Santorum's Honorary Florida Chairman: Gays "Make God Want to Vomit":

Having taken a third place drubbing in South Carolina, Rick Santorum apparently believes he needs to step up his gay bashing as he moves on to Florida. Hence his scheduled appearance today at the Worldwide Christian Center in Pompano Beach, home of homophobe extraordinaire and Santorum honorary Florida Campaign chairman, Rev. O'Neal Dozier (pictured at left). Dozier doesn't hold back on his anti-gay hate nor does he hold back carrying water for white Christianists that would be most happy if segregation (or perhaps black slavery) were still the law of the land.

Dozier claims to be an unabashed Christian dominionist and has stated that gays "make God want to vomit." Frankly, Dozier makes me want to vomit not only because of his anti-gay extremism, but also because of his stupidity - i.e., if one looks carefully at the dominionist agenda, the ruling Christians are all going to be white. I'd also question how long it will be - given Dozier's hysteria over gays - before we see Dozier accused of misconduct like disgraced bishop Eddie Long. Mother Jones has a piece that looks at Santorum's truly nasty honorary campaign chairman. Here's a sampling:

While the network news shows spend this Sunday marveling over Newtmentum in South Carolina, Rick Santorum will quietly make his first stop in Florida, site of the next primary on January 31. He'll be dropping in to see the honorary chairman of his state campaign—a Bush-connected Islamophobic pastor who says gays "make God want to vomit."

Dozier opened his church in 1985 and immediately began preaching a different kind of gospel. "We teach and preach on the cultural issues," he says in a recent video. "We also teach and preach on the war on terror. We teach and preach on the dangers of Islam and Islamic fascism here." He says he was heavily influenced by the work of the Rev. D. James Kennedy, a founding father of the Christian right who started the annual Reclaiming America for Christ political conference at his church complex just down the street in Fort Lauderdale.

As Republicans courted him, Dozier continued to express some of his most extreme views. At a Reclaiming America convention in 2003, Dozier declared that "We should take control of every facet of society." He added that God was "100 percent for capital punishment. Oh, yeah, God knew some were going to slip through, a few innocent ones. He knew that. But you cannot have a society without capital punishment."

He reserved his greatest fervor for that "paramount of sins," homosexuality—which he declared was "something so nasty and disgusting that it makes God want to vomit."

In 2006, he declared war on a local Islamic group trying to build a mosque in the neighborhood. "One day," he intoned, "our grandchildren will live under the grips of sharia law. . . . By the summer of 2006, Crist and Jeb Bush had both dumped him.

But the rise of tea party politics gave Dozier a new calling. He campaigned vigorously for Rep. Allen West, an African-American conservative who shares Dozier's views on gays and Muslims. . . . "The tea party is a godly ordained party," he's said. At one recent event, he expanded the thesis: "God would never ordain a government to take from the rich to give to the poor, you see, so therefore God is not a socialist. God is not a Robin Hood."

Those sentiments, and Dozier's revitalized reputation in the black community, seem to have struck the right chord with Santorum's campaign.