ANOTHER CRIME BUSH SHOULD BE CHARGED WITH: TEARING DOWN THE WALL SEPARATING CHURCH AND STATE

I spend a lot of time on the very long line at the post office in my neighborhood. I know all the clerks and I like most of them. One of my favorites is Hanna, an Asian immigrant. She's the most efficient and the fastest and she has a great sense of humor and is always friendly. Her English isn't the Queen's, but not much gets by her. Or so I assumed. The other day I gave Hanna a CD of "Have You Had Enough?". She was helping me send out 200 of them to radio stations so I figured she should have one. We had never discussed politics before. Again with the assumptions, but this is L.A. and she's a postal worker, presumably in a union, and an immigrant... So I figured she was a decent human being who supports things like affordable medical care, a minimum wage, anti-bigotry laws, a humane foreign policy... all that stuff.

And she may support all that stuff. But not as much as she supports her pastor. And he told his congregation that Bush is God's servant and that those who oppose him are Evil. I didn't ask Hanna if she's a citizen but I suspect she is and that she votes.

Today's L.A. Times goes into the entire question of pastors guiding their congregations. "With a pivotal election five weeks away, leaders on the religious right have launched an all-out drive to get Christians from pew to voting booth. Their target: the nearly 30 million Americans who attend church at least once a week but did not vote in 2004. Their efforts at times push legal limits on church involvement in partisan campaigns. That is by design. With control of Congress at stake Nov. 7, those guiding the movement say they owe it to God and to their own moral principles to do everything they can to keep social conservatives in power."

The Christian Right-- the extreme of which is on display in the film "Jesus Camp"-- has just about nothing whatsoever to do with Jesus or Christianity or legitimate religion. It's just another part of the Republican political machine. "The Rev. Rick Scarborough, a leading evangelical in Texas, has recruited 5,000 "patriot pastors" nationwide to promote an agenda that aligns neatly with Republican platforms... At a recent rally in Pennsylvania, Focus on the Family founder James C. Dobson told a crowd of 3,000 that it would be 'downright frightening' if Republicans lost control of Congress. If there's a good Christian on the ballot, he said, failing to vote 'would be a sin.'"

Does it work? I remember Latino friends of mine telling me how the priests in California's Central Valley were telling Mexican-American women that if they voted for Kerry they would go to hell. They took it seriously. "'If the pastor is doing the right job, the people will automatically vote for the right person,' said Gale Wollenberg, who belongs to a conservative evangelical church in Topeka, Kan."

Yesterday, long lost DWT Jews-for-Jesus Art Director, Adam, re-surfaced. A resident of West Palm Beach, he was impressed how right I had been all year about Congressman Mark Foley. Adam, very much a religionist nut-- don't think me cruel and callous for writing about him; he doesn't read-- is close to Foley's pastor, who holds sway over 3 churches in the district, including one of the biggest ones in Florida. Every two years he turns out the troops for Foley. Adam has been telling him all along that his "family values" congressman is gay and yesterday he confronted him with the first of my two Mark Foley resignation and GOP cover-up stories.

The pastor's reaction shocked me. It really shocked me. I mean this is about a man with wealth and power, professing to be a servant of God, using his power to lure a 16 year old boy into... well, at the very least, into sin. The pastor told Adam he didn't care and that even Foley would be preferable to a Democrat. Think about that. That's from a very powerful "preacher man," a man of God, with sway over thousands of people in the community who thinks he's speaking for Jesus, not for Karl Rove.

The further irony here is that Tim Mahoney is barely a Democrat. In fact, last spring, before Rahm Emanuel persuaded him to switch party designations, he was a rich, country club Republican with typical Republican views (and practices). He's still that, only with a different word on his party registration card.


UPDATE: AND, BY THE WAY, THEY HAVE NO INTENTION OF GIVING UP POWER

And it isn't just by using the power of their fake religionists that the far right expects to mainstain power in November. Time Magazine explains why Rove says he's not worried. And it's more than just all the corporate cash and the gerrymanders.


UPDATE: ANYTHING TO MENTION FELIX MACACAWITZ

My friend Jerry in Georgia sent me this quote and I thought it fit well with the story:

"Today Christians… stand at the head of [this country]… I pledge that I never will tie myself to parties who want to destroy Christianity... We want to fill our culture again with the Christian spirit… We want to burn out all the recent immoral developments in literature, in the theater, and in the press - in short, we want to burn out the poison of immorality which has entered into our whole life and culture as a result of liberal excess during the past … (few) years."

No, not Pat Robertson or Jerry Falwell or Phelps or Dobson, not George W. Bush or Marilyn Musgrave or Felix Macacawitz or Santorum or Frist... although any of them might have said it, especially Porkchops'n'Bacon Macacawitz, who certainly seems to need to make a point lately. A this real hero of the right? Adolph [The Speeches of Adolph Hitler, 1922-1939, Vol. 1 (London, Oxford University Press, 1942), pg. 871-872]