Election 2012

David French is a Senior Counsel for the American Center for Law and Justice, home of both Jay and Jordan Sekulow, two of Mitt Romney's most high-profile Religious Right supporters.  French too is also a Romney supporter, having launched Evangelicals for Mitt with his wife Nancy.

Today, French penned an op-ed for CNN calling on his fellow evangelicals to drop their support for Newt Gingrich and, in making his case, he certainly didn't pull any punches, calling Gingrich an arrogant, bullying serial adulterer:

If character counts, then so do values like fidelity, honesty, humility and charity. Sadly, Gingrich fails on all these counts ... Churchgoing evangelicals have one of the lowest divorce rates in the country. Gingrich is a thrice-married, serial admitted adulterer.

While the former House speaker tries to change the subject, biblically literate Christians understand that his conduct is a real and present issue. Simply put, a man doesn’t cleanse the moral stain of adultery by marrying his mistress.

Matthew 19:9 is crystal clear: “I tell you that anyone who divorces his wife, except for marital unfaithfulness, and marries another woman commits adultery.” Gingrich has divorced his wife and married his mistress twice.

...

[I]s there a more arrogant public figure in American political life than Gingrich? His self-regard is legendary. He’s compared himself to world historical figures from Ronald Reagan to Margaret Thatcher to Abraham Lincoln to Pericles.

He has said that people like him stand between America and Auschwitz. His self-congratulatory statements fill press releases, and former colleagues tell tales of his erratic and bullying behavior. Is that the right witness for evangelicals?

Today on Washington Watch Weekly with Family Research Council president Tony Perkins, Rep. Chris Smith (R-NJ) laced into President Obama, whom he called the “abortion president,” for appointing “radically pro-abortion” people to the government who are promoting “evil” with an “anti-child, anti-woman mentality.”

Smith: When you have the coercive power of the state in the hands of the abortion president who litmus tests virtually everybody in his administration to ensure that they are radically pro-abortion and very often come right out of the ranks of Planned Parenthood or NARAL or EMILY’s List to hold these positions and then they do their dirty work every day of the week and then they fund non-governmental organizations like Planned Parenthood who then continue promoting this evil, and this anti-child, anti-woman mentality.

Smith went on to tell Perkins that the Obama administration seeks “to remake America as the culture of death” and if he wins re-elections, it “will be significantly worse in terms of extremism in promoting both the abortion issue as well as the homosexual agenda.”

Smith: They are very coercive in this administration, there is nothing benign or ‘come along and let us try to convince you,’ they tell you under power of huge penalties, and that is what ObamaCare is all about, it is riddled with penalties, everyone knows about the one if you don’t buy health insurance you can get fined. But when it comes to the moral issues, they seek to remake America as the culture of death.

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The second four years, the second term of a Barack Obama will be significantly worse in terms of extremism in promoting both the abortion issue as well as the homosexual agenda.

Yesterday, Newt Gingrich held another conference call for Religious Right supporters, seeking to mobilize them ahead of the Republican primary in Florida.

The call was hosted by Jim Garlow and featured several other of the Gingrich campaign's Faith Coalition leaders explaining why they had decided to support Gingrich ... and the consensus was that if President Obama wins re-election, it means the end of Western Civilization:

Mat Staver: I believe that if Speaker Gingrich wins Florida next Tuesday, he wins the nomination. If he wins the nomination, he beats President Barack Obama and we have not a cloud hanging over us in November and December of 2012 but we begin to see the clouds dissipating and some ray of sunshine of hope return to this land.

Jim Garlow: At the risk of sounding melodramatic, the United States as we know her will cease to exist as will, then, Western Civilization. Those who are discerning, those who are intuitive to what is happening morally and economically in our nation understand the truth.

George Barna: As you mentioned Jim, for the last twenty years I have steadfastly refused to endorse any individuals or organizations or products. But as I've analyzed the severity of America's situation today, I've come to believe that such self-restrictions are a luxury that we can no longer afford. So after carefully studying all the candidates in regards to the needs I just described and assessing their ability to win in November, I concluded that Newt Gingrich is the best man for the job.

