rssPerry’s prayer event part of a larger effort by conservative Christians to unseat Obama in 2012
Monday, July 11, 2011 at 3:26 pm
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It appears the evolution of Gov. Rick Perry’s prayer event began even earlier than recently reported in Time, and is part of a wider strategy by influential conservative Christian figures to unseat President Barack Obama in 2012.
After Sarah Posner of Religion Dispatches wrote that Perry’s rally seemed reminiscent of televangelist James Robison’s efforts to mobilize conservative Christians to support Ronald Reagan in 1980 and George W. Bush in 2000, the author of what Posner described as one of the most “under noticed” religion stories of the campaign season helped strengthen the connection.
In a two-part series, Ethics Daily contributing editor Brian Kaylor reveals closed-door meetings called last month by Robison in the Fort Worth suburb of Euless, bringing together about 80 pastors and conservative Christian leaders.
With the aim of plotting to oust Obama, the leaders met not just on the phone call recounted in TIME, but in person on June 20-21, after earlier rounds of secretive gatherings September 2010 in Dallas. Robison also held two conference calls in March with 35 right-wing Christian leaders.
Many of the leaders Ethics Daily reported attended those closed-door meetings are also sponsors of Perry’s prayer rally planned in August. (Today, Robison included a list of those who attended on his blog.)
They include event leadership figures Don Wildmon, founder of the American Family Association, the controversial host organization of Perry’s prayer rally; influential conservative activist David Lane, who serves as the event’s national finance chairman; Jim Garlow, in charge of the rally’s “national church mobilization” efforts; former Republican U.S. Rep. Bob McEwen, the government “mobilization” leader; and program endorsers Richard Land of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, and Jacob Aranza, a minister who, Ethics Daily said, “helped popularize the theory that rock ’n’ roll music included backmasked messages promoting drug use and sex,” in the 80s.
Robison had been pushing for a governor to take up his prayer call, Posner writes, arguing that “we need our governors, our state leaders, our national leaders, really come together in real serious prayer because we need answers from above.” And as revealed to Kaylor, Ohio Governor John Kasich urged Robison to pick Perry because he was “the governor that had been in leadership long enough that [he] could call a prayer meeting.”
The authors lay out Robison’s pro-life, pro-Israel, pro-smaller government record, opposed to same-sex marriage and in favor of defending the fight against “Radical Islam.” Though Robison said the meetings are “intended to be spiritual, not political” he admitted to “political implications” of the gathering, “including issues involving political elections.”
“This is not a political gathering; it is a gathering for a spiritual awakening that will affect every area of life and culture,” Robison told Ethics Daily. “We’re not trying to organize some power base. We’re trying to release the power that affects every other base of influence and power.”
Kalyor traces the political subtext apparent on Robison’s TV ministry show, “Life Today”:
“I believe we’ve got about a 12- to 18-month, 24-month period at the most, really less than that, where we’re going to literally have to turn the ship of state away from the hidden dangers, like hidden underwater iceberg edges and the visible, to turn away and head to a safe course, safe harbor with a captain and crew in place over all that will make necessary course corrections to keep us in a secure safe place,” said Robison to Jay Richards, who attended both meetings and played a major role in the conference calls.
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Comment posted June 4, 2011 @ 1:40 am
It is well past time for these plutocrats to cave in. Marijuana is safer than alcohol and perhaps the safest mind altering drug on the planet. Some of our government organizations ship firearms to south American countries that end up in the hands of violent criminals who use them to KILL PEOPLE and marijuana is the culprit? When are ‘we the people’ going to wake up and realize that our federal government is perhaps one of the biggest crooks in the world?
Comment posted June 4, 2011 @ 5:02 am
There are much more serious crimes taking place in this country, the DOJ needs to focus in on something else. States that have passed medical marijuana shouldn’t have to deal with the federal government coming in and destroying property and costing them money when they are paying taxes on their income and following the laws of the state. The DOJ needs to get out of the marijuana business entirely. It should be legal for all adults who may wish to imbibe in the most natural and least harmful drug there is.
