Cathie Adams Is Back!

Texas Eagle Forum today announced that its current president, Pat Carlson, is stepping down because she is seeking election to the Texas House of Representatives. (We reported about Carlson’s House run here.)

Her replacement is Cathie Adams, who had served as TEF’s president until she became chair of the Texas Republican Party in fall 2009. But Adams wasn’t too popular among Republican activists — she lost her post as state party chair in 2010.

Adams is one of the most extreme voices on the far right in Texas today. How extreme? Let’s take a walk down memory lane.

– Adams sees religious diversity as a threat to this country. From an October 1999 TEF letter:

“(W)e must place our faith in the ONE true God, then humble ourselves, pray and seek Him and repent for our sins. Then God will forgive us and heal our land. Do you think that a jealous God will tolerate ‘religious pluralism’ and allow us to come to Him any way we please? Absolutely not!”

– Adams believes that the United Nations is paving the way for the “anti-Christ.”

From a 2000 TEF letter:

“The Bible tells us that in the end times there will be a world government headed by a world leader, called the anti-Christ, who will profess a world religion, but did you ever think you would live in the day when these things would come into being? That is exactly what the United Nations is doing behind the backs of most Americans.”

From a January 1999 TEF newsletter:

“In the future, the anti-Christ will use the pleas for human rights, economic equity and a promise to ‘end all wars’ to found global government. . . . God is not the author of global government, the anti-Christ is, and the UN conspicuously manifests his warmongering spirit.”

– Adams has compared President Obama to Adolf Hitler, suggesting that a speech to American students was “eerily like Hitler’s youth movement.”

– In an e-mail to far-right activists in 2008, Adams viciously attacked the faith of then-candidate Obama (page 40):

“While many question Barak [sic] Hussein Obama’s ‘religion’…, the more important question is whether he has a ‘relationship’ with Jesus Christ because that is the only HOPE that any of us have to obtain eternal life. I personally see NO evidence that Obama has that kind of ‘saving faith.'”

– Adams is an anti-science zealot.

Criticizing evolution in an October 2003 email to TEF activists during the Texas State Board of Education’s debate over proposed new science textbooks:

“Did you evolve from an ape or were you created by God? This is NOT a rhetorical question. Your child or grandchild WILL be taught according to what you choose now.”

Criticizing vaccination programs in a 2003 email to TEF activists:

“State vaccine tracking registries being promoted in the name of protecting the public health are simply a smokescreen for the creation of yet another big brother government-operated system that will further invade our privacy and take away endangered liberties.”

Promoting climate change denialism in a January 1999 TEF newsletter:

“Tell your children they are ‘gifts’ from God,’ not ‘curses to the earth’ because they breathe out CO2, which radical environmentalists claim causes global warming.”

– Adams is an anti-gay fanatic who supports discrimination based on sexual orientation:

Criticizing then-President Bush for hiring gay people in an April 2003 email to TEF activists:

“While our President enjoys high polling numbers because of his leadership in the war against terror, we cannot look the other way when he elevates homosexuals and homosexual sympathizers to key positions within the White House and within the GOP.”

Opposing proposed legislation against job discrimination based on sexual orientation in a February 2003 email to TEF activists:

“Texas’ laws should be aligned with nature and nature’s God, thus protecting children from the unnatural and unhealthy lifestyles of homosexuality and bisexuality.”

Criticizing articles about same-sex couples in the mainstream media in a March 2003 email to TEF activists:

“This display of immoral pictures and articles presents a clear and present danger to traditional families as the media’s odd tolerance is doing its best to mainstream sexual perversion.”

– Defending the dominance of failed abstinence-only programs in Texas schools, Adams blamed the state’s sky-high rates of teen births and sexually transmitted diseases on the supposedly inferior morals of Mexican immigrants:

“If mom had a baby at age 15, are her morals going to be setting different standards than someone who has grown up in the American culture where that is not typical? As a matter of fact, we would look at someone impregnating a 15-year-old as child abuse.”

– Adams opposes the Children’s Health Insurance Program, which gives children of the working poor access to health care:

“Now illegal aliens will be able to purchase cheap insurance for their children. This is an incentive for them to come here.”

– Adams attacked legislation by fellow Republicans (and signed into law by Gov. Perry) to aid the study of how mental health services might be used in treating patients with other health conditions. Such a thing, she said,

“is now more dangerous than ever with the federal government taking up nationalized/rationed health care. Texans must not surrender our mental and physical health to a socialist State that President Obama is striving toward.”

– In 1994 Adams launched this vicious attack on Texas Gov. Ann Richards:

“She’s an anti-religious bigot. . . .  How can people think she is Texas — down-home Ma Richards? I feel very insulted that she is representing me as a Texas woman. Most Texas women are ladylike and God-fearing. Ann Richards has none of those qualities.”

All that, and now she’s back!