The Theocratic "Shadow" Campaign

Kudos to Max Blumenthal for his article "The Christian Right's Humble Servant." Blumenthal is one of the few journalists who knows where to find the fingerprints of the right-wing cabal that is methodically pushing our nation toward theocracy. Here's an interesting paragraph:

When the official Bush/Cheney re-election campaign kicked into high gear, the religious right's shadow campaign had been underway for nearly a year. The Southern Baptist Convention's Land had created a program to cultivate "values voters" called IVoteValues, which included a Web site rating candidates according to issues of concern to conservative Christians. Jay Sekulow, chief counsel for the American Center for Law and Justice, a legal arm of the Christian Coalition, sent mailers to 45,000 conservative pastors explaining how to rally support for Republican candidates without threatening their church's non-profit status. The Presidential Prayer Team, a private evangelical group bankrolled by Arizona Diamondbacks owner Jerry Colangelo ran ads during the summer on 1,200 radio stations urging listeners to get on their knees and pray for the president.

While Blumenthal gives a lot of print to the issue of homosexuality, Brad Carson, a Baylor grad who lost to theocrat Tom Coburn in the recent campaign for one of Oklahoma's U.S. Senate seats, has recently written in The New Republic about the role that the issue of abortion played in his campaign. Here's a quote from his article:

After the morning rituals, the pastor called me to the stage, and we engaged in a lengthy discussion about abortion, homosexuality, "liberal judges," and other controversial matters. After leaving the stage, I rejoined the congregation, and the pastor launched into an attack on the "pro-choice terrorists," who were, to his mind, far more dangerous than Al Qaeda. Yes, he acknowledged, thousands had died on September 11, but abortion was killing millions and millions. This was a holocaust, he continued, and we must all vote righteously. Vote righteously! In 13 months of campaigning across the vast state of Oklahoma, I must have seen or heard this phrase a thousand times, often on the marquees of churches, where, outside of election season, one finds only clever and uplifting biblical bromides. But it was not until that September Sunday in Sallisaw, one of the most Democratic towns in Oklahoma, that I first understood that the seemingly innocuous phrase "vote righteously" was the slogan not of a few politicized churches, but the cri de coeur of millions--millions who fervently believe that their most deeply held values are under assault and who further see this assault as at least tolerated by the Democratic Party, if not actually led by it.

One of the best responses I've seen to the theocratic rights' fixation on sexual ethics is an editorial in the last issue of the Texas Baptist Standard. Marv Knox writes:

But (high school boys' imaginations to the contrary) there's more to this world than sex. And every American, particularly every person of faith, who is motivated by "moral values" should press our leaders to act on a wider range of issues. They include, but aren't necessarily limited to: (I'm just giving the headings without Knox's discussion)

Poverty . . . Healthcare . . . Environment . . . Debt . . . Nationalism