched with big business. It's not with
evangelicals-they're a means to an end." The Christian Right? "They just
want to keep the culture war going because it raises a lot of money for
them." Abramoff? "Evangelicals were being used as pawns to promote a big
money agenda." His fellow evangelicals? "Can't they see that Republicans
are just pandering to them??" He once was blind, but now he sees.
What sets Brinson apart from other disgruntled evangelicals is that he
has an infrastructure at his disposal. Although Redeem the Vote is still
engaged in voter registration activities, Brinson has expanded its
mission, branching out into issue advocacy and using the organizational
capability developed during the campaign to mobilize evangelicals at a
moment's notice. Last year, when a Republican state senator led an
effort to shift money from Alabama's education trust fund to more
conservative causes, Brinson generated nearly 60,000 email
messages-nearly half of the state senate district. It didn't take long
for the legislator to cry "uncle" and leave the funds for public education.
It's for this reason that Brinson has not been completely shut out of
conversations in the Christian Right, and officials at the White House
continue to take his calls. He has numbers behind him, and they all know
it. In an uncharacteristically boastful moment, Brinson crows that
Republicans "are sweating bullets because they know what we can do."
While Brinson has been working with Democrats in Alabama on the Bible
literacy bill, other evangelicals are having their own road to Damascus
moments. One of them is Richard Cizik, vice president for governmental
affairs at the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE), and a
frequent subject of profiles on "kinder, gentler" evangelicals in
outlets like Newsweek and USA Today. Cizik has spent years trying to get
evangelicals invested in what he calls "creation care," the idea that
God gave them responsibility for tending to the earth. His hope has been
that a Republican administration would be more likely to pay attention
to lobbying from its own base on issues like carbon dioxide emissions
than from liberal environmentalists.
In early January, I talked to Cizik about his efforts to get
evangelicals to take a stand on climate change, a move that would place
considerable political pressure on the administration to take the
problem seriously. The NAE represents 52 denominations with 45,000
churches and 30 million members across the country-getting them all to
agree on something is no easy task, but Cizik had made impressive
strides and was optimistic. Convinced that his only course of action was
to work with Republicans, he spent an hour patiently explaining why
evangelicals were better off trying to change Republican attitudes about
the environment rather than working with Democrats who already embraced
his position. Not able to help myself, I argued back. It's not as if the
Bush administration doesn't support environmental policies because they
hate trees. It's because they have powerful business supporters who
don't like regulation. Still, Cizik held firm, insisting that
evangelicals had to change "our own party."
A month later, I ran into Cizik at the National Prayer Breakfast. That
morning, he had opened up his Washington Post to find an article based
on a letter to his boss from the old guard-Dobson, Colson, Wildmon, and
the rest-suggesting, in the way that Tony Soprano makes suggestions,
that the NAE back off its plan to take a public position on global
warming. "Bible-believing evangelicals," the letter-writers argued,
"disagree about the cause, severity and solutions to the global warming
issue." The leaked letter was a blatant attempt to torpedo Cizik's
efforts, and it had worked. The NAE would take no stand on climate change.
There was no doubt that the administration had prevailed on the more
pliable figures of the Christian Right to whack one of their own. Cizik
was beside himself. It was hard to resist the "I told you so" moment,
and I didn't. But when I suggested to him that this was an example of
the way that business seemed to win out most of the time when religious
and business interests came into conflict in GOP politics, he stopped
me. "Not most of the time," he corrected. "Every time. Every single
time." And he's no longer sure that can change. "Maybe not with this
administration.... We need to stop putting all of our eggs in one
basket-that's just not good politics."
Cizik wasn't the only example of this shift at the Prayer Breakfast. At
the main event earlier in the day, keynote speaker Bono (of U2 and
antipoverty crusading fame) enjoyed a far more enthusiastic reception
than President Bush, whose applause was, several conservative religious
leaders told me, surprisingly weak. ("He got a standing ovation when he
entered, but that's because you have to stand," observed one
evangelical.) It could have had something to do with the fact that Bono
highlighted this tension between what's good for corporate interests and
what serves the cause of justice. He went through a litany of
examples-trade agreements that make it harder for Third-World countries
to sell their products, tax policies that shift debt to the next
generation, patent laws that raise the price of life-saving drugs-and
then put the challenge to his audience: "God will not accept that. Mine
won't, at least. Will yours?"
