Fighting the Right

In March, Kyle reported that Rick Scarborough of Vision America was launching a new effort, 40 Days to Save America, to rally conservative voters before the November election and stop the “daily deluge of sinful activity”:

We fully understand and are grateful for the fact that America was birthed first in your heart. We acknowledge that America has been a blessed nation above all the nations of the world. Hallelujah!

But we also acknowledge that we have forgotten as a people that it was you and your laws that made this country the land of freedom and opportunity that has been the envy of the world for more than two hundred years. Dear Lord, forgive us of our pride and apathy that has allowed men to call good, evil; and evil, good. We acknowledge that we have grown calloused to the daily deluge of sinful activity, degradation and speaking that has become the routine in American life, and we repent.

Reignite our love for purity and holiness, and create in us a will to initiate the changes in our society that will allow you to once again bless our beloved America.

Scarborough is now unveiling endorsements of the effort from Senator Roy Blunt and Congressmen Todd Akin, Doug Lamborn, Duncan Hunter and Louie Gohmert, and major Religious Right groups like the American Family Association, Concerned Women for America, Liberty Counsel, the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission and the Family Research Council. Dominionist organizations including Lou Engle’s The Call and Cindy Jacobs’ Generals International have also signed on, along with Janet Porter’s Faith2Action, Jerry Boykin’s Kingdom Warriors, Sam Roriguez’s National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference and Jim Garlow’s Renewing American Leadership.

The board of directors appears to be a who’s who of leading conservative activists and pastors:

David Bereit
40 Days for Life

General Jerry Boykin
Kingdom Warriors

Dave Butts
Harvest Prayer Ministries

Dr. Jim Garlow
Renewing American Leadership

Bishop Anne Gimenez
Rock Church, Virginia Beach, VA

Bishop Harry Jackson
Hope Christian Church

Dr. Robert Jeffress
First Baptist Church, Dallas, TX

Penny Nance
Concerned Women for America

Father Frank Pavone
Priests for Life

Tony Perkins
Family Research Council

Rev. Samuel Rodriguez
National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference

Dr. Rick Scarborough
Vision America

Kelly Shackelford
Liberty Institute

Mat Staver
Liberty Counsel

Tim Wildmon
American Family Association

Kamal Saleem has promulgated some of the craziest and wild conspiracies so it is difficult to take the phony “ex-terrorist” seriously, but since Religious Right leaders continue to rely on the hoaxer for their anti-Muslim activism, he can’t be easily ignored. Liberty Counsel chairman Mat Staver hosted Saleem on Faith & Freedom this week where he maintained that radical Muslims are plotting to takeover America’s religious, education, medical, financial and political fields until “Islam will be the only religion that will be practiced in the United States of America and the White House and all this will be Islamist”:

The invasion that we are seeing today, it’s mandated by their own Sharia law, that they have to do so and the way that they are here today in the United States of America they have infiltrated to every level. The head of the Muslim Brotherhood said we are not here to be equal to the American people or to their belief but to be the highest order, where Islam will be the only religion that will be practiced in the United States of America and the White House and all this will be Islamist. In doing so, what happened is the agenda is to infiltrate the highest rank of this government, the political arena, the education arena, the banking arena, the medical arena, all the other facets of what make America, America. With this they have penetrated the religious sector and they have penetrated also the government today, Islamist lobbyists are bringing billions of dollars to our government and buying politics, and you know, politicians. The education system has been shifted because now the Islamic centers are being opened specifically in all the Ivy League universities in the United States of America to create the curriculum for our students from kindergarten all the way to university level.

…

Nobody is stopping them, you know, in this current political time and leadership. So therefore what happened is that’s why they are advancing in many different ways, specifically in the education, where they are changing the future, and also in the medical arena where they are concentrating on changing and bringing all the natural resources in America to be owned by Islamists so there will be co-dependency on Muslim power.

General Mills was immediately attacked when it announced its opposition to a proposed amendment in Minnesota, where the company is based, that would enshrine the state’s ban on same-sex marriage in its constitution. National Organization for Marriage president Brian Brown called the move “ludicrous” and claimed that the company “effectively declared a war on marriage” and Minnesota for Marriage began holding protests to “Dump General Mills.” Today, Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council weighed in during his daily radio bulletin by attacking the cereal company for becoming a “general nuisance”:

Perkins: In the marriage debate, General Mills just became a general nuisance. Hello, I'm Tony Perkins with the Family Research Council in Washington. One of America's largest food companies has an appetite for liberal politics. Five months before voters head to the polls, General Mills decided to weigh in on Minnesota's marriage amendment. Like Starbucks, the company tried to argue that marriage is bad for business--a theory that's absolutely ridiculous. Forbes magazine did a feature on the "best states for business"--and 18 of the top 20 protect natural marriage. Still, a spokesman says, "We don't believe the proposed constitutional amendment is in the best interests of our employees or our state economy... We oppose it." Experts say it's a "very risky" position--especially since General Mills makes billions of dollars marketing brands to parents of kids--like Betty Crocker, Pillsbury, Green Giant, Yoplait, Cheerios, Chex, Wheaties, and Lucky Charms. It may impress their corporate friends, but it's customers that count.

Back in June, Rep. Steve King (R-IA) talked to Janet Mefferd about President Obama’s decision against deporting undocumented immigrants who came to the country as children, which naturally angered the notoriously anti-immigrant congressman. King agreed with Mefferd that the announcement was made for political purposes, arguing that Obama wants to “get a political benefit from the destruction that he is doing to the Constitution of the United States.”

