Here are some of the week’s most notable quotes culled from news reports from across Texas, and beyond.
Pat Robertson, telling a mother that she could cure her son’s stomach pains by finding someone to cast out demons that were possibly caused by an ancestor who practiced witchcraft.
You need to get somebody with you who understands the spiritual dimension and doing spiritual warfare. If I were you, I would look back in your family. What in your family — do you have anybody involved in the occult, somebody in witchcraft or tarot cards or psychic things?
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An unnamed former Republican staffer, on the flood of emails sent by Texas Congressman Steve Stockman’s office.
Steve Stockman is like the uncle that forwards you paranoid chain emails everyday, except this is Congress. Your first inclination is to reply with a link to Snopes, but you know it will only make things worse for you.
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Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky.
There are many things I like about Texas Gov. Rick Perry, including his stance on the Tenth Amendment to the Constitution. But apparently his new glasses haven’t altered his perception of the world, or allowed him to see it any more clearly.
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Friendswood Rep. Randy Weber on his and Rep. Joe Barton’s decision to postpone bringing impeachment charges against President Obama.
We’ve got so many things that need our attention. We do need to do this methodically and correctly … I don’t think it’s practical that we impeach him right now, but he definitely deserves it.
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Marv Knox, editor of The Baptist Standard, writing about the thousands of children fleeing to America to escape violence and extreme poverty in their home countries.
We have taken something good—patriotic love for and appreciation of a blessed nation. We have perverted it to think our comfort and exceptionally high standard of living are of more concern to God than the grave travesty and injustice suffered by the world’s most vulnerable.
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Cameron County sheriff Omar Lucio, questioning the need for 1,000 National Guard troops which Gov. Rick Perry will deploy to the border of Mexico and Texas.
They’re trained in warfare. I don’t know what they’re really going to be doing.
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Comments made by Richard Land, former head of the Southern Baptist Convention’s policy team, on the radio program “Washington Watch.”
If you are younger than forty and you’ve been taught in the public schools, you have not learned the real story of America. You have been taught a lie about America as a colonial power, as a rapacious power. As Dinesh points out, we ended slavery, we didn’t bring slavery to North America. Slavery was there, the Native Americans were enslaving each other before we got here. Eventually, we ended slavery. We have been a civilizing influence in the world.
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Marco Rubio making accusations against same-sex marriage advocates – while reaffirming his belief in marriage only between a man and a woman – in a speech at Catholic University.
Today, there is a growing intolerance on this issue, intolerance towards those who continue to support traditional marriage. And I promise you that even before this speech is over, I will be attacked as a hater, a bigot or someone who is anti-gay.
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American Family Association president Tim Wildmon airing his grievances in a fundraising email sent to AFA members.
The progressive movement is out to destroy our country as it has existed. It is against patriotism. It is against religion in general and is in particular hostile to evangelical Christianity and traditional Catholicism. It is against borders. It is against capitalism. It is for high taxation and government control and regulation of almost everything.
That is interesting coming from Rev. Land. I wonder if he knows anything whatsoever about the history of the Southern Baptists. I would have to speculate that maybe he doesn’t.
Land knows; he knows quite well He’s just really good at denial.
“We have taken something good—patriotic love for and appreciation of a blessed nation. We have perverted it to think our comfort and exceptionally high standard of living are of more concern to God than the grave travesty and injustice suffered by the world’s most vulnerable.”
Unlike the time before 1979, that kind of talk will get you fired in the SBC today. Almost everyone in the SBC today knows God desperately wants them to move up from that old Lexus to a new Mercedes. Pressler and Patterson were able to finally deliver to the American people the one thing that nearly all had longed for in the years prior to 1979, a sold-out religious system that looks a bit like real Christianity but panders to the worst traditional prejudices and material lusts of all Americans—with the lavish and extravagant megachurch as its graven image.
That’s my honest opinion.
P.S. I will be monitoring the SBC just to see how quickly this guy gets fired or transferred to a new SBC job with the title Personal Assistant to…
As for what Richard Land says, that is the biggest pile of crap I have ever seen. I am almost 62 years old, and I was raised in conservative Tennessee school systems—and know American history well. The only change I have seen is that American history is no longer all about white people, as if no other kinds of Americans ever existed. In my day, they said almost nothing about American Indians except for shooting them. So, I must take it that Richard Land wants to turn back American history to the days when all it talked about was the ideas and accomplishments of white people. That’s not a realistic or right view of the American history that actually happened.
The American anthropologist in me does not recall any instances where Native American groups practiced a “peculiar system” of slavery like the one in the Old South. They might have taken an occasional captive in war and eventually made them part of the tribe—but nothing like American slavery. This man got a degree at Oxford? Which limey was asleep on that shift?