Jim Garlow: We are in a situation that is so crisic in America, I'm actually stunned that President Obama could do this much destruction to the nation in a three year span. I never anticipated that this much harm in the moral and economic arenas of our nation could be brought on by one particular president.

Don Wildmon: This is not a typical election. This is an election unlike any ever held in our country. We're not just voting for a president; we're voting for the continuation of Western Civilization. If those who are listening think that what we enjoy, the freedoms we enjoy, the right to practice our Christan faith, is merely an accident and is there, it's not, people paid for it. And we can lose it, and we will lose it, if we lose this next election. What's at stake is everything that the human race, Western Civilization, has fought for for the last two thousand years.

When Gingrich joined the call, the thrice-married candidate served up some red meat to the audience by declaring that efforts to grant equal marriage rights to gays and lesbians are "pagan behaviors":

It's pretty simple: marriage is between a man and a woman. This is a historic doctrine driven deep into the Bible, both in the Old Testament and in the New Testament, and it's a perfect example of what I mean by the rise of paganism. The effort to create alternatives to marriage between a man and a woman are perfectly natural pagan behaviors, but they are a fundamental violation of our civilization.

Finally, Gingrich explained that he didn't really have any interest in being president but decided that he had to do so because all the other Republicans are so terrible so that he had a moral obligation to step up and save this nation and that he would just magnanimously have to suffer the insults that come his way:

I want people to understand, I'm a volunteer. Callista and I had very long talks for over a year and then we talked with our two daughters and our two son-in-laws because we knew if we tried to offer help the country that we would be subjected to news media assaults, we'd be subjected to vicious gossip, we'd be subjected to people on the web saying horrible things and we'd be subjected to negative ads from our opponents. And we concluded that we are in so much trouble and we are in such grave danger of losing the America that we grew up in and the lack of Republican ability to articulate and communicate and defend is so great that both of us - this was a dual decision - we both concluded that we had a moral obligation to endure whatever comes and to at least offer, as citizens, to try and be of service.

Yesterday, Gingrich appeared on The Janet Mefferd Show, where as we reported, he dabbled in anti-Muslim conspiracy theories that the Justice Department may censor speech targeted at Islam and that the nation’s “elite” has a bias in favor of “radical Islam over Christianity and Judaism.”

Later in the interview with Mefferd, Gingrich once again equated secular Americans with radical Islamists. “We are under attack from two directions: we have secularists who want to eliminate all reference to God in public life, and we have people in the radical Islamic world who want to find a way to impose on us a world that we don’t want to live in,” Gingrich said, “I think both of those are very genuine threats to us”:

Gingrich also told Mefferd that Obama has a “destructive” attitude towards Congress and is “pretty willing to capriciously break things up” because he doesn’t “respect anybody but his own judgment.” Such remarks are especially ironic coming from Gingrich, who is not known for modesty and has a long history of ethics troubles:

Mefferd: Many people think that there has been a flagrant abuse of power in the executive branch under this president, how will you conduct yourself differently if you end up being elected?

Gingrich: Well first of all I am going to try to work with Congress, not just run over it. I think that he has adopted an attitude which is very destructive. So start with that. I was in Congress for twenty years; I respect the Congress as an institution. My sense is that Obama doesn’t actually respect anybody but his own judgment and he doesn’t understand the idea of a larger system that has lasted for 230 years and that has an importance and a power beyond any one fight or beyond any one person and so he is pretty willing to capriciously break things up.

Mefferd’s show is a curious platform for Gingrich, as Mefferd in the past has claimed that “The Enemy” has LGBT people in “bondage,” defended countries that criminalize homosexuality and maintained that homosexuality is “an excuse of the pagan mind” to “wipe out Christianity” and “destroy marriage.” Mefferd has also attacked Mitt Romney over his Mormon faith, defending the labeling of Mormonism as a cult while warning that Romney may not care about facing scrutiny during the campaign because he thinks he will “one day rule [his] own planet as a god” and claiming that Romney has a “bias against evangelicals.”

