The excerpt (below) from a piece about Texas Gov. Rick Perry in yesterday’s Deseret News (Salt Lake City) appears dead-on to us. The writer quotes Shaun Casey, a professor of Christian ethics at Wesley Theological Seminary. Casey is also an expert on the role of religion in presidential politics. He comments about Gov. Perry’s courting of the religious right:
“Perry is a cheaper imitation of George Bush … and I think Perry has really studied Bush. But Bush’s brilliance with the religious right was that he did everything behind closed doors. There were no photo-ops, there were no press releases saying I met reverend so and so today. Bush did everything through intermediaries, and so there was no public trail of him reaching out to the religious right. The irony is that here comes along Perry, the dollar-general-store version of Bush, and here he is meeting with these people in public and you start looking at the line up of the people he’s cozying up to in public and all he is doing is setting himself up for trouble later on if by some miracle he actually wins the nomination … Some of these guys are really beyond the fringe — folks who George Bush would have never been caught dead with within a hundred miles of.”
TFN Insider has reported about some of the extremists helping Gov. Perry organize his Christians-only prayer event in Houston next month. See here and here. Then sign an open letter calling on Gov. Perry to end his association with a hate group and stop using faith as a political weapon to divide Americans.
Perry…Dollar Store Version of Bush…ya gotta like it! No, ya gotta LOVE it because that is exactly what he is. But I feel that he is a more DANGEROUS version of Bush. He swings back and forth enough to convince anyone that we are descended from the apes. He thinks that he is Tarzan of Texas, swing from one religious vine to another; his loin cloth is in the shape of a cross for some reason or another.
Bush left us Perry. Let’s not let him pollute the rest of the United States. What is happening, however, is so reminiscent of pre-WWII that it is enough for me to start digging a nuke bomb shelter. This country is heading away from logic to the kind of religious fanaticism that will eventually lead us into a “Christian” only country, Mind you, they really are not Christians; they just say that they are. But if they do the exact opposite of what the founder of their faith told them to do, it is ANTI-CHRISTIANITY and that is the kind that put Hitler into the place where he could do what he did.
Once again the LIE that the United States is somehow a Christian country is spreading like peanut butter over white bread. We’re going to have to be very careful about who we put into office or bear the consequences.
more dangerous indeed, Beverly. if he’s not a Dominionist, he’s certainly toying with the idea. it seems at this time that he’s reconsidering speaking at the Response due to the media backlash over the people he’s associated himself with; that tells me that he’s more interested in getting votes than anything else. he’s laid off the ‘illegal alien’ matter for years because Hispanics have been very important to his office, being responsible for a large amount of his votes.
on the other hand, he’s publicly referred to himself as a ‘prophet’, and a couple or so days ago he referred to himself as ‘President’. he strikes me as the kind who, with a little less judgment, would proclaim himself as the Messiah, like David Koresh, or possibly believe he was God, as Jim Jones seemed to do.
i’d suppose he’s not the only one among this religious fringe thinking this way. . .
I wish folks would stop using the term “fringe” for the Lynch Party Tea coming down Main street. It marginalizes the greatest threat to the Constitution since the British burned the White House. Not even the Confederacy would do to American law what is in store from this threat.
No “marginal” group could bring us so close to the greatest financial collapse this nation has seen since Black Monday of October 28, 1929 followed by BlackTuesday. What turned a financial collapse into the Depression were the budget cuts by both Hoover and FDR, which turned off money from the economy.
The fatuous excuse i hear howling down Main Street is that Americans don’t reach real poverty until they reach Somali-Darfur standards. So wake up and smell the ^*#@ storm coming. This storm has been brewing in a tea cup since the first true RINO (Abraham Lincoln) and the first socialist (FDR) mementum until the las straw, a Darky President out to push his agenda on the Dixie Resurgency.
tt is also interesting to note that the generational progression of the fatuous faithful puts them in college during the anti-everything tie-died, drop out, turn on generation. I guess they miss the adrenallin fix, and heightened sense of rage. As the Longshoreman of San Francisco noted, True Believers are interchangeable.
This, like the hippy generation, is not a monolith, it is a moving stack of cards with enough momentum to overwhelm the defenses of the Republic. Then the real chaos comes.
Governor Perry is not the only Republican Governor playing the “religion right” tune. In Kansas our “C” Street governor’s (Sam Brownback) budget agenda, including privatizing state functions, preferably by “faith-based organizations,” reminds me of what James Madison, “Father of the Constitution,” wrote long ago: “Strongly guarded as is the separation between Religion and Government in the Constitution of the United States, the danger of encroachment by Ecclesiastical Bodies may be illustrated by precedents already furnished in their short history,” c. 1817, William and Mary Quarterly 3:555, or see The Religion Commandments in the Constitution: A Primer, p. 121, by Gene Garman, M.Div.