{"id":173,"date":"2006-12-06T07:28:11","date_gmt":"2006-12-06T13:28:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php\/2006\/12\/06\/straw-ministers\/"},"modified":"2006-12-07T07:46:42","modified_gmt":"2006-12-07T13:46:42","slug":"straw-ministers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=173","title":{"rendered":"Straw Ministers"},"content":{"rendered":"

Have you never noticed that when hispanics, blacks or asians cross party lines and vote Republican – as they have in the last few elections in numbers that would have astounded people ten or fifteen years ago – nary a word from the media?<\/p>\n

But let a couple of evangelical ministers break with the GOP, and suddenly, if you’re EJ Dionne, it’s a trend<\/a>?<\/p>\n

When Rick Warren, one of the nation’s most popular evangelical pastors, faced down right-wing pressure and invited Sen. Barack Obama to speak at a gathering at his Saddleback Valley Community Church about the AIDS crisis, he sent a signal: A significant group of theologically conservative Christians no longer wants to be treated as a cog in the Republican political machine.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Rick Warren<\/a> is famous for his book The Purpose-Driven Life<\/em>. He’s famous for donating a lot of money to AIDS research. He’s not <\/em>famous as an especially conservative evangelical.<\/p>\n

But EJ Dionne either doesn’t know that (do they all look the same to him?) or assumes his audience doesn’t.<\/p>\n

Another fact; while the left is hopping up and down like monkeys flinging poo because some evangelicals flaked away from the GOP this past election, the numbers are a tad <\/em>more sobering than that. In 2004, 22% of evanglicals voted Democrat. Last month? 30%.<\/p>\n

And they’ve been fickle before. In 2000, when the issues on the table didn’t especially excite evangelicals, they stayed home in droves; some pollsters estimated that Bush would have won the popular vote as well as the electoral college had evangelicals turned out in the same force they had in ’94, ’02 and ’04.<\/p>\n

Finally – ’08 is another whole campaign. And the Democrat party at its highest level – once you get past the blandishments of Barack Obama, who is not exactly the favorite candidate of the Democrat inner circle – is intrinsically hostile to evangelical beliefs. They may run hot and cold on the GOP itself, but the fact that evangelicans have never <\/em>been in the Democrat camp (not in recent memory,anyway) should tell you something; that, Rick Warren notwithstanding, Democrat evangelicals are a situational aberration, not a trend. EJ: get back to me in ’08 or ’10.
\nMr. Dionne; I’ve met Mac Hammond, and Rick Warren is no Mac Hammond.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Have you never noticed that when hispanics, blacks or asians cross party lines and vote Republican – as they have in the last few elections in numbers that would have astounded people ten or fifteen years ago – nary a word from the media? But let a couple of evangelical ministers break with the GOP, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,26],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-173","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-campaign-08","category-faiths-and-their-followers"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/173","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=173"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/173\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=173"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=173"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=173"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}