Today on The Janet Mefferd Show, Newt Gingrich said that an intolerant “elite” made up of “secular judges and religious bigots” are trying to promote “radical Islam over Christianity and Judaism.” Gingrich, who told John Hagee’s church that America may soon be “a secular atheist country, potentially one dominated by radical Islamists,” said that there was a conspiracy between the Justice Department and the “Organization of Islamic Countries” [sic] to “begin to enforce censorship against American citizens to protect radical Islam.”

Listen:

Gingrich: Well, I think that we have to really, from my perspective you don’t have an issue of religious tolerance you have an elite which favors radical Islam over Christianity and Judaism. You have constant pressure by secular judges and by religious bigots to drive Christianity out of public life and to establish a secular state except when it comes to radical Islam, where all of the sudden they start making excuses for Sharia, they start making excuses that we really shouldn’t use certain language. Remember, the Organization of Islamic Countries is dedicated to preventing anyone, anywhere in the world from commenting negatively about Islam, so they would literally eliminate our free speech and there were clearly conversations held that implied that the US Justice Department would begin to enforce censorship against American citizens to protect radical Islam, I think that’s just an amazing concept frankly.

With news that gambling mogul Sheldon Adelson and his wife have now both contributed $5 million each to the pro-Gingrich Super PAC Winning Our Future, on top of the millions of dollars the Adelson’s have contributed to Gingrich’s organizations before he entered the presidential race, Grove City College professor Warren Throckmorton is wondering if social conservatives know—or care—about Gingrich’s close ties to the “billionaire casino owner.” Adelson, who is believed to be worth $26.5 billion, made his money through casinos in Las Vegas, Singapore and Macau, China, and is one of Gingrich’s longtime financers.

Ironically, members of Gingrich’s Faith Leaders Coalition have strongly denounced the gambling industry.

Beverly LaHaye, a Gingrich coalition co-chair, founded Concerned Women for America, which explicitly calls for the “elimination of gambling in all its forms” and education about “the detrimental effects of gambling on the family.” CWA actively works against the legalization of casinos and Janice Shaw Crouse, head of the Beverly LaHaye Institute, said that “gambling” is one of the ways people “are destroying their lives.”

Another Gingrich coalition co-chair, evangelical pollster George Barna, listed gambling as one of the top causes of society’s “moral decay.” Barna’s work on gambling is frequently used by casino opponents like Focus on the Family and Barna himself has written about the dangers of the growing gambling industry.

One of Gingrich’s first Religious Right endorsers and a coalition co-chair, American Family Association founder Don Wildmon, is also an outspoken opponent of the gambling industry. In his native Mississippi, Wildmon condemned then-governor Haley Barbour for betraying the “moral people” who voted for him by siding with the “money people” in his move to liberalize gambling laws. The AFA has consistently opposed the legalization of casinos and said [pdf] that “a federal commission to study the impact of gambling in America” should only include “people with sound Judeo-Christian values and no ties to the gambling industry,” while attacking congressmen who have taken “big gambling bucks.” In fact, that was the very same commission Gingrich tried to weaken to the chagrin of gambling opponents and AFA Journal noted that Gingrich “used one of his two choices to appoint the chairman and CEO of a Las Vegas casino company” to the commission. Wildmon himself wrote in 2005:

But the truth is that all our fine talk about personal freedoms in the U.S. can be nullified by the freedom we take with the moral laws of God. … Our consciences have become blunted and dulled with an overdose of pseudosophistication and broad-mindedness. We have become so tolerant of sin and sinfulness that we have lost our capacity to protest and rebel against plain indecency and moral rottenness. In many quarters we are so accustomed to violence, licentiousness, the glorification of sex, the shady deal, and the fast dollar — to say nothing of the gambler’s passion for something for nothing — that old-fashioned righteous indignation is regarded as a corny exercise for squares.

The tragedy is that modern Christians too often go along with the tide. We try to convince ourselves that drunkenness is illness, that filthy writing is realism, that obscenity is social comment, that perversion, adultery, cynicism, and gambling are the folkways of our time. … The cause of our problem does not lie altogether in poverty or slums or ignorance. … The truth is, the human mind is being poisoned, not by common immorality, but by an amoral, humanistic, nihilistic, cynical outlook on human behavior, wholly divorced from any concept of right or wrong.