He went on to claim that Obama has “really damaged” the reputation of the University of Chicago Law School, where he served as a professor, and also insisted that Obama is breaking his presidential oath of office. “This oath means nothing to him; the Constitution is an impediment to him,” King said, “I have hit the limit of my patience with trying to work my way towards an election and hopefully we will elect ourselves a new president.”

Days after the interview, the Supreme Court appeared to approve of the government’s ability to use “discretion in the enforcement of immigration law” in their ruling that overturned parts of Arizona’s SB 1070.

Mefferd: Now he’s doing it as a re-election strategy, do you think that that is the motivation for this?

King: I think it is and the timing of it would suggest that. The president is scheduled to give a speech today before the Hispanic leaders that are gathered together at the national level, the same group that Mitt Romney spoke to here a couple days ago. It seems to me that the timing of this is to be ahead of that speech so that he can get a political benefit from the destruction that he is doing to the Constitution of the United States. You know, this president taught constitutional law as an adjunct professor at the University of Chicago, one of the top five most respected law schools in the country year after year after year, and he has really damaged their reputation.

…

King: It’s almost as if there is a team there in the White House that keeps track of everything the president says and whatever he gives his word on they have to set about breaking his word. The president has broken his own word so many times that it is hardly even a subject anymore. But it isn’t just the president’s word, this is his oath of office, ‘I do solemnly swear to the best of my ability to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States so help me God.’ That’s what he said. And in the Constitution, just shortly behind that oath, is the requirement that he, meaning the president, ‘take care that the laws be faithfully executed’ and he is doing the exact opposite. This oath means nothing to him; the Constitution is an impediment to him. I have hit the limit of my patience with trying to work my way towards an election and hopefully we will elect ourselves a new president and get a new executive branch of government, this is a place where we have to draw a bright line.

Bryan Fischer has not been reluctant to voice his hatred of  the Supreme Court's ruling upholding the constitutionality of health care reform, calling it "legal garbage" and total gibberish that signals the end of America.

On Friday's radio program, Fischer continued the assault, declaring that the decision written by Chief Justice John Roberts was so fundamentally illogical and irrational that there must be something was wrong with his brain, perhaps rooted in the fact that Roberts takes medication for epilepsy:

Fischer has spent three days absolutely tearing apart this ruling and blasting it as utterly incoherent and unconstitutional, and then began attacking Chief Justice Roberts for supposedly changing sides at the last minute ... just like Justice Anthony Kennedy did during Roe v Wade:

[Roberts] ruling was absolutely irrational, it's absolutely illogical, it is absolutely unconstitutional, and it is so bad it will make your eyes water trying to make sense of it. And it's my position that ruling doesn't even make sense; you couldn't even imagine a world, you couldn't even create a parallel universe in which this ruling could make any kind of sense.

Now Roberts apparently switched his vote very late in the game. This happened on Roe v Wade, by the way - Anthony Kennedy originally was going to be against Roe v Wade [but] somebody got to him. So the first vote on Roe v Wade was to uphold the pro-life position, sanctity of life was going to be protected by the Court. But over the course of the month between when the first vote was taken and when the opinions were written, Anthony Kennedy switched teams, he went over to the dark side of the force. So they had to change and so the majority opinion became the one that struck down Roe v Wade and made abortion legal in all nine months of pregnancy.

Hmmm, apparently Fischer is such a scholar that he knows that Roberts' opinion is incoherent nonsense and totally unconstitutional .... but doesn't realize that Roe v Wade was decided in 1973 on a vote of 7-2 and that Kennedy didn't join the Court until 1988 or that there as never been a "majority opinion ... that struck down Roe v Wade."

As Kyle has been documenting, there is no shortage of rhetorical excess from right-wing leaders upset about the Supreme Court upholding the Affordable Care Act.  But the response from Rick Joyner, head of MorningStar Ministries and the dominionist Oak Initiative, has to be among the most unhinged. Joyner has a penchant for apocalyptic rhetoric, warning of demonic threats and natural disasters facing an unrepentant America.

Joyner is embraced by other right-wing leaders, appearing at the Awakening conferences organized by the Liberty Counsel and the Freedom Federation, a Religious Right super-group of which Joyner’s organization is a member.  Sen. Jim DeMint spoke earlier this month at a “Freedom Congress” organized by Joyner.

In a “special bulletin” appropriately titled “Dazed and Confused,” Joyner goes after Chief Justice John Roberts with literally hellish relish.  Roberts’ reasoning, he says, “could potentially open the biggest gate of hell into our nation and culture by the Supreme Court since Roe v. Wade” and “has potentially released the most evil hounds from hell against the American people.”

Joyner even suggests that Roberts is, quite literally, on drugs:

It is understandable that some are now making the assertion that Chief Justice Roberts’ medication used to control his epilepsy has taken a toll on his mental abilities and reasoning. Nothing else has come forward as an adequate explanation for why he would be the one to free Obamacare like he did to become the biggest grab of totalitarian power over America in history.

“This decision,” says Joyner, “has deepened our national crisis, and jeopardized our Constitution at a most inopportune and dangerous time.”

It now seems that the American Republic is under unrelenting attack from every possible direction. Let us not faint, but keep in mind that the greatest victories only come when there are great battles. No doubt this will wake up many more Americans to the battle we are in. Great souls run to the sound of battle, not away from it. America still has many great souls who will fight regardless of the odds against them, and who will stand and never surrender for the sake of the freedom that was their birthright. This Supreme Court Decision has only increased the volume of the alarm and we can expect many more to hear it now.

Joyner had much kinder words for Mitt Romney, quoting the candidate’s response to the ruling and his “resolve” to repeal the health care reform law.