Church Signs II: More Inflammatory Comments, Wherein Barak Obama is Associated With Satan and Rick Warren Proven a Decidedly Minority Voice

Late last week, Harrogate and Mommy PhD began a discussion about the fairness of Harrogate's play with church signs. In this discussion Rick Warren, a famous evangelical who uses his pulpit to stand for issues of social justice as opposed to the "red meat" political issues beloved by the GOP, figured centrally. In that discussion, too, Harrogate linked to a blog post by a blight of human skin named Kevin McCullough, who is "outraged" at Senator Barak Obama's appearance at Warren's congregation under the auspices of looking for solutions to the AIDS pandemic in Africa.

Today McCullough expanded his excoriation by going nationwide in print syndication,
once again nicely channeling The Rhetorical Situation whereby GOP dominance of over 60% of the evangelical vote is perpetrated. One can learn a lot by reading McCullough's article. That's why Harrogate links to it.

Some of Harrogate's favorite passages from this "argument":

By scriptural standards Rick Warren is to be bound by the biblical text and its teaching on morality. Obama would pursue and has pursued mass distribution of condoms. If you say to a society, as Uganda has, that the only way to be sure of not getting AIDS is through "abstinence until marriage" then they will be likely to believe you. (It's scientifically provable. And it explains Uganda's unique improvement on the African continent in numbers of people contracting the virus.) On the other hand if you say to a culture, as has happened in more than one African nation, "try abstinence - but if you can't remain abstinent then use a condom" what do you think the likely outcome will be?

and then

Barack Obama is likely to run for president in 2008 and speaking from the pulpit of one of America's most well known evangelical churches is likely to be footage that could be used over and over in trying to dissuade Christians from thinking about moral issues that real Christians truly feel concern for.

and then there's a very classy impetus for stalking:

It may be too late to alter a stubborn heart or mind at Saddleback Church, but the effort should at least be made. So I am encouraging you to do what my listeners have done for the past several days call Rick Warren and ask him why Barack Obama's evil worldview will be given the high honor of addressing the faithful. (949.609.8000 or info@saddleback.com)

(note McCullough isn't quite open enough to discourse to provide his own telephone number so that non-bigots who read his work can call him to remind him what a fucking dangerous moron he is).

But there you have it, Readers. Evangelicals in this country have earned the stereotype to which Harrogate's recent signs point. Majorities of them keep voting Republican, keep insisting that arcane passages from Leviticus are more important than the words and teachings of Christ himself, keep listening to douchebags like Dobson, Falwell, McCullough, and George W. Bush. So long as these numbers hold, the Rick Warrens of the world don't get to be held as representative of anything but a minority voice, no matter how "famous" they may otherwise be. Barbara Streisand is famous and widely beloved, too, but that doesn't make her worldview normative. Harrogate wishes such voices well, however, and holds out a shred of hope that perhaps someday it will be the McCulloughs that are seen for the drooling fanatics that they are, and the Warrens and Mommy PhD's as representative.