Evangelicals-particularly centrists-are increasingly answering, "No!"
Rick Warren has recently started a campaign to end global poverty,
reminding his followers that "Life is not about having more and getting
more-it's about serving God and serving others." Groups like the
Evangelical Environmental Network (EEN) are taking up Cizik's cause; 63
percent of evangelicals in a recent survey released by EEN said that
global warming was an immediate concern. Half went even further,
agreeing that steps needed to be taken to reduce global warming, even if
it meant a high economic cost for the United States. Former National
Review writer Rod Dreher has a just-published book that urges religious
conservatives to question negative consequences of the free market.
The list of issues these evangelicals care about extends beyond the
social hot-buttons that win elections. And yet, as Cizik notes, when
they try to promote concerns that threaten the interests of big
business, evangelicals are stymied every time. Observers date the latest
round of religious/business tensions to the mid-1990s disagreement over
whether to continue China's Most-Favored-Nation trading status. Although
the issue split Democrats, the most serious dispute was within the
Republican Party. Religious conservatives, led by evangelicals, argued
that the United States should not trade with a country that had serious
human rights abuses, including persecution of Christians. But their
concerns were overridden by corporations who lusted after China's vast,
largely untapped market.
More recently, evangelicals and other religious leaders have met with
officials at the Justice Department and the Federal Communications
Commission (FCC) to request government action to protect children from
receiving pornography over wireless devices. This was a cause the
Bush-Cheney campaigned trumpeted during 2004 as proof of its commitment
to help parents protect their children from harmful cultural influences.
That was before wireless companies weighed in to oppose the regulation,
however. In their latest meeting with federal agencies, the religious
leaders were politely but firmly rebuffed.
Even a simple measure to protect the rights of workers to wear religious
garb such as the hijab in the workplace or to swap work schedules with a
colleague on religious holidays like Good Friday hit a brick wall when
business interests got involved. For 10 years, Republican congressional
leaders-and, since 2001, the Bush White House-have refused to support
the Workplace Religious Freedom Act (cosponsored by John Kerry and Rick
Santorum) because the business lobby, led by the U.S. Chamber of
Commerce, opposes the idea that employers should have to make
accommodations for religious workers. In a November 2005 hearing on the
legislation, Rep. Mark Souder (R-Ind.), angrily dressed down the
Chamber's witness, declaring himself "incredibly disgusted, as well as
disappointed" by her testimony. This earned him a rebuke from the
committee chair, who reminded Souder that "private business... has the
right to set the rules."
This is hardly a new tension in the Republican coalition. In 1984,
Sidney Blumenthal wrote a fascinating article in The New Republic,
detailing how Reagan's political advisors struggled to sideline the
religious conservatives who had put them into power. A "strategy of
repressive tolerance," he wrote, was the work of economic conservatives
who found the agenda of the Christian Right inconvenient and often
embarrassing. The battle plan sounds very familiar today: The Christian
Right rallied its followers around issues like abortion and school
prayer; the White House offered "insincere gestures of support" while
instructing congressional leaders to place relevant legislation in
permanent limbo; and White House aides made sure the Christian Right
constituency was "maintained in a state of perpetual mobilization."
The flaw in this strategy, Blumenthal noted, was that "The White House
served as an incubator for the movement it was trying to contain." After
eight years of this, religious conservatives wised up. And when
televangelist Pat Robertson entered the 1988 presidential primaries, his
strong early showing stemmed in large part from the support of
frustrated evangelicals. Back then, of course, the issues that the White
House was working to avoid were conservative favorites like abortion and
school prayer. That's still a problem for the Bush administration, but
now they face dissent from the other side as well. The first time
around, of course, Robertson failed to get the nomination, and most
evangelicals-faced with the choice between the Episcopalian George H.W.
Bush or the avowedly secular Michael Dukakis-drifted back to the GOP.
What will happen in 2008 is now an open question.
Giving Karl Rove heartburn
Like an abusive boyfriend, Republicans keep moderate evangelicals in the
coalition by alternating between painting their options as bleak and
wooing them with sweet talk. You can't leave me-where are you going to
go? To them? They think you're stupid, they hate religion. Besides, you
know I love you-I'm a compassionate conservative. The tactic works as
long as evangelicals don't call the GOP's bluff and as long as Democrats
are viewed as hostile to religion.
