Gov. Perry’s Pro-Censorship Endorser

Stop us if you’ve heard this one before. An extremist pastor walks into a library to destroy public property and when the stunt royally backfires on him, he recruits a member of his congregation to craft an unconstitutional city ordinance that essentially made his church members the morality police and the arbiters of what you and your children can read.

No? Never heard that one before? It happened in Wichita Falls in the late 1990s. The pastor in question is Robert Jeffress, at the time the senior pastor of First Baptist Wichita Falls.

Jeffress has since moved on to bigger things. He’s now at First Baptist Dallas and in the past week has stirred controversy by endorsing Gov. Rick Perry and going on the attack against the Mormon faith of Perry rival Mitt Romney.

Jeffress’ 1998 controversy erupted after he learned that the Wichita Falls Public Library had purchased two copies each of “Heather Has Two Mommies” and “Daddy’s Roommate,” both children’s books about kids with same-sex parents.

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Separated at Birth

Has anyone ever seen the American Family Association’s Bryan Fischer and Dallas First Baptist Church Pastor Robert Jeffress together in the same room at the same time? No, I’m not implying that one is Clark Kent and that the other is Superman. What I’m saying is, well, this:

“Because my argument all along has been that the purpose of the First Amendment is to protect the free exercise of the Christian religion.” — Bryan Fischer	“However, the fact that our Constitution demands that everyone have the freedom to embrace any religious beliefs, or no religious beliefs, does not mean that the government cannot demonstrate a preference for Christianity.” — Robert Jeffress

When Perry’s Allies Attack: VVS Edition

Where was Gov. Rick Perry this past weekend when two prominent supporters brandished faith as a weapon and went on the attack against former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney? The answer to this question is at the end of this post.

But first, the Values Voter Summit.

This year’s VVS — held this past weekend in Washington, D.C. — was everything the American Family Association probably hoped Gov. Perry’s The Response would be when they wrote a $600,000 check to make the early August prayer rally possible.

In fact, VVS can be called the director’s cut of The Response, filled with all the extremist rhetoric that Gov. Perry’s handlers human decency dictated shouldn’t be aired at Houston’s Reliant Stadium lest the Texas governor be embarrassed ahead of his eventual announcement of a presidential run.

The Politics of ‘Reclaiming Texas for Christ’

Religious-right leaders and activists in Texas will converge October 20 on Lewisville near Dallas for the second annual “Reclaiming Texas for Christ” conference. It sure seems from the conference program that what’s really going on here is another cynical effort to use faith to advance a political agenda.