John McCain has been the nominee of his party for over a month now. He has no active opposition, no figure on his side of the aisle contesting him for leadership of the Republican party and the conservative movement.
And yet, Republicans are still voting against him. In Indiana McCain pulled in 77% of the vote, and he made an even worse showing with 73% in North Carolina. Even more troubling for McCain is that Huckabee is the leading protest vote. That’s the religious right vote, the anti-choice crowd and the bedrock of President Bush’s re-election victory.
In 2004 the GOP got the vote out by riling up the religious right and wooing the moderate middle. Post-Katrina and post-Iraq they have lost the middle. The press image of McCain as a maverick helps them with the middle, but they’ve still lost it. The religious right is mostly disgusted with the GOP - they haven’t kept up their end of the bargain. The religious right lined up behind the GOP to ban abortion, negate gay rights, and violate the separation of church and state. In exchange for that, the religious right was okay with allowing the business class to take their pound of flesh. But the GOP had the House, Senate, and White House and while they did enough at the edges of those issues they did not remake America into a theocracy.
John McCain does not inspire these people. Ambivalent at best about his faith, he is not the “God warrior” Bush pretends to be. He is very much the Bob Dole candidate. McCain is the “his turn” guy and in Obama he is going up against the first Democratic candidate in a long while who has the base of voters who are really for their guy.
The religious right is not going to move Democratic, but like in 2006 they are probably going to stay home while the Democratic base is poised to make the turnout in 2004 seem like training camp. The religious right’s relationship with the GOP isn’t just yet a divorce, but Mommy and Daddy are for sure on a break.
I posted this in links yesterday, but I’m putting it here because I thought it was funny and worth more notice. I really hate these intelligent design (creationism) people and the way they continue to try and pervert science and education. Expelled and Ben Stein are even worse because they try to link Nazism and Fascism to science and evolution. Their tactics, of course, are right out of the Goebbels playbook.
The legislature down there in America’s appendage passed a bill that calls for the theory of evolution (caution: may contain science-like material) to be downgraded to just contradictory noise in order to allow creationism based “intelligent design” into the classroom.
Rick Moran of Right Wing Nuthouse, writing about the Colorado church shootings, says:
Given the spate of lawsuits brought by atheists and others who seek to remove Christian symbols and the outward manifestations of Christian beliefs from the public square along with attacks in media and on the internet, is it any wonder that Christians feel themselves besieged?
He goes on to talk about Christians feeling besieged in America, yada yada yada atheists have some blame to take for this atmosphere. Bull. I’ve written here numerous times that I don’t like the new brand of atheism as practiced by folks like Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins, but I think the culture that has pushed the idea of Christians being oppressed in America is full of crap. If anything this country has become more aggressively Christian since about the midpoint of the Clinton presidency.
The religious right has regularly acted as if they own this country, regularly asserting that America is “a Christian nation” which goes against the historical fact that the founders were largely deists or so disenchanted with religion controlled government they enshrined the distinction between government and religion in the founding documents. The religious right has made clear that if we are not like them that we are not true Americans, and yet still claim to be oppressed - making out institutions like the ACLU to be vast cabals of government influence when at the same time the leader of the government at this time is one of them, who fills government positions with their people from their universities no matter what their actual qualifications are.
It’s as if the New England Patriots at 13-0, killing everyone by 30-40 points said that they were really afraid of the Jets and winless Dolphins and someone actually took them seriously.
Echoing Mitt Romney’s speech last week asserting that the dividing line in America is between the religious and the secular, the far right Family Research Council claims that church shootings are the fault of “secular media”.
Because what we need now in America are more divisions based on total bull. Thanks, Mitt. Thanks, Family Research Council.
You should know that up until last year the pastor of New Life Church was Ted Haggard, who lectured the secular from a place of moral superiority until it came out he was cheating on his wife with a man and using meth.
A megachurch canceled a memorial service for a Navy veteran 24 hours before it was to start because the deceased was gay.
Officials at the nondenominational High Point Church knew that Cecil Howard Sinclair was gay when they offered to host his service, said his sister, Kathleen Wright. But after his obituary listed his life partner as one of his survivors, she said, it was called off.
“It’s a slap in the face. It’s like, ‘Oh, we’re sorry he died, but he’s gay so we can’t help you,’” she said Friday.
They hate and they destroy and they undermine real Christianity and its believers.
Oh for the day when women were second class citizens again, right jackasses?
One of the nation’s largest Southern Baptist seminaries, the school is introducing a new, women-only academic program in homemaking _ a 23-hour concentration that counts toward a bachelor of arts degree in humanities. The program is aimed at helping establish what Southwestern’s president calls biblical family and gender roles.
Coursework will include seven hours of nutrition and meal preparation, seven hours of textile design and “clothing construction,” three hours of general homemaking, three hours on “the value of a child,” and three hours on the “biblical model for the home and family.”
