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Sunday, June 04, 2006

THE DANGER THE CHRISTIAN RIGHT POSES TO US AND THE NATION. IMPORTANT TO THE COMING ELECTIONS.

On 05/31 I posted an article, "Alternet: Tyranny of the Christian Right." In it I stated that I would begin a series of posts on the Religious Right before the coming elections.

My purpose is not to attack Christians, but to spread information on the extreme views of the Religious Right, the Christian Coalition, and especially the Christian Reconstructionists and their cohorts, the Zionist Reconstructionists, their influence in government, the churches, and the Christians who are deceived by their propaganda, and how they can affect the outcome of the elections.

Granny's post below, "Better Dead Than Impure," wherein she posts about Tony Perkins, made me decide to begin the series now. Understanding their agenda and their power is crucial to every American who wants to try to re-take our nation and avoid the establishment of a Theocracy.

In the following article, note his pointed remarks that Democrats are against "people of faith" indicating they are anti-Christian, and influencing voters in favor of Republicans. It is a rather long article but an important one. It is necessary that we learn all we can and practise, "KNOW THINE ENEMY."

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Justice Sunday Preachers
by Max Blumenthal

Senate majority leader Bill Frist appeared through a telecast as a
speaker at "Justice Sunday," at the invitation of the event's main
sponsor, Family Research Council president Tony Perkins. "Justice
Sunday" was promoted as a rally to portray Democrats as being "against
people of faith." Many of the speakers compared the plight of
conservative Christians to the civil rights movement. But in sharing the
stage with Perkins, who introduced him to the rally, Frist was
associating himself with someone who has longstanding ties to racist
organizations.

Four years ago, Perkins addressed the Louisiana chapter of the Council
of Conservative Citizens (CCC), America's premier white supremacist
organization, the successor to the White Citizens Councils, which
battled integration in the South. In 1996 Perkins paid former Ku Klux
Klan Grand Wizard David Duke $82,500 for his mailing list. At the time,
Perkins was the campaign manager for a right-wing Republican candidate
for the US Senate in Louisiana. The Federal Election Commission fined
the campaign Perkins ran $3,000 for attempting to hide the money paid to
Duke.

As the emcee of Justice Sunday, Tony Perkins positioned himself beside a
black preacher and a Catholic "civil rights" activist as he rattled off
the phone numbers of senators wavering on President Bush's judicial
nominees. The evening's speakers studiously couched their appeals on
behalf of Bush's stalled judges in the vocabulary of victimhood,
accusing Democratic senators of "filibustering people of faith."

James Dobson, who founded the Family Research Council as the Washington
lobbying arm of his Focus on the Family, invoked the Christian right's
persecution complex. On an evening when Jews were celebrating the second
night of Passover, Dobson claimed, "The biggest Holocaust in world
history came out of the Supreme Court" with the Roe v. Wade decision.
On his syndicated radio show nearly two weeks earlier, on April 11,
Dobson compared the "black robed men" on the Supreme Court to "the men
in white robes, the Ku Klux Klan." By his logic, the burden of
oppression had passed from religious and racial minorities to unborn
children and pure-hearted heterosexuals engaged in "traditional
marriage."

Bishop Harry Jackson, from Hope Christian Church in College Park,
Maryland, was Justice Sunday's only black speaker. Jackson had recently
unveiled his "Black Contract With America," a document that highlights
wedge issues like gay marriage that would presumably pry black
churchgoers away from the Democratic Party. But so far he has been
disappointed. "Black churches are too concerned with justice," Jackson
lamented in his speech. Nonetheless, his association with the right wing
has done wonders for his personal profile. Just after Bush's second
inauguration, he was among a contingent of black clergy members invited
to the White House for a private meeting.

Justice Sunday also featured a token Catholic, William Donohue, who
heads the nation's largest "Catholic civil rights organization," the
Catholic League. In the battle to confirm far-right judicial nominees
like William Pryor, who happens to be Catholic, Donohue has become a key
asset for the Christian right's evangelical faction. He has argued that
Democratic senators opposing Pryor and others are motivated by
anti-Catholicism. "There isn't de jure discrimination against Catholics
in the Senate," Donohue claimed on Sunday. "There is de facto
discrimination. They've set the bar so high with the abortion issue, we
can't get any real Catholics over it."

But for all his concern with anti-Catholicism, Donohue had no qualms
about sharing the stage with Southern Baptist Theological Seminary
president Dr. Albert Mohler. "As an evangelical, I believe that the
Roman Catholic Church is a false church," Mohler remarked during a 2000
TV interview. "It teaches a false gospel. And the Pope himself holds a
false and unbiblical office." Donohue, who has protested against
Democrats who have made no such comments about Catholics, was silent
about Mohler. In fact, the site of Justice Sunday, Highview Baptist
Church, in Louisville, Kentucky, is Mohler's home church.

"We're fed up and we're on the same side," Donohue declared. "And if the
secular left is worried, they should be worried."