Randy Brinson is proof that some evangelicals are willing to take their
chances and cross over to see what Democrats have to offer. There is a
growing recognition among mainstream Democrats and the once-quiescent
Religious Left that they can reframe issues they care about in terms
that appeal to religious voters. But winning over moderate
evangelicals-or moderate religious voters generally-will take more than
just repackaging old positions. It will require aggressively staking out
new positions that can be used to demonstrate the tension within the
GOP's religious/business coalition-embracing, for instance, the
Workplace Religious Freedom Act. And it means forwarding new ideas that
can counter the conservative-promoted image of progressives as
anti-religious-ideas like Bible-as-literature courses in public high
schools, which might anger some secularists on the left but are
perfectly consonant with liberal values.
A sign that Democratic leaders are beginning to get it is the
plan-promoted by leaders such as Harry Reid and Hillary Clinton-to lower
abortion rates by preventing unwanted pregnancies. Full-throated support
of this effort, and a recognition that abstinence education plays a role
in lowering teen pregnancy rates (along with birth control), puts
Democrats alongside the majority of voters on this difficult issue, and
it is especially appealing to moderate evangelicals. They're not looking
to punish everything outside of procreative marital sex; they just want
to see fewer abortions take place. And because evangelicals generally
don't have the same opposition to contraception that Catholics do,
Democrats can promote the kind of plan that would truly reduce
abortions, something Republicans-with their reliance on right-wing
Catholics-can't afford to do.
Despite all of the punditry about a "God gap" at the voting booth, this
is a better moment for Democrats to pick up support from religious
moderates than any other time in the past few decades. That's because
evangelicals themselves are the ones who are broadening the faith
agenda, insisting that there are issues they care about beyond abortion
and gay marriage, connecting Gospel messages about the golden rule and
the Good Samaritan to the policies they want their government to support.
For 30 years, the Republican advantage among religious voters has come
from being able to successfully control the definition of "religious,"
conflating it with "conservative" and encouraging the media to do the
same. Measured against that yardstick, most Democrats come up short. But
when the standard is more complex, when being religious also means
caring about the environment and poverty and human rights and education,
the plane levels. Soon enough, Republicans start to miss the mark, and
Democrats get a little closer.
This is what gives Karl Rove and the other GOP headcounters heartburn. A
third-party candidacy by Roy Moore would be troublesome, but
conservative evangelicals are ultimately loyal to the Republican Party.
And while it might irritate business supporters, the administration
could probably toss moderate evangelicals a few crumbs on the
environment or global poverty. But once that door is opened, it can't be
shut again. Whether or not large numbers of moderates migrate to the
Democratic Party, if they succeed in expanding the scope of "religious
issues," the GOP will lose its lock on faith.
And so Republicans revert to the only tactic they have left: fear. The
fight down in Alabama has shown that they will do whatever they have to
in order to prevent Democrats from claiming a piece of the religious
mantle, even if it means taking what could be portrayed as the
"anti-religion" stance themselves. On the same day that Alabama
Republicans launched their filibuster of the Bible literacy bill, state
GOP chairwoman Twinkle Cavanaugh published an op-ed that charged the
Bible curriculum was written by "ultra-liberal groups like the American
Civil Liberties Union, the Council for Islamic Education, and the People
for the American Way." (It was not.) Randy Brinson chuckled as he
reported this to me, saying, "This is smokin' them out. Now we see what
they really care about. It's not religion; they care about power." He
may have the last laugh. According to convoluted state law, Democrats
can revive the Bible literacy bill after the Alabama legislature
approves all of its budget bills this spring-and they have the votes to
pass it.
--
"Now, by the way, any time you hear the United States government talking
about wiretap, it requires -- a wiretap requires a court order. Nothing has
changed, by the way. When we're talking about chasing down terrorists, we're
talking about getting a court order before we do so"
-George W. Bush, April 20, 2004
Not dead, in jail, or a slave? Thank a liberal!
Pay your taxes so the rich don't have to.
http://www.zeppscommentaries.com
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--
^^ ^^ ^^ ^^ ^^ ^^ ^^ ^^ ^^ ^^ ^^ ^^ ^^ ^^
Michelle Malkin (Mickey) aa list#1
BAAWA Knight & EAC Bible Thumper Thumper
^^ ^^ ^^ ^^ ^^ ^^ ^^ ^^ ^^ ^^ ^^ ^^ ^^ ^^
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