"I blame Congress over the last 50 to 100 years for not standing up and taking its responsibility given to it by the Constitution. The reason the judiciary has been able to impose a separation of church and state that's nowhere in the Constitution is that Congress didn't stop them. The reason we had judicial review is because Congress didn't stop them. The reason we had a right to privacy is because Congress didn't stop them."
Mr. Hurt: Have you ever crossed the line of ethical behavior in terms of dealing with lobbyists, your use of government authority or with fundraising?
Mr. DeLay: Ever is a very strong word.
Ralph Reed's Zeal for Lobbying Is Shaking His Political Faithful
By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK
and PHILIP SHENON
Published: April 18, 2005
ATLANTA - In 30 years of culture wars, few conservative Christian standard bearers have traveled further in American politics than Ralph Reed. The former head of the Christian Coalition has been a high-priced communications consultant, a top Bush campaign adviser, chairman of Georgia's Republican Party and now a candidate for lieutenant governor here.
Campaigning in early April at a Republican district meeting outside Atlanta, Mr. Reed talked of his small-town roots in northeast Georgia.
"I'm not going to forget where I came from," he said. "I am not going to forget what I stand for."
But as he completes his journey from Christian advocate to professional politician, Mr. Reed, 43, finds himself carrying some baggage: his ties to an old friend, the Republican lobbyist Jack Abramoff.
In Washington, federal investigations of Mr. Abramoff, a close ally of Tom DeLay, the House majority leader, have revealed that Mr. Abramoff paid Mr. Reed's consulting firm more than $4 million to help organize Christian opposition to Indian casinos in Texas and Louisiana - money that came from other Indians with rival casinos.
Mr. Reed declined to comment for this article; he has said publicly that he did not know that casino owners were paying for his services and that he has never deviated from his moral opposition to gambling. But the episode is a new blemish on the boyish face that once personified the rise of evangelical Christians to political power in America.
Some of Mr. Reed's past patrons - including the Rev. Pat Robertson, the Christian broadcaster who set Mr. Reed on the national stage by hiring him to run the Christian Coalition - say his work with Mr. Abramoff's Indian casino clients raises questions about how he has balanced his personal ambitions with his Christian principles.
"You know that song about the Rhinestone Cowboy, 'There's been a load of compromising on the road to my horizon,' " Mr. Robertson said. "The Bible says you can't serve God and Mammon."
In Georgia, Mr. Reed's rival in the Republican primary is playing up his links with Indian casinos to try to revive longstanding criticism from conservative Christian purists that Mr. Reed has sometimes put his own ambitions ahead of their goals. At the meeting near Atlanta, for example, his opponents were doing their best to sow doubts in the crowd.
"The Christian Coalition, they may have some shady background," said Robert McIntyre, the treasurer of the Spalding County Republican Party, who still wore a Ralph Reed sticker on his lapel. "I was being loyal to Ralph Reed, but since now some things have come up, I need to listen. I am now wavering."
Others argue, however, that shaking soiled hands is sometimes the price of making an impact.
"Thirty or 40 years ago, the people who you would see as the spokesmen for traditional values kind of things were people who were outsiders railing against the system," said Kelly Shackelford, a prominent Christian conservative and president of the Free Market Foundation in Texas. "And if they didn't get a hundred percent of what they believe in, they weren't going to play." Mr. Reed led a new wave of Christian conservatives, Mr. Shackelford said, who "understand that you have to be part of the system, and you can't sit outside and throw rocks at everybody."
Bill Paxon, a former Congressman turned lobbyist who worked closely with Mr. Reed on Republican Congressional campaigns, said Mr. Reed was a man of many dimensions: a heartfelt Christian, a limited-government conservative and a canny political street fighter. "He was always all of the above," Mr. Paxon said.
Unlike most conservative Christian leaders, Mr. Reed was drawn to Republican politics first and evangelical faith later. He arrived in Washington as a 19-year-old Senate intern in 1981 and became executive director of the College Republican National Committee two years later, under Mr. Abramoff as chairman.
Mr. Abramoff was "a conservative firebrand," Mr. Reed wrote in his book "Active Faith." The men became so close that Mr. Reed sometimes slept on Mr. Abramoff's couch and later introduced Mr. Abramoff to his future wife.
Ralph Reed's Zeal for Lobbying Is Shaking His Political Faithful
Published: April 18, 2005
(Page 2 of 3)
The same year he joined the College Republicans, Mr. Reed started attending an evangelical church and became born again. "I was a bare-knuckled political operative," Mr. Reed wrote in his book. "In the rough and tumble of politics, I began to sense the need for spiritual roots."
