Justice Sunday

[Nbadan]

A group of ministers representing about 17 Baptist churches in the Louisville area and a national Baptist committee that supports separation of church and state yesterday called on a Louisville church to cancel its planned "Justice Sunday" tomorrow.

"We see 'Justice Sunday' as part of a larger effort to link church and state in ways not seen in America since the Puritans were hanging Quakers on Boston Commons and exiling Baptists to Rhode Island," the Rev. Joe Phelps, pastor of Highland Baptist Church, said during a news conference yesterday.

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Phelps said there's no support for the premise that judicial nominees are being "persecuted" for their Christian faith, and that the ministers want the public to know the event does not represent "all Baptists in this city, or people of faith everywhere."

The Rev. Reba Cobb, a board member of the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty and former executive director of the Kentuckiana Interfaith Community, said: "No one faith or political party holds a monopoly on morality in this country. … Characterizations of public policy issues as the faithful versus the faithless are divisive, misleading and, perhaps worst of all, exploit religion for political purposes."

Courier-Journal (http://www.courier-journal.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20050423/NEWS01/504230400/1008)

Unannounced 2008 Presidential hopeful Bill Frist still plans to participate, but rumor mill has it that he will moderate his view a tad bit and try and be nonpartisan...humm....wonder how long that will last?


snip>

During a teleconference held with reporters Friday morning, Bishop Mark S. Hanson, president of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, called Senator Frist’s planned participation “divisive, dangerous and divisive of all those Americans of great faith who disagree with him.”

“The FRC has every right to hold an event with the message of their choosing,” said Hanson. “But the majority leader of the Senate should not lend credence to such an event.

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Rev. Robert Edgar, General Secretary of the National Council of Churches, also criticized Frist’s participation and called it a hindrance to religious freedom.

“Truly none of us can miss the irony. Even as we fight for religious liberty around the world, the anti-democratic mentality is rising up here , Edgar said during the teleconference. “No longer are we allowed to freely express our views in opposition to a majority political party without being accused of being anti-Christian and anti-American.

Christian Post (http://www.christianpost.com/article/church/2054/section/protestant.leaders.criticize.sen.frist.for.justice .sunday/1.htm)

It will be interesting to see where this goes today.

[Nbadan]

Senate majority leader Bill Frist appeared through a telecast as a speaker at "Justice Sunday," at the invitation of the event's main sponsor, Family Research Council president Tony Perkins. "Justice Sunday" was promoted as a rally to portray Democrats as being "against people of faith." Many of the speakers compared the plight of conservative Christians to the civil rights movement. But in sharing the stage with Perkins, who introduced him to the rally, Frist was associating himself with someone who has longstanding ties to racist organizations.

Four years ago, Perkins addressed the Louisiana chapter of the Council of Conservative Citizens (CCC), America's premier white supremacist organization, the successor to the White Citizens Councils, which battled integration in the South. In 1996 Perkins paid former Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard David Duke $82,000 for his mailing list. At the time, Perkins was the campaign manager for a right-wing Republican candidate for the US Senate in Louisiana. The Federal Election Commission fined the campaign Perkins ran $3,000 for attempting to hide the money paid to Duke.

As the emcee of Justice Sunday, Tony Perkins positioned himself beside a black preacher and a Catholic "civil rights" activist as he rattled off the phone numbers of senators wavering on President Bush's judicial nominees. The evening's speakers studiously couched their appeals on behalf of Bush's stalled judges in the vocabulary of victimhood, accusing Democratic senators of "filibustering people of faith."

James Dobson, who founded the Family Research Council as the Washington lobbying arm of his Focus on the Family, invoked the Christian right's persecution complex. On an evening when Jews were celebrating the second night of Passover, Dobson claimed, "The biggest Holocaust in world history came out of the Supreme Court" with the Roe v. Wade decision. On his syndicated radio show nearly two weeks earlier, on April 11, Dobson compared the "black robed men" on the Supreme Court to "the men in white robes, the Ku Klux Klan." By his logic, the burden of oppression had passed from religious and racial minorities to unborn children and pure-hearted heterosexuals engaged in "traditional marriage."

