Tuesday, April 12, 2005

The "Culture of Life's" Finest Hour

From The Nation we have these interesting pieces of information:

Michael Schwartz must have thought I was just another attendee of the
"Confronting the Judicial War on Faith" conference. I approached the chief of
staff of Oklahoma's GOP Senator Tom Coburn outside the conference in downtown Washington last Thursday afternoon after he spoke there. Before I could
introduce myself, he turned to me and another observer with a crooked smile and exclaimed, "I'm a radical! I'm a real extremist. I don't want to impeach judges. I want to impale them!"

And:

The recent right-wing fixation on impeaching judges was conceptualized by David Barton, Republican consultant and vice chairman of the Texas GOP. In 1996 Barton published a handbook called Impeachment: Restraining an Overactive Judiciary,
which was timed to coincide with Tom DeLay's bid for legislation authorizing
Congress to impeach judges. "The judges need to be intimidated," DeLay told
reporters that year.
In 1989 Barton published a book titled The Myth of Separation, which proclaims, "This book proves that the separation of church and
state is a myth." The Baptist Joint Committee on Public Affairs, in a critique
of his 1995 documentary America's Godly Heritage, stated that it was "laced with
exaggerations, half-truths, and misstatements of fact." Barton is on the board
of advisers of the Providence Foundation, a Christian Reconstructionist group
that promotes the idea that biblical law should be instituted in America. In 1991 Barton spoke at a Colorado retreat sponsored by Pastor Pete Peters, an adherent of racist Christian Identity theology with well-established neo-Nazi ties. During the 2004 presidential campaign, the Republican National Committee hired him as a paid consultant for "evangelical outreach." The RNC sponsored more than 300 events for him.

So basically, the culture of life is being led by folks who consort with neo-nazi ties and who want to impale judges? Is that the message I am supposed to take away from this? Am I supposed to participate in the culture of life by impaling people?
Go read the rest of the article.