In 1988, Mr. Robertson hired Mr. Reed to build the Christian Coalition from his campaign organization. Mr. Reed became a hero to evangelical Christians who saw him as a fresh-faced, telegenic spokesman who could defend their views to the secular world of Sunday-morning talk shows and weekly magazines.
But he also boasted at times of working "under the cover of night" to mobilize grass-roots support. He honed his skills at organizing phone banks and direct-mail campaigns, and former associates say he talked in the cynical lingo of political operatives, referring to a candidate as "the body" and about fund-raising "dough."
"There is a duality to Ralph, the godly rhetoric and the hardball political operative, and what he says with his godly hat on is very different than with his political hat on," said Marshall Wittmann, who worked as legislative director of the Christian Coalition but is now a senior fellow at the centrist-liberal Democratic Leadership Council. "There are very few guardrails for Ralph when it comes to politics."
During his years at the Christian Coalition, his opponents and some evangelical Christians, including Dr. James C. Dobson, founder of Focus on the Family, sometimes argued that Mr. Reed put Republican political or economic goals ahead of social conservative policies. The Internal Revenue Service declined to renew the Christian Coalition's tax-exempt status as a nonpartisan group in 1999, concluding after a 10-year review that it had worked too closely with the Republican Party.
Soon after he left the organization in 1997, it nearly imploded as financial problems came to light.
At the time, Mr. Reed said he was starting a political consulting and communications firm "because I know there are hundreds of candidates out there who share the kind of values that I do." But his firm, Century Strategies, also took on deep-pocket corporate clients, including Verizon, Enron and Microsoft.
Some Christian conservatives were surprised. "Most of us in the movement are where we are because we believe in what we are doing," said the Rev. Don Wildmon, founder of the American Family Association. "I don't know any of us trying to get rich."
Some of Mr. Reed's efforts for clients soon drew criticism. While he was working as an adviser to George W. Bush's campaign in 2000, he also was working for Microsoft on a campaign to influence Mr. Bush and other presidential candidates about the company's antitrust battles. Mr. Reed later apologized for creating the appearance of a conflict.
In Georgia, some conservative Christians were troubled by Mr. Reed's consulting work for Mitch Skandalakis, a losing candidate for lieutenant governor who ran advertisements portraying one rival in racial stereotypes and another as a drug addict. (Mr. Reed said afterward that he opposed racially divisive tactics.)
"There are questions as to whether Mitch Skandalakis lined up well with the viewpoints of social and economic conservatives," said Randy Hicks, president of the Georgia Family Council. "And Ralph taking him on was not well received by an awful lot of people."
By 1999, Mr. Abramoff, who was well known as a lobbyist for Indian casinos, had hired Mr. Reed's firm to help organize antigambling campaigns in Texas and Louisiana.
Lisa Baron, a spokeswoman for Mr. Reed's firm, said that Mr. Abramoff had told Mr. Reed that the payment for his consulting services came from a "broad-based coalition" of antigambling groups. "We did not know who his specific clients were or their specific interests," Ms. Baron said.
In fact, Mr. Abramoff had recruited Mr. Reed to help the Coushatta Indians of Louisiana shut down or block casinos operated or proposed by the Tiguas, in neighboring Texas, or the Jena Band of Choctaws, in Louisiana, according to disclosures by the Senate Indian Affairs Committee, which is investigating $82 million in lobbying fees that Mr. Abramoff and his partner, Michael Scanlon, reaped from tribes.
Ralph Reed's Zeal for Lobbying Is Shaking His Political Faithful
Published: April 18, 2005
(Page 3 of 3)
E-mail messages disclosed by the committee last year offered some unflattering views of Mr. Reed and Mr. Abramoff. In one, Mr. Reed forwarded potentially damaging information about Indian contributions to a politician supporting the casinos, saying, "We are getting this in the water with the right people."
In another, he called supportive legislators his "tigers." And he boasted of how he had gotten "our pastors all riled up" to push John Cornyn, who was then Texas attorney general and is now a senator, to close the Tigua casino. Mr. Cornyn, however, already had opposed gambling, according to a spokesman.
After a court ruled against the Tiguas' casino on Feb. 11, 2002, Mr. Abramoff wrote to Mr. Reed in an e-mail message: "I wish those moronic Tiguas were smarter in their political contributions. I'd love us to get our mitts on that moolah."