Bishop Harry Jackson, from Hope Christian Church in College Park, Maryland, was Justice Sunday's only black speaker. Jackson had recently unveiled his "Black Contract With America," a document that highlights wedge issues like gay marriage that would presumably pry black churchgoers away from the Democratic Party. But so far he has been disappointed. "Black churches are too concerned with justice," Jackson lamented in his speech. Nonetheless, his association with the right wing has done wonders for his personal profile. Just after Bush's second inauguration, he was among a contingent of black clergy members invited to the White House for a private meeting.

Justice Sunday also featured a token Catholic, William Donohue, who heads the nation's largest "Catholic civil rights organization," the Catholic League. In the battle to confirm far-right judicial nominees like William Pryor, who happens to be Catholic, Donohue has become a key asset for the Christian right's evangelical faction. He has argued that Democratic senators opposing Pryor and others are motivated by anti-Catholicism. "There isn't de jure discrimination against Catholics in the Senate," Donohue claimed on Sunday. "There is de facto discrimination. They've set the bar so high with the abortion issue, we can't get any real Catholics over it."

But for all his concern with anti-Catholicism, Donohue had no qualms about sharing the stage with Southern Baptist Theological Seminary president Dr. Albert Mohler. "As an evangelical, I believe that the Roman Catholic Church is a false church," Mohler remarked during a 2000 TV interview. "It teaches a false gospel. And the Pope himself holds a false and unbiblical office." Donohue, who has protested against Democrats who have made no such comments about Catholics, was silent about Mohler. In fact, the site of Justice Sunday, Highview Baptist Church, in Louisville, Kentucky, is Mohler's home church.

"We're fed up and we're on the same side," Donohue declared. "And if the secular left is worried, they should be worried."

*Sic*


Six years later, in 2002, Perkins embarked on a campaign to avenge his mentor's defeat by running for the US Senate himself. But Perkins was dogged with questions about his involvement with David Duke. Perkins issued a flat denial that he had ever had anything to do with Duke, and he denounced him for good measure. Unfortunately, Perkins's signature was on the document authorizing the purchase of Duke's list. Perkins's dalliance with the racist Council of Conservative Citizens in the run-up to his campaign also illuminates the seamy underside of his political associations. Despite endorsements from James Dobson and a host of prominent CNP members, Perkins was not even the leading Republican in the senatorial race.

In the wake of his defeat, with Dobson's blessing, Perkins moved to Washington to head the Family Research Council. In a closed meeting at the Plaza Hotel in New York City during the Republican National Convention in August 2004, an alliance drawing in Frist was sealed. Perkins's associates at the CNP presented the Senate majority leader with its "Thomas Jefferson Award." The grateful Frist declared, "The destiny of the nation is on the shoulders of the conservative movement."

On Justice Sunday, Perkins introduced Frist as "a friend of the family." "I don't think it's radical to ask senators to vote," Frist said from a giant screen above the audience. "Only in the United States Senate could it be considered a devastating option to allow a vote." His face then disappeared, and Perkins returned onstage to urge viewers to call their senators.

But there is more at stake here than the fate of the filibuster. With Justice Sunday, Perkins's ambition to become a national conservative leader was ratified; Bill Frist's presidential campaign for 2008 was advanced with the Christian right; and the faithful were imbued with the notion that they are being victimized by liberal Democratic evildoers.

The Nation (http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20050509&c=2&s=blumenthal)

Woody Jenkins (the right-wing candidate) PROFITS from adoption


Anti-choice means big bucks to Woody Jenkins. He owns a private "home for unwed mothers" just far enough outside New Orleans (River Ridge, if memory serves) that the women can't catch buses in order to leave. They are stuck there until they deliver babies that Woody sells, um, er, I mean "places privately" for thousands apiece. He is a slimeball even by the standards of the Fristian Right.