Last week as I was driving to a meeting I heard a reporter with NPR interviewing a minister at President Bush's inaugural. The name of the minister rang a bell with me. His name was Rob Schenck. He is the leader of a 5,000 member organization that calls itself the National Clergy Council. He and the council were very active in events around the inauguration.
Here's a link to an article that quotes some of what he said in the interview that I heard. In this article Schenck is defending the President's quoting from the Koran as "being in Jesus' words, wise as a serpent."
Schenck's name rang a bell with me because I have read Jerry Reiter's Live From the Gates of Hell: An Insider's Look at the Antiabortion Underground. Reiter was a journalist in Houston during the time I pastored in Houston. He became an informer for the FBI who provided them information about the plans that militant Christian Reconstructionists and other right-wing extremist Christians were making to commit acts of violence against abortion providers. Reiter's entre into an underground network led by Donald Treshman, founder of Rescue America, was his relationship with the twin brothers Paul and Rob Schenck. His book is full of information about the Schenck's support of the anti-abortion underground.
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Bill Rauch is the Mayor of Beaufort, South Carolina and a former assistant to Ed Koch in NYC. In 2000 however, Rauch, came out for John McCain in the SC GOP Primary and campaigned for him, opening up his own home in Beaufort for McCain's first stop in SC after McCain took the New Hampshire Primary and had Karl Rove and George W. Bush in shambles.
What saved Bush and put him on path to be a two term President. For the most part it was the anti-abortion underground, the Right to Life Community of the coastal region of South Carolina in cahoots with Ralph Reed and Karl Rove.
Though Rauch does not mention him by name in his Chapter Principles in Politikin, key player in that right to life community is Chip Campsen who led the quixotic and ultimately failing fight in the eary 90's to capture Furman University for the Fundies. CAmpsen is now a state legislator and associate of the Purvises of the right to life and Baptist struggles in the state. He is not a Rob Schrenk by any stretch, but as Box 13 in Duval County Texas has an apotheotic legend in the career of LBJ, so will, I am convinced, this serpentine right-to-life community of low state SC ultimately have in the legend of Karl Rove, George W. Bush and Richard Land.
Such is the underbelly of evangelical America Time now honors.
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