For Tony Perkins, Justice Sunday was the fulfillment of a strategy
devised more than two decades ago by his political mentor, Woody
Jenkins. In May 1981, in the wake of Ronald Reagan's presidential
victory, Jenkins and some fifty other conservative activists met at the
Northern Virginia home of direct-mail pioneer Richard Viguerie to plot
the growth of their movement. The Council for National Policy (CNP), an
ultra-secretive, right-wing organization, was the outcome of that
meeting. The CNP hooked up theocrats like R.J. Rushdoony, Pat Robertson
and Jerry Falwell with wealthy movement funders like Amway founder
Richard DeVos and beer baron Joseph Coors. As DeVos famously said, the
CNP "brings together the doers with the donors."

Jenkins, then a Louisiana state lawmaker, became CNP's first executive
director, and promptly made a bold prediction to a Newsweek reporter:
"One day before the end of this century, the Council will be so
influential that no president, regardless of party or philosophy, will
be able to ignore us or our concerns or shut us out of the highest
levels of government."

Eighteen years later, in 1999, the CNP was addressed by Texas Governor
George W. Bush, on the eve of his presidential campaign. At the
gathering, which was closed to the press, Bush reportedly sought to put
to rest any notion that he was a moderate. Later, when he was asked to
release to the public a transcript of his speech to the CNP, Bush
stubbornly refused. But the press reported rumors that he had promised
the CNP he would appoint only antiabortion judges if elected.

For years, Jenkins had been grooming Perkins as his political successor.
"To Jenkins, Perkins was like a son, and the feeling was and is mutual,"
wrote former Jenkins staffer Christopher Tidmore. In 1996 Perkins cut
his teeth as the manager of Jenkins's campaign for US Senate. It was
during that campaign that, in an attempt to consolidate the support of
Louisiana's conservative base, Perkins paid David Duke $82,000 for his
mailing list. After Jenkins was defeated by his Democratic opponent,
Mary Landrieu, he contested the election. But during the contest period,
Perkins's surreptitious payment to Duke was exposed through an
investigation conducted by the FEC, which fined the Jenkins campaign.

Six years later, in 2002, Perkins embarked on a campaign to avenge his
mentor's defeat by running for the US Senate himself. But Perkins was
dogged with questions about his involvement with David Duke. Perkins
issued a flat denial that he had ever had anything to do with Duke, and
he denounced him for good measure. Unfortunately, Perkins's signature
was on the document authorizing the purchase of Duke's list. Perkins's
dalliance with the racist Council of Conservative Citizens in the run-up
to his campaign also illuminates the seamy underside of his political
associations. Despite endorsements from James Dobson and a host of
prominent CNP members, Perkins was not even the leading Republican in
the senatorial race.

In the wake of his defeat, with Dobson's blessing, Perkins moved to
Washington to head the Family Research Council. In a closed meeting at
the Plaza Hotel in New York City during the Republican National
Convention in August 2004, an alliance drawing in Frist was sealed.
Perkins's associates at the CNP presented the Senate majority leader
with its "Thomas Jefferson Award." The grateful Frist declared, "The
destiny of the nation is on the shoulders of the conservative movement."

On Justice Sunday, Perkins introduced Frist as "a friend of the family."
"I don't think it's radical to ask senators to vote," Frist said from a
giant screen above the audience. "Only in the United States Senate could
it be considered a devastating option to allow a vote." His face then
disappeared, and Perkins returned onstage to urge viewers to call their
senators.

>>>>But there is more at stake here than the fate of the filibuster. With
Justice Sunday, *Perkins's ambition to become a national conservative
leader was ratified; *Bill Frist's presidential campaign for 2008 was
advanced with the Christian right; and* the faithful were imbued with the
notion that they are being victimized by liberal Democratic evildoers. <<<<

This article can be found on the web at:

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20050509/blumenthal

*****For more information on Tony Perkins, his agenda, and how his powerful influence in the White House and with the Christian Right affects you and the coming election.

http://www.defconamerica.org/meet-the-religious-right/tony-perkins.html check out the left sidebar for other major leaders of this powerful organization. I will post on some of them later.

5 Comments:

  • At Sunday, June 04, 2006 9:32:00 PM , Blogger David Cho said...

    It's a very fair and good article.

    Al Mohler's part in Justice Sunday is interesting. His good friend John MacArthur, who is my former pastor preaches against "moralism." But I guess his repudiation of political activism is only in name.

    I used to support the Religious Right for many years, but it has changed.

    You mention the Zionist and Christian "Reconstructionists." I don't know exactly what that means. Are you talking about Christian Zionism?

     
  • At Monday, June 05, 2006 1:43:00 AM , Blogger Marty said...

    For a wealth of information on this subject see Dr. Bruce Prescott's blog:

    http://mainstreambaptist.blogspot.com/

    Another resource is Talk To Action:

    http://www.talk2action.org/

     
  • At Monday, June 05, 2006 4:29:00 AM , Blogger Endorendil said...

    The remedy for the Religious Right is the Religious Left. We need principled people in politics, and that includes religious people.

     
  • At Tuesday, June 06, 2006 6:26:00 AM , Blogger Unknown said...

    David, I am not ignoring you. I am tearing apart the Mt. Vesuvius pile of papers, notes, folders, lists of urls searching for specifics on the Zionists and hoping the stacks do not explode.

     
  • At Tuesday, June 06, 2006 10:31:00 AM , Blogger Granny said...

    I should have responded to David in a comment as well as email. I sent him links on the Reconstructionists.

     

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