American Style Ayatollahs

The word is that a coalition of influential Christian conservatives is threatening to back a third-party candidate in an attempt to stop Giuliani. Giuliani’s offense , he supports abortion rights. The threat came out of a meeting on Saturday 9/29/07 in Salt Lake City involving the secretive Council for National Policy which includes Dr. James Dobson of Focus on the Family, who is perhaps the most influential of the group, as well as Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council, the direct mail pioneer Richard Viguerie and dozens of other politically-oriented conservative Christians. Almost everyone present expressed support for a written resolution that “if the Republican Party nominates a pro-abortion candidate we will consider running a third party candidate.”

Whether or not such a third party materializes ( great for the Democrats) is not important. What is important is that fundamental evangelical Christians are becoming a threat to American democracy. Increasingly religion is being injected into our politics. Increasingly candidates feel obliged to proclaim their faith. The evangelical political agenda is bent on destroying our religious freedom and spits in the face of our Constitution. Fundamental evangelical Christians prey upon the ignorant who find it too difficult to probe the meaning of life and defer to an American style Ayatollah.

I feel threatened, not by terrorists but by religious zealots! Who is going to stop them? Certainly not the Republicans whose base is dominated by right wing conservatives and religious nuts. Maybe the Democrats can in spite of events of the past few months where Democratic candidates fell over themselves to pledge allegiance to some kind of faith. Hopefully this was for show rather than substance. But isn’t this the problem? Why must anyone cow tow to a religious movement in order to successfully run for office? Before its all over it may take an assault on our liberties to awaken the citizenry. More to the point once our entrepreneurs find their ability to make money being diminished by American Ayatollahs there will be an uprising returning us to the separation of church and state.