Seeing as that Ralph Reed continues to be a leading Religious Right figure despite his past funding from casinos, Gingrich may still be able to balance his campaign focus on attracting “values voters” while his Super PAC is bankrolled with casino money.

Pastor Jim Garlow, the Proposition 8 campaign organizer and now co-chair of Newt Gingrich’s Faith Leaders Coalition, appeared on The Steve Deace Show Friday, where he argued that Gingrich is the only candidate in a position to stop President Obama and “the radical homosexual agenda” from causing the imminent “destruction of the definition of marriage.”Garlow appeared on the show to defend the twice-divorced Gingrich, whose second wife last week claimed that he wanted an open marriage with his then-mistress and now-third wife Callista, and described Gingrich as the savior of marriage and Western civilization. He said that Obama is “going to destroy America as we know it and eventually bring a halt to Western civilization as we know it” and soon it will be “virtually illegal to say the name Jesus”:

Garlow: We have got to get Romney stopped because of his policies and we must get Obama stopped if we’re going to save this nation. Obama may be a nice guy, I have no problem with that, but his ideology is going to destroy America as we know it and eventually bring a halt to Western civilization as we know it. It’s not melodramatic language, it’s not flamboyant, it’s where we are right now. We cannot economically and morally survive any more of Obama’s leadership and his ideology, therefore, we need the powerhouse of Gingrich coming in with that intellectually bandwidth to take him on and bring a halt to it.

…

We have come to a posture where I am absolutely astounded at the spiritual damage that Barack Obama’s ideology has done to this nation; I would never have believed three years ago he could’ve done this much in terms of moral and economic damage. Our religious liberties are evaporating at a pace—it’s going to be virtually illegal to say the name Jesus before long at the rate they’re going, or stand for any kind of authentic, biblical, historic Christianity.

Where we’re seeing it the most is we have two locomotives on the same track going at each other with full speed and one of them is going to be left standing when this day is over, it’s either going to be the radical homosexual agenda or it’s going to be religious liberty. They cannot both coexist in the same nation at the same time. Then you add in the dimension the destruction of the definition of marriage itself. I was in the auditorium at the Saddleback Civil Forum when candidate Obama said marriage is one man, one woman, people clapped and cheered, we didn’t believe him then, our concerns proved to be exactly right, and now President Obama is destroying, decimating 5,000 years’ worth of history.

One day before the crucial South Carolina primary, Rick Santorum is beginning to win the endorsements of not just Religious Right luminaries but also fringe activists, including some who previously backed the failed presidential campaigns of Michele Bachmann and Rick Perry. Santorum recently won the backing of Religious Right activists such as James Dobson, Gary Bauer, Richard Viguerie, Maggie Gallagher, Penny Nance and most recently, former Perry booster John Stemberger.

Today, Viguerie released the names of additional Religious Right figures that are supporting Santorum, including Paul Pressler, the Southern Baptist leader who hosted the recent Texas meeting of social conservatives.

But other Santorum endorsers are less well-known:

• Cathie Adams of the Texas Eagle Forum, who has likened President Obama to Adolf Hitler, warned that scientists are cloning humans in order to give them diseases and kill them and that the United Nations is trying to “subvert our children’s faith in God by elevating its earth-centered zealotry that would grant the UN dominion over the earth.”

• Elaine Donnelly of the Center for Military Readiness, who has dedicated her career to fighting the rights of gays and lesbians to serve openly in the military, argued that it would lead to a draft along with “forcible sodomy.”  

• William Estrada of Generation Joshua, the homeschooler activist who hopes that young people will lead the fight against marriage equality.

• Joseph Farah of WorldNetDaily, the birther movement leader and onetime Bachmann supporter who wants to see Obama “frog-marched down Pennsylvania Avenue” and an unfailing critic of equal rights for gays and lesbians.

• Michael Geer of the Pennsylvania Family Institute who has crusaded against marriage equality, calling it a “tragedy.” 

