Kevin Phillips' book... great stuff

[LuckyTheDog]

This passage from Kevin Phillips' book deserves to be e-mailed to everyone you know.

http://www.beliefnet.com/story/192/story_19277_3.html


While most religious-right leaders have given lip service to churchstate separation, many have periodically let the mask slip—and sometimes slip badly. Jerry Falwell has said, “I hope I live to see the day, when, as in the early days of our country, we won’t have any public schools. The churches will have taken them over again, and Christians will be running them.” Bob Jones III, president of the politically attuned university bearing that name, opined that “the so-called ‘wall of separation’ between church and state is a liberal fabrication to try to put churches out of a place of influence in political life.” In 2004 he congratulated George W. Bush on his reelection, urging him to press profamily legislation in keeping with Scripture.

The Reverend Sun Myung Moon, the owner of the Washington Times and the head of the well-funded Unification Church, said that “we must have an autocratic theocracy to rule the world. So we cannot separate the political field from the religious. My dream is to organize a Christian political party including the Protestant denominations, Catholic and all religious sects. We can embrace the religious world in one arm and the political world in the other.” Moon, somewhat surprisingly, has been close to the Bush family, having been praised by the senior Bush in a 1996 speech. Then in 2001, Moon cohosted George W. Bush’s inaugural prayer lunch.

To Pentecostal Pat Robertson, ever blunt, “there is no way that government can operate successfully unless led by godly men and women under the laws of the God of Jacob.” For all practical purposes, Robertson is a Christian Reconstructionist. His Virginia educational complex bears the name Regent University, because a regent is one who governs in the absence of a sovereign, and Regent University is a “kingdom institution” for grooming “God’s representatives on the face of the earth” to serve until the return of Jesus.

However, as political operators like Georgia’s Ralph Reed acknowledged years back regarding the tactics of the Christian Coalition, stealth is a major premise, furtiveness a byword. The Christian right usually does not like to acknowledge what it is doing or where. The point is to minimize public attention to its influence and back-stairs power.

[farmbo]

1. : DU homework assignment: "American Theocracy" by Kevin Phillips

Everyone should read this book...its from a reformed Nixonian conservative who understands that the Bush cartel's policies will bring this country to RUINATION!

It is a call to arms from a great American Patriot.

[WCGreen]

6. Phillips has been running away from the Conservative

movement ever since he saw what the bastards did with his Nixon era phrase the Silent Majority....

In the eyes of the thuggish and brutish conservatives, Rove comes to mind, the Silent Majority came to be a buzz word for White people who are "oppressed" by vocal minorities and long haired hippies...

He is forever atoning for his hand in the polarization of America right at the time when we could have all come together and worked together as a country...

He is a brilliant political analyst who will be remembered long after he is gone...

But I will never forgive him for his part in manipulating the bigotry of the working men and women when it was so important for the country to unite...

[ayeshahaqqiqa]

2. They are trying to rewrite history

Public education has been available in portions of the US since the Northwest Ordinance of 1790, which provided for land set aside for use as a school building and for funding the school. Lincoln's schooling, which was by dribs and drabs, was done by itinerant schoolteachers who set up class for a time and then left. I have seen his copy book. There were math problems dealing with acreage and the measurement of grain, but in no place did I see a quotation from the Bible or a prayer or other religious verse. Even back then, church was seperate.

Also, I have ancestors who were public school teachers 100 years ago, and I can assure you from their own writings that, though they were religious, their schools were not run by churches; they kept their faith and their education seperate.

[Maat]

3. As they should have!

Good for them! As far as my family is concerned, this Nation has a long tradition, since it's inception, of keeping religion and government totally separate, and of honoring all faiths and the free exercise thereof, in addition to honoring the right of nonbelievers not to be subjected to the government endorsement of religion.

[ayeshahaqqiqa]

4. Well, you tend not to like theocracies when

your direct ancestor was condemned as a witch in Salem.....

[Maat]

5. HeeHee.

Now, THAT's an interesting story. I pray she transitioned to Heaven Everafter!

[Lydia Leftcoast]

8. Yes, I once asked my grandmother, who was born in 1899, whether

she had ever had prayer or religious instruction in school, and she said, "No, only in the German summer school that the German Lutheran church held."

[NMMNG]

7. They grow ever more dangerous

Infiltrating every layer of government, implementing laws in their favor, now trying to take over the school system. Where will it end, if it does indeed end?


“the so-called ‘wall of separation’ between church and state is a liberal fabrication to try to put churches out of a place of influence in political life.”


Untrue. Separation of Church and State is implicit in the 1st Amendment of the Constitution, explicit in Thomas Jefferson's Letter to the Danbury Baptists, and even directed by the Bible (“Render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s.”).