Frank Schaeffer smacks down the crazies running the GOP during an appearance in the DL Hugley show:

Ouch.

From his open letter to the GOP :

Just imagine where America would be today if the 14 to 20 million voters -- "the rube base" who slavishly follow the likes of Limbaugh -- had not voted as a block year after year thus empowering the Republican fiasco. We would have a regulated banking industry and would have avoided our current financial crisis; some 4000 of our killed military men and women would be alive; over to 35,000 wounded Americans would be whole; we would have been leaders in the environmental movement; we would be in the middle of a green technology boom fueling a huge expansion of our economy and stopping our dependence on foreign oil, and our health-care system would be reformed.
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They (as in their blogger Kyle) knocked it out of the park with The Religious Right's New Demand: Stop Calling Us the Religious Right :

If the phrase "Religious Right" has negative connotations, it probably stems primarily from the fact that the people who have traditionally represented the Religious Right have caused it to, you know, have negative connotations.

When people like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson go on television and blame the 9/11 attacks on "pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People For the American Way, [and] all of them who have tried to secularize America," that is the sort of thing that tends to create negative impressions about the Religious Right.

And even if they were called "socially conservative evangelicals," this type of rhetoric would still create negative impressions about the term "socially conservative evangelicals" ... and then "socially conservative evangelicals" would be telling everyone to stop calling them "socially conservative evangelicals."

You see, it is not the term that it is problem - it is the Religious Right's agenda and rhetoric.
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Skepticism about Palin has been growing and for a good reason.

I've watched the segment where Sarah Palin talks about Roe vs. Wade and I have to tell you, I think it is one of the most insightful commentaries to come out of her mouth. I think she did a really good job at sounding level headed.

Yet listen to it very closely and what you can hear is an extremist taking her political views for a little mainstream spin and, fortunately for us, coming short.

So let me back track here a bit and go back to and issue that popped up a few weeks ago : Under then Mayor Palin, Wassilla was one of a handful of cities in Alaska that charged victims for rape kits. And what has been most astounding about this policy is Palin's response to the allegations : She claims to have not know about the practice. This from a woman that was voted into office in Wassilla by less than 7,000 votes.
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from Talk to Action

As Flip Benham's Operation Save America prepares to besiege the same Birmingham, Alabama clinic bombed by Eric Rudolph, veteran associates of the underground terrorist network calling itself the Army of God prepare to memorialize assassin Paul Hill (left) — complete with a reenactment of the shotgun murder that took the lives of Dr. John Britton and his escort, James Barrett.

Events like these are intended to remind abortion providers that there is a violent underground. But they should also remind the rest of society that there is an armed wing of theocratic activism, to which most turn a blind eye. — Frederick Clarkson

Many also turn a blind eye to the fact that people such as these — "the underbelly of the Christian right ... as scary as anything that ever dwelled in a Tora Bora cave" — have influential associates in some very high places.
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from Talk to Action

From the March 18 lead editorial in the Palm Beach Post.

To have fewer abortions, stop subsidizing the lies

Public money should not pay for fear-mongering 'crisis pregnancy centers' that peddle lies about fetal development, contraception and abortion.

Florida, like the federal government, spends millions each year supporting such centers, many of which are run by religious zealots who see abstinence-only as the only alternative to abortion and for whom scientific facts do not matter.
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If reducing abortion is the goal, avoiding unwanted pregnancy is the way to reach that goal. That means investing in centers and schools that provide unbiased, medically accurate, comprehensive information about the benefits of delaying sexual intercourse and the availability of contraception to avoid sexually transmitted diseases and unwanted pregnancy. Investing in fear and lies guarantees only more unwanted pregnancies and abortions.

Women deserve much more than they're getting from state governments controlled by the religious right, and several Texas Democrats in the 80th Legislature are providing a template for making that happen — in our state and all the others.
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