Personally, I have always believed that the Tea Party crowd and the Christian Right are for the most part one and the same. I make this statement based on over a decade's scrutiny of leading professional Christian organizations and their web sites and scrutiny of the Tea Party and its candidates. Both groups are about 95% comprised of white, conservative Christians who oppose (i) immigrants and immigration, (2) tax increases and any spending for the poor and/or homeless, (3) reject objective facts and modern knowledge, (4) hate and despise anyone they consider "other," and (5) re-write history to suit their own agenda. Nothing terrifies both groups more than non-whites, non-Christians, LGBT citizens, and modern knowledge and progressive ideas. Both groups are living mentally back in the 1950's and early 1960's. Thus, it was only a matter of time until Tea Party candidates like Christine O'Donnell and Sharon Angle would surface and confirm the merger. Mother Jones has highlights on this phenomenon. Here are highlights:*
Does the Delaware insurgent's campaign foreshadow the marriage of tea party and Christian right? . .O'Donnell's victory also marks a step forward for the Christian right, which her campaign has quietly begun to court—and which could end up riding the tea party wave back into the halls of power.
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O'Donnell has campaigned more as a tea partier, preaching against government spending and Democratic overreach. But she has also used the money that anti-government activists have poured into her campaign to obtain support from Christian and evangelical activists.
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Response Unlimited's president, Christian activist Philip Zodhiates, says . . . . "A great percentage of those that would consider themselves part of the tea party movement would hold very conservative beliefs…[on] issues like abortion [and] homosexual marriage."
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O'Donnell has supplemented her Christian outreach by buying lists from an online marketing firm called American Church Lists, according to her FEC filings. She's also hired religious-right activists for her campaign.
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A beneficiary of both tea party anger and religious right fervor, O'Donnell represents the potential overlap between Christian conservatives and anti-government activists. She's building this coalition just as the religious right's old power players are trying to ride the coattails of the tea party back into the spotlight. At his Faith and Freedom conference in Washington last week, former Christian Coalition director Ralph Reed attempted to cast small-government conservatism as an extension of God's will.
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And make no mistake about just how extreme O'Donnell and Angle are in their religious views. Angle has made her own outrageous statemeents and after O'Donnell's win this week, it seems people are coming out of the woodwork to give their evidence that O'Donnell is a full blown Christian Right whack job. Here are highlights from The Daily Beast that recounts the statements of Wade Richards, a former minion of O'Donnell in her support of the wholly discredited "ex-gay" myth:
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A little more than 10 years ago, Wade Richards, a tormented, deeply religious 20-year-old gay man, took his Bible school tuition money and used it to fly to Los Angeles to join forces with Christine O’Donnell, a budding Christian right activist. O’Donnell, a former spokeswoman for Concerned Women for America, had founded an organization called The Savior’s Alliance for Lifting the Truth, or The SALT, in 1996; it was meant to organize young people around opposition to abortion, sex education, and homosexuality. Richards had just graduated from an ex-gay rehab program and had been interviewed about it on 20/20. Ostensibly cured, he got in touch with O’Donnell and became The SALT’s outreach coordinator and spokesman on homosexuality.
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Richards, though, was having doubts, which he confided to O’Donnell. “I told her, ‘You know, Christine, I’m still super struggling with same-sex attraction,’” he says. “‘I don’t really know if this is real, if I can really be this changed person that I’m going around the country speaking and saying that I am.’” She paid little attention, he says. Campaigning against gay rights was too central to her mission.
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For O’Donnell, such gay-baiting was very much in character. Toward the end of the Clinton administration, she protested the appointment of James Hormel to be ambassador to Luxembourg, a posting the religious right opposed because Hormel was gay. “The SALT was concerned about Hormel’s ties to the pedophile-rights movement,” her website said, though there was not a shred of evidence behind the slur.
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O’Donnell’s demonization of gay people is especially striking given the fact that, according to Richards, she has a sister who is openly lesbian. Indeed, it was meeting her sister, he says, that helped him begin to accept his own sexuality.
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Richards finally came out in an article in The Advocate in 2000. After that, he says, O’Donnell “totally turned her back on me. I never heard from her ever again. That’s been my experience with the Christian community in general. The minute I was struggling and saying, ‘Hey, listen, I don’t know really where I am with this,’ that’s when everyone really turned their back on me.”
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Christine O’Donnell was toeing the party line at the expense of an individual. Often these groups, in pushing their dogma, they overlook that there’s a human being that’s having their lives upended.”
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