My Last Song About Satan
The Foley scandal revealed much about the leadership of the religious right. They’re not “one-soul-at-a-time” Evangelicals, but rather missionaries in our midst – “culture changers,” as Maggie Gallagher put it at the Family Research Council’s Values Voters Summit last month. As Cotton Mather and Mullah Omar before them, they’re people who love humanity, but hate human beings. The Foley scandal brings this to light almost as well as their support for torture.
Not all the Christian Right leaders are parroting the West Wing’s line that Foley was an unknown bad apple. Paul Weyrich, the dean of the religious right, has called for Hastert’s resignation, but the big dog Neddites, such as Gary Bauer and James Dobson, give the Speaker their unquestioning support – despite the most recent revelations from former House pages revealing a standing stay-clear-of-Foley order in force since 1995, and retiring Rep. Jim Kolbe (R-AZ) who claims he took Foley to the woodshed over stalking pages in 2000. So if Denny Hastert wasn’t aware of the issue, or didn’t quite understand it, we can just add that to the long list.
The Washington Times has also called for Hastert’s resignation – Tony Blankley says that when “They get past their partisanship and consider what’s right and what’s wrong,” other Republicans, such as Limbaugh and Hannity will agree. Get past their partisanship? Recognize right from wrong? Good luck with that.
Human Events has also called for Hastert’s resignation, but not until after the election. That’s the kind of principled stance we’ve come to expect from the rag that runs Ann Coulter and Robert Novak.
At the same Values Voters conference, Gary Bauer, former FRC president and 2000 US presidential candidate (during the campaign, he called Bush’s compassionate conservatism “Wimpy.”) railed against the “homosexual agenda,” which it turns out, has nothing to do with Biblically-condemned sex. It’s all about secularizing America so that homosexuals and their evil minions can use fetal stem cells to clone androgynous storm troopers for the final battle against the forces of good on the plains at Armageddon. Or something like that. Maggie Gallagher says same-sex marriage is only the first of many steps in the homosexual agenda – because they’re evil culture changers.
This week Gary Bauer wrote:
Homosexual rights groups have compiled a “target list” of GOP congressmen and Capitol Hill staffers who they claim are hiding their homosexual orientation. These leftwing activists intend to release this list sometime soon to destroy political careers and in the hope that millions of pro-family voters will stay home on Election Day, thus delivering the House and Senate to the party of Ted Kennedy and Hillary Clinton and Barney Frank.
Bat-shit crazy David Limbaugh, the junkie-noodle-dick’s little brother, has nothing to say about Foley, and brings, as best he can, the conversation back around to Clinton. Six full years later, the Republicans’ only defense of themselves – whether it’s the war, the economy, or their own in-bred sex scandals – is an attack on the prior administration. Limbaugh went so far as to absolve Republicans of any responsibility for the Foley affair:
“This should be a non-scandal because it doesn’t involve the Republican Party, or in fairness, even its House leader. Based on the facts we know now, it involves Foley alone.”
That’s right – Reps Kolbe, Shimkus, Boehner, and Reynolds all claim to have alerted the Speaker’s office about Foley’s cyber-stalking, but it’s not a “Republican scandal,” or even one that involves its “House leader” (a tellingly passive description of J. Denis Hastert, the Speaker of the House.)
Yesterday, Bauer wrote:
Closet Conspiracy?
The investigation into who knew what and when about e-mails and
instant messages former Congressman Mark Foley was sending to
underage House pages resulted in an interesting story in today’s
Washington Post. Evidently, one Republican congressman confronted Foley in 2000 about inappropriate messages to House pages. That congressman was Rep. Jim Kolbe of Arizona, who went to Foley after a former page showed Kolbe messages he received from Foley.
Eight paragraphs into the story, however, the Post informs readers that Kolbe is an open homosexual. Is that relevant? Perhaps so. If there was a conspiracy to cover-up Foley’s behavior, one could reasonably argue that it has been “kept in the closet,” but that is not what the Washington Post is hoping voters will read into this story. Fortunately for him, Rep. Kolbe is not running for reelection this year. If he were, the Post and many others would surely be calling for his immediate resignation, and rightly so.
It’s never really about those homosexuals, or those forced abortions in the sweat shops on the Marianas Islands – Congressional Republicans and their minions only oppose sinners who serve no purpose. Foley voted for the Defense of Marriage Act (but, to his credit, against the Federal Marriage Amendment), and for that won the support of the official religious right. The fact that he’s attracted to boys too young to marry without their parents’ permission, anyway, is a detail the Family Research Council left off their voter guide.
The Neddite’s view is long and vast – all the way to the end of the world. But their leadership has failed them repeatedly. And not just their political leaders – their gurus, James Dobson, Tony Perkins, and Gary Bauer push the big war lies, and turn a blind eye to the Ernst Rohm wannabes, thieving lobbyists, free trade pimps, and alternative interrogation techniques.
But you can only get over on people for so long. They may not care that Diebold keeps no paper trail, but they believe that Jesus does. Polls indicate that, for at least for this election cycle, the Bible-believing Christian rank and file are re-thinking their unholy alliance with the Republican Party. Thank goodness.
~Jack McEnany
Also see: Gary gets it, Gary Bauer, Deliscioso, Perfect Sturm,
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