CHRISTIAN CONSERVATIVES' BAD JOKE (Silence of the sheep)

[ProSense]

11.02.06

CHRISTIAN CONSERVATIVES' BAD JOKE:

I noticed that our friends at places like RedState and The Corner haven't had a lot to say about allegations that conservative evangelical leader Ted Haggard paid a male escort for sex over the past three years. Then I realized this story hasn't gotten much play because it doesn't involve a poorly delivered joke. So here goes: If you study hard, do your homework, lead a moral life, try to practice what you preach, you can do well. And if you don't, you end up as the pastor of a mega-church in Colorado, the head of a major grassroots evangelical organization, a prominent adviser to the president, and, allegedly, a breathtaking hypocrite.

I'll be here all week, folks.

--Noam Scheiber

[Ian David]

1. ROFL!!!!

That was my best laugh all day!

THANKS!

[Democrafty]

2. PERFECT! n/t

[Hepburn]

3. K&R

LMAO!!! :rofl:

[enid602]

4. a rack

Well, given Haggard's preferences, I seriously doubt he'll be anywhere near 'a rack' soon.

[DeSwiss]

5. n/t

[Dosaybe]

6. The Kerry story is a canary to check for media toxicity for Dems.

you gave me the idea that we could look at the cable news networks willingness to repeat ad nauseum the Kerry story
as a measure of the media's pro-republican bias.
How could they repeat that junk
and ignore Laura Bush's trashing of Michael j. Fox, Haggard, Iraq's deadliest month, the conviction of Bob NEy and his connection with Help america Vote act and taking bribes from Diebold thru Abramoff, etc

[globalvillage]

7. Vote #5

Thanks. That's awesome.

[stevedeshazer]

8. K & ARRRRrrr!

:)

[Joanne98]

9. Here's a Harper's article about the bastard...

Soldiers of Christ I
Inside America's most powerful megachurch with Pastor Ted Haggard
Posted on Thursday, November 2, 2006. Originally from May 2005. By Jeff Sharlet.
Sources

Jesus, 1871

They are drawn as if by magnetic forces; they speak of Colorado Springs, home to the greatest concentration of fundamentalist Christian activist groups in American history, both as a last stand and as a kind of utopia in the making. They say it is new and unique and precious, embattled by enemies, and also that it is “traditional,” a blueprint for what everybody wants, and envied by enemies. The city itself is unspectacular, a grid of wide western avenues lined with squat, gray and beige box buildings, only a handful of them taller than a dozen stories. Local cynics point out that if you put Colorado Springs on a truck and carted it to Nebraska, it would make Omaha look lovely. But the architecture is not what draws Christians looking for clean living. The mountains help, but there are other mountain towns. What Colorado Springs offers, ultimately, is a story.

Lori Rose is from Minnesota and heard rumors about this holy city when she lived on an Air Force base near Washington, D.C. Her husband isn't a Christian, refuses Jesus, looks at things he shouldn't; but she has found a church to attend without him and joined a marriage study group there. Ron Poelstra came from Los Angeles. Now he volunteers at his church, selling his pastor's books on “free-market theology” after services. His two teenage boys stand behind him, display models for the benefits of faith. L.A., Ron says, would have eaten them up: the gangs. Adam Taylor, now a pastor, grew up in Westchester County, an heir to the Bergdorf Goodman fortune, the son of artists and writers. In Colorado Springs he learned the Bible the hard way, each word a nail pounded into sin.

The story they found in Colorado is about newness: new houses, new roads, new stores. And about oldness, imagined: what is thought to be the traditional way of life, families as they were before the culture wars, after the World Wars, which is to say, during the brief, Cold War moment when America was a nation of single-breadwinner nuclear families.

Crime, of course, looms over this story. Not the actual facts of it—the burglary rate in and around Colorado Springs exceeds that in New York City and Los Angeles—but the idea of crime: a faith in the absence of it. And of politics, too: Colorado Springs' evangelicals believe they live without it, in a carved-out space for civility and for like-minded dedication to common-sense principles. Even pollution plays a part: Christian conservatives there believe that they breathe cleaner air, live on ground untainted by the satanic fires of nineteenth-century industry—despite the smog that collects against the foothills of the Rockies and the cyanide, from a century of mining, that is leaching into the aquifers and mountain streams.

http://www.harpers.org/SoldiersOfChrist.html

Call it the NOVEMBER SURPRISE!

GAWD BLESS REAL CHRISTIANS!

[ProSense]

10. Thanks! The best part:

Pastor Ted, who talks to President George W. Bush or his advisers every Monday, is a handsome forty-eight-year-old Indianan, most comfortable in denim. He likes to say that his only disagreement with the President is automotive; Bush drives a Ford pickup, whereas Pastor Ted loves his Chevy. In addition to New Life, Pastor Ted presides over the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE), whose 45,000 churches and 30 million believers make up the nation's most powerful religious lobbying group, and also over a smaller network of his own creation, the Association of Life-Giving Churches, 300 or so congregations modeled on New Life's “free market” approach to the divine.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=364&topic_id=2563990&mesg_id=2563990