Senators team with religious right on reform obstruction
(video: The Rachel Maddow Show)
The mustachioed bobblehead leading the Family Research Council’s anti-healthcare-reform freakshow is Lou Engle. Bruce Wilson, writing at Talk to Action, has a piece up on Engle, who Wilson suggests is “the Republican Party’s new spiritual guru.” In GOP’s New Prayer Guru Says Gays Possessed By Demons, Wilson says:
As the Rachel Maddow Show has recently showcased, on December 16th the Family Research Council sponsored a “Prayercast” event, attended by GOP luminaries including Senators Jim DeMint and Sam Brownback, and House Representatives Michelle Bachmann and Randy Forbes. But FRC head Tony Perkins did not lead the prayer event. That honor fell to Lou Engle, Founder of TheCall. Besides leading the capstone stadium rally for pro-Proposition 8, antigay marriage organizers last November 1, 2008 at San Diego’s Qualcomm Stadium, Lou Engle could also be found, at a special ceremony at a Virginia Beach megachurch last summer, anointing and blessing GOP presidential hopefuls Mike Huckabee and Newt Gingrich.
In his article, Wilson, who has written extensively about Lou Engle, quotes a sermon in which Engle describes San Francisco’s Castro District as “where the homosexuals boast the dominion of darkness.”
Dominion of darkness? How could I possibly have missed that t-shirt the last time I was in San Francisco? Evan Hurst, writing at Truth Wins Out, ponders Engle’s hyperbole in a spot-on piece called Radical Cleric Lou Engle Believes Homosexuality Is A “Demon Spirit.”
Onstage at TheCall (foreground L-R) James Dobson, Lou Engle, Jim Garlow
(Photo: Karen Ocamb)
When Engle first appears in the Rachel Maddow video above, holding his hand is none other than San Diego’s Pastor Jim Garlow.
Garlow also shared the stage with Engle, a few days before the 2008 election, at the prey away the marriage equality rally, TheCall, held at Qualcomm Stadium where Engle, who was invited by Garlow to bring his anti-gay dog-and-pony to San Diego, called for, what Wilson describes as, “acts of Christian martyrdom to stop legal abortion and gay marriage.”
That bit of rhetorical menace is the kind of incitement one usually expects from religious extremists as they urge their fellow zealots to commit violent acts of terrorism, i.e. bomb clinics, shoot doctors, fly airplanes into skyscrapers.
In another piece on Engle last June, Bruce Wilson notes:
In the early 1980′s, KKK and Aryan Nations strategist Louis Beam helped popularize a tactic known as “leaderless resistance” in which high profile propagandists would incite terrorist acts carried out by autonomous individuals and cell groups. Lou Engle’s inflammatory TheCall antiabortion rhetoric conforms with Beam’s tactic; Engle merely incites.
On 17 December 2009, Wilson connected Lou Engle with Uganda’s pending legislation that, if passed, would criminalize homosexuality and impose the death penalty for repeat offenders and HIV-positive individuals:
Engle’s religious movement has also played a significant role in inspiring, and even organizing, legislators who pushed the pending, draconian anti-gay legislation in Uganda that some have described as a “kill the gays” bill.
The connections don’t stop there.
Jim Garlow at “Prayercast”: Health Care Reform Violates The Ten Commandments (video: Right WIng Watch at YouTube)
Jim Garlow is the senior pastor of one of the recipients of the 2009 James Hartline Report Award For Excellence, Skyline Church in La Mesa. In the video above, Garlow, alongside fellow homophobes Harry Jackson and the Family Research Council’s Tony Perkins and sounding every bit as nutty as his pal Lou Engle, claims healthcare reform violates the Ten Commandments.
There doesn’t seem to be a bit of anti-gay action going on that Pastor Jim Garlow doesn’t want a piece of. On 16 November 2009 in Washington DC, Garlow joined other anti-gays in a so-called Religious Free Speech Rally. The rally, staged to protest the passage of The Matthew Shepard & James Byrd Jr Hate Crimes Prevention Act, was a wholly unnecessary photo-op allegedly having something to do with the participants’ right to bash the gays from their pulpits — a right already firmly ensconced in the US Constitution. Garlow was among the initial signatories of the Manhattan Declaration that called for nothing less than an American theocracy on 20 November 2009.
And Uganda?
Earlier this year, Americans affiliated with so-called ex-gay ministries, Exodus International and International Healing Foundation, and anti-gay hate-group leader and holocaust-revisionist Scott Lively traveled to the African nation to fan the flames of hatred and violence against Ugandan gays.
On 27 January 2010, Pastor Jim Garlow’s Skyline Wesleyan Church, will be hosting a training event (aka: Equipping Event) for Exodus International. Exodus board member Don Schmierer played a role in stirring up the anti-gay sentiment that resulted in Uganda’s proposed legislation that, if enacted, could result in the extermination of gay and lesbian Ugandans.