• Rebecca Hagelin, formerly of the Heritage Foundation, who derided gays as “bullies” and “power-mongers,” cautioning that gay rights leads to pedophilia and “chaos.”

• Tim Lefever of the Capitol Resource Institute, who said that Californians should repeal SB48, which ensures students learn about LGBT historical figures...because it undermines lessons in the Constitution.

• William Murray of the Religious Freedom Coalition, who ironically was a fierce opponent of the construction of the Park 51 Islamic Community Center near Ground Zero, and suggested that a train crash happened because the negligent engineer was gay.

• Preston Noell III of the American Society for the Defense of Tradition, Family, Property, a pseudo-military, extremist, anti-gay group linked to Brazilian neo-fascists.

• Pam Olsen of the Florida Prayer Network and the International House of Prayer’s Tallahassee branch, is a former Perry campaign activist who advocates Seven Mountain dominionism, plans to raise people from the dead, and believes that gay rights cause natural disasters:
  

All in all, about the people you would expect to endorse Rick Santorum.

Focus on the Family founder and Family Talk host James Dobson endorsed Rick Santorum today, which comes as no surprise as Dobson advocated for Santorum behind closed doors at a meeting with fellow Religious Right leaders in Texas. According to reports, Dobson feared the repercussions of electing Newt Gingrich and having “a woman who was a man’s mistress for eight years” as First Lady.

In his endorsement, Dobson said that “the institution of the family” is “in serious jeopardy,” warning that the “very definition of marriage is threatened, which has implications for the next generation and the stability of society itself.” Dobson has previously compared Santorum to Tim Tebow and saluted him for “standing up for righteousness,” and joins social conservative activists Maggie Gallagher, Penny Nance, Richard Viguerie, John Stemberger and Gary Bauer in endorsing the former Pennsylvania Senator:

Dr. Dobson, well-known radio broadcaster, psychologist and author of 35 best selling books, and consultant to three U.S. Presidents, said today, "The institution of the family is the key issue facing this great nation. It is the foundation, the bedrock, upon which every dimension of Western Civilization rests. If it is undermined or weakened by cultural and governmental forces, the entire superstructure will collapse in short order. And indeed, today it is in serious jeopardy. The very definition of marriage is threatened, which has implications for the next generation and the stability of society itself.

"Of all the Republican candidates who are vying for the presidency, former Sen. Santorum is the one who has spoken passionately in every debate about this concern. He has pleaded with the nation and its leaders to come to the aid of marriages, parents, and their children. What a refreshing message. The Congress voted in 1969 to impose a marriage penalty tax on husbands and wives who were struggling to raise their children. That unfair tax continued for 32 years, until George W. Bush rolled it back. Now, if Democrats and some Republicans have their way, the marriage penalty tax will be re-imposed in 2013. We desperately need a president who will intercede on behalf of those who are caring for the next generation and working to build this nation.

"While there are other GOP candidates who are worthy of our support, Sen. Santorum is the man of the hour. His knowledge of international politics, especially Israel and the turmoil in the Middle East, is highly relevant to the dangerous world in which we live. This is why I am endorsing former Senator Rick Santorum for president of the United States, and urge my countrymen to join us in this campaign."

UPDATE: Rick Santorum thanked Dobson in a statement and hoped his endorsement would help “build upon our momentum generated from our Iowa Caucus win”:

I am truly honored to receive Dr. Dobson's endorsement today. Dr. Dobson has been a light for conservative movement, an unwavering leader in the face of forces both within and outside our Party to call a truce on the foundational principles that make our nation the greatest in the history of the world, but he knows that calling a truce is nothing more than surrendering. I commit to never surrender our principles, our foundational values, and the moral enterprise that is America. I am excited to work with Dr. Dobson in the weeks to come as we build upon our momentum generated from our Iowa Caucus win.

Meanwhile, the Red White and Blue Fund, a pro-Santorum Super PAC, is airing a new ad in South Carolina narrated by Bauer, who helped found the Family Research Council with Dobson, calling Santorum an opponent of “liberal elites and those who seek to undermine the nation’s freedoms and moral fabric”: