Wednesday, October 24, 2007

New name, same hangups


By PAT MURPHY
Express Staff Writer

The 26 percent of American voters known as the "Christian right" now march under a new banner—"Values Voters."

The alliterative sound of the new name has the come-on of a Wal-Mart summer bargain days special.

Be not confused, however. Values Voters, a creation of the Family Research Council, still is promoting the same agenda—anti-abortion, anti-gay marriage.

This will strike some as odd.

In its mission statement, the FRC claims to support "public policy that values human life."

During their genuflecting appearance before 2,600 attendees at the Values Voters Summit in Washington last week, Republican presidential hopefuls pilloried Hillary Clinton. But if they were asked about the two most brutal attacks on human life—the slaughter of innocents in Iraq and Afghanistan and the rapid onset of global warming threatening to transform some of the poorest nations into waterless, treeless deserts that'll lead to widespread famine—I missed it.

Values Voters and their likeminded evangelical brethren live in a world of abbreviated values and with their heads in the clouds.

When 17 Christian ministers earlier this year signed a document denouncing torture of terrorist suspects by the United States, far right evangelicals dismissed them as, among other things, "pseudo-pacifist academics and antiwar activists" conducting "a barely disguised crusade against the U.S. war against terror." Read that, we favor war and more killing.

One would think Values Voters also would be hopping mad that President Bush vetoed more funds for the S-CHIP program for children's health care, which surely falls under the hallowed mission of "public policy that values human life." But no, Values Voters either are so irreversibly Republican to the core they'll buy anything with a Bush label, or saving children from deathly illness isn't the same to them as saving a fetus from abortion.

This crowd brought us the Terri Schiavo debacle—the humiliation of Congress enacting a law to keep Terri hooked to a tube, which President Bush flamboyantly signed after an overnight flight from his ranch to Washington, for naught. Terri died.

They also are trying to turn the U.S. government into a theocracy, with a faith-based office inside the White House and job interviews that include questions of whether applicants support overturning the historic Roe v. Wade abortion court decision.

Many of the wet-behind-the-ears lawyers hired by the Justice Department are grads of religion-based universities, such as the late Rev. Jerry Falwell's Liberty University, whose law school is committed to the "Christian intellectual tradition."

With all this godliness available, why is there more crime, scandalous public behavior and government-by-lies?




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