…
“We are moving against the tide in order to establish family and gender roles as described in God’s word for the home and the family,” Patterson said at the denomination’s annual meeting in June. “If we do not do something to salvage the future of the home, both our denomination and our nation will be destroyed.”
Former state legislator Coy C. Privette, a Cabarrus County commissioner and retired Baptist minister, was charged Thursday with soliciting prostitution, authorities said.
Privette, 74, of Kannapolis, was charged with six counts of misdemeanor aiding and abetting prostitution by renting a hotel room and paying for sexual acts, according to State Bureau of Investigation Agent Kevin Canty. Tiffany Denise Summers, 32, of Salisbury, was charged with six counts of prostitution, Canty said.
One man’s “jihad” is another man’s “crusade”. It’s all religious belief in favor of evil.
A group of Christian protesters tried to shout down a Hindu clergyman who was invited to give the opening prayer during yesterday’s session of the Senate. Capitol Police say they arrested three people after they stood up and started yelling “this is an abomination” when guest chaplain Rajan Zed invited the Senate to join him in prayer.
I am writing to let you know that the Center for Reclaiming America for Christ was closed on April 26. This unanimous action by the members of the Board of Coral Ridge Ministries—each one a close friend or associate of Dr. D. James Kennedy, who continues to recover from a cardiac arrest suffered in December—came after a lengthy period of review. It was taken as part of a larger ministry restructuring designed to redirect Coral Ridge Ministries back to its core mission—doing media ministry.
We at Coral Ridge Ministries have now embraced a very aggressive goal to expand our media audience tenfold over the next five years—from three million to 30 million people by 2012. To reach that goal, we will need to be focused laser-like on the production of print, audio, and video programming for use on television, radio, the Internet, and other new media channels.
It is this requirement for single-minded ministry that led to the hard decision to close the Center for Reclaiming America for Christ.
Pair this with the whole backlash on Dobson and it looks like the religious far right may have had it with the boondoggle the Republicans have had them in since the Reagan era. No theocracy, no total ban on abortion, no curbing of freedom of speech…
Long-time readers of this site know that there is no Republican I love more than Alan Keyes. Nobody in the world can provide such soaring oratory for the most insane-crazy things than Alan Keyes. And now there’s an effort among the anti-choice fringe to get Keyes into the 2008 race. Indeed, we need Alan Keyes for president!!!!
The Parent’s Television Council, a right wing organization set up by Brent Bozell (of Media Research Center) to get a small minority of righties say-so over what’s allowed on tv sent an email out Tuesday complaining about the recent ruling turning back FCC fines over cursing on broadcast tv. What I noticed was the graphic accompanying PTC’s email.
Apparently something “objectionable” is on the tv and the kid is covering his eyes. And the dad? The dad is HOLDING A REMOTE and LEANING IN TO GET A CLOSER LOOK. He could quit being a perv in front of his kid and change the channel…
When he’s not writing about how to whip children like dogs, Focus On The FascismFamily’s James Dobson is claiming that his radio program (a pedantic affair where he explains the world to the mindless sheep who follow him - listen to examples here) is listened to by 220 million people.
Using Dobson math, I’ll state the following:
"OliverWillis.com, edited and written daily by Oliver Willis reaches a potential daily audience of 211 million Americans and 1.1 billion people globally."
That statement is a clear example of honest conservative truthiness.
Lest you forget, this was Jerry Falwell’s response to 9/11:
“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 have tried to secularize America. I point the finger in their face and say ‘you helped this happen.’”
GOP Suckup Watch: Mitt Romney: “He will be greatly missed” John McCain: “Dr. Falwell was a man of distinguished accomplishment who devoted his life to serving his faith and country.”
“The ACLU has long said that abstinence-only-until-marriage programs are ineffective, and what’s worse censor vital information about how to protect against unintended pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases,” said Lorraine Kenny, Public Education Director of the ACLU Reproductive Freedom Project. “Today’s study makes clear that these programs have no place in our classrooms and should not be funded by taxpayer dollars.”
Tyrannosaurus rex was a strict vegetarian, and lived with Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden.
There were dinosaurs of every kind aboard Noah’s ark. Some dinosaurs managed to hang around until just a few hundred years ago. The legend of St. George slaying the dragon? That probably was a dinosaur.
Exhibits showing all this and more will be at the Creation Museum, a $27 million religious showcase nearing completion in Northern Kentucky.
The museum, in Boone County, is being built by a non-profit group called Answers in Genesis. It is scheduled to open on Memorial Day. Museum and Northern Kentucky tourism officials expect it to be a boon to the region, bringing in at least 250,000 visitors in its first year.
It already is getting media attention. Newspapers and television stations from Europe, Asia and Australia have visited, and CNN was there last week.
But mainstream scientists, who have dubbed it The Fred and Wilma Flintstone Museum, say the museum’s message is just plain wrong.
Wrong is putting it nicely. Idiotic is about right.