Comment posted June 4, 2011 @ 8:38 am
This whole thing is getting very old, every person with a thinking brain knows cannabis, & how it has been lied about. I have been calling the whitehouse comment line to let my feelings known and also writing letters to top politicans. We should overwhelm these elected officials.when the presidents campaign asked me for money I wrote back & told them I was voting for someone witg the cahones to legalize cannabis,after seeing that the AG was threatining to close cannabis dispensarys. Then I read their licensing BIG PHARMA 55 unnamed Co’s. to grow cannabis farms for research & reschedule cannabis to a class III narcotic. Something we the people wanted for 80 years.This is all aviolation of the core principals of freedom
Comment posted June 6, 2011 @ 9:38 am
If you are a Prohibitionist then you owe us answers to the following questions:
#1. Why do you rejoice at the fact that we have all been stripped of our 4th amendment rights and are now totally subordinate to a corporatized, despotic government with a heavily armed and corrupt, militarized police force whose often deadly intrusions into our homes and lives are condoned by an equally corrupt and spineless judiciary?
#2. Why do you wish to continue to spend $50 billion a year to prosecute and cage your fellow citizens for choosing drugs which are not more dangerous than those of which you yourself use and approve of such as alcohol and tobacco?
#3. Do you honestly expect the rest of us to look on passively while you waste another trillion dollars on this garbage policy?
#4. Why are your waging war on your own family, friends and neighbors?
#5. Why are you so complacent with the fact that our once ‘free & proud’ nation now has the largest percentage of it’s citizenry incarcerated than any other on the entire planet?
#6. Why are you helping to fuel a budget crisis to the point of closing hospitals, schools and libraries?
#7. Why do you rejoice at wasting precious resources on prohibition related undercover work while rapists and murderers walk free, while additionally, many cases involving murder and rape do not even get taken to trial because law enforcement priorities are subverted by your beloved failed and dangerous policy?
#8. Why are you such a supporter of the ‘prison industrial complex’ to the extent of endangering our own children?
#9. Will you graciously applaud, when due to your own incipient and authoritarian approach, even your own child is caged and raped?
* It is estimated that there are over 300,000 instances of prison rape a year.
* 196,000 are estimated to happen to men in prison.
* 123,000 are estimated to happen to men in county jail.
* 40,000 are estimated to be committed against boys in either adult prisons or while in juvenile facilities or lock ups.
* 5000 women are estimated to be raped in prison.
http://www.loompanics.com/Articles/RapeInPrison.html
#10. And will you also applaud when your own child, due to an unnecessary and counter productive felony conviction, can no longer find employment?
Private prisons are publicly traded and their stock value is tied to the number of inmates. Here’s what the UK Economist Magazine thinks of the situation: “Never in the civilised world have so many been locked up for so little” http://www.economist.com/node/16636027
According to Paul Craig Roberts, a former editor of the Wall Street Journal and former assistant secretary to the treasury under Ronald Reagan, “Police in the US now rival criminals, and exceed terrorists as the greatest threat to the American public.”
“Narcotics police are an enormous, corrupt international bureaucracy and now fund a coterie of researchers who provide them with ‘scientific support’, fanatics who distort the legitimate research of others. The anti-marijuana campaign is a cancerous tissue of lies, undermining law enforcement, aggravating the drug problem, depriving the sick of needed help, and suckering well-intentioned conservatives and countless frightened parents.” – William F. Buckley, Commentary in The National Review, April 29, 1983, p. 495
There is no conflict between liberty and safety. We will have both or neither.
William Ramsey Clark (1927–)
Comment posted June 10, 2011 @ 1:51 pm
I like all 4 comments, here is why. If Big Business and the GOP can’t make money on marijuana then no one CAN. This is just plain stupid. Our Govenment is so caught up and collecting money from Big Business towards being elected that nothing is being done to help the People of America gain any security of mind and body. Our Government is broken and can’t be fixed it must therefore punish the very People who created it. We the People has lost its luster and is now declined to absolute chaos and the American Dream is gone. Face it folks we are beinf systematicaly screwed by the RICH man. (or Woman)
Comment posted June 20, 2011 @ 6:23 am
2007 tax dollars spent fighting drugs according to the Department of Justice National Drug Intelligence Center:
Criminal justice system costs: 56.4 Billion
Incarceration: 48.1 Billion
And I believe the DEA’s budget is around 3 billion.
So the guy who oversees a 100 billion dollar operation is being asked to not treat marijuana as a criminal substance- Why dont we just get the opinion of the drug czar and some psychiatrists while we are at it…
ONDCP:~7.7 Billion
Specialty Treatment:3.7 Billion
Oh I guess I know what they are gonna say…
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