Ms. Baron, Mr. Reed's spokeswoman, said that after the cost of direct mail, phone banks and radio advertising, his firm kept only 15 percent to 20 percent of the roughly $4 million it received from Mr. Abramoff between 1999 and 2002.
"Ralph is in the casino-closing business," she said, "and we ran a successful grass-roots campaign to close casinos and prevent casinos from operating."
Seven days after the "moolah" message, however, Mr. Abramoff sent the Tigua tribe an elaborate proposal that it pay him to help reopen the casino. Ms. Baron said that Mr. Reed had "no knowledge" of Mr. Abramoff's plan to seek business on both sides of that casino fight.
In the Christian conservative world that forms Mr. Reed's most natural political base, many say they accept his explanation. "He was betrayed by a friend who lied to him," said Dr. Richard Land, president of the ethics and religious liberties commission of the Southern Baptist Convention.
Tom Minnery, a vice president of Focus on the Family, said he did not know the facts. He said the group had often criticized Republican politicians, including Mr. DeLay, for taking money from gambling interests. Of Mr. Reed, Mr. Minnery said, "We wish he wouldn't have done that."
Mr. Reed's primary opponent, State Senator Casey Cagle, criticized him last week for inviting at least three lobbyists whose firms have worked for gambling concerns to a Washington fund-raiser tomorrow.
"Ralph has a lot of things he has got to answer for, like this gambling situation," said Joel McElhannon, a consultant to Mr. Cagle's campaign. "It strains believability that somebody hands him $4.2 million and he doesn't know where that money came from."
Among the Republican Party stalwarts at the meeting near Atlanta, though, many were eager to snap pictures of themselves and their families with Mr. Reed. In his speech, he omitted references to God, prayer, abortion, obscenity or the Christian Coalition, instead echoing President Bush's inaugural themes about spreading democracy abroad.
"We are so proud of him when he gets on television because he speaks for people like me, true conservative Republicans, and it is such a breath of fresh air to see someone who can go toe to toe with the people who don't," said Jean Studdard, a local Republican official.
"We really haven't heard anything about the Indian gambling thing yet," she added. "Of course, we want to hear Ralph's side of the story."
David D. Kirkpatrick reported from Atlanta for this article, and Philip Shenon from Washington.
The atheist
Evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins explains why God is a delusion, religion is a virus, and America has slipped back into the Dark Ages.
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By Gordy Slack
April 28, 2005 | Richard Dawkins is the world's most famous out-of-the-closet living atheist. He is also the world's most controversial evolutionary biologist. Publication of his 1976 book, "The Selfish Gene," thrust Dawkins into the limelight as the handsome, irascible, human face of scientific reductionism. The book provoked everything from outrage to glee by arguing that natural selection worked its creative powers only through genes, not species or individuals. Humans are merely "gene survival machines," he asserted in the book.
Dawkins stuck to his theme but expanded his territory in such subsequent books as "The Blind Watchmaker," "Unweaving the Rainbow" and "Climbing Mount Improbable." His recent work, "The Ancestor's Tale," traces human lineage back through time, stopping to ponder important forks in the evolutionary road.
Given his outspoken defense of Darwin, and natural selection as the force of life, Dawkins has assumed a new role: the religious right's Public Enemy No. 1. Yet Dawkins doesn't shy from controversy, nor does he suffer fools gladly. He recently met a minister who was on the opposite side of a British political debate. When the minister put out his hand, Dawkins kept his hands at his side and said, "You, sir, are an ignorant bigot."
Currently, Dawkins is the Charles Simonyi Professor of the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University, a position created for him in 1995 by Charles Simonyi, a Microsoft millionaire. Earlier this year, Dawkins signed an agreement with British television to make a documentary about the destructive role of religion in modern history, tentatively titled "The Root of All Evil."
I met Dawkins in late March at the Atheist Alliance International annual conference in Los Angeles, where he presented the alliance's top honor, the Richard Dawkins Prize, to magicians Penn and Teller. During our conversation in my hotel room, Dawkins was as gracious as he was punctiliously dressed in a crisp white shirt and soft blazer.
Once again, evolution is under attack. Are there any questions at all about its validity?
It's often said that because evolution happened in the past, and we didn't see it happen, there is no direct evidence for it. That, of course, is nonsense. It's rather like a detective coming on the scene of a crime, obviously after the crime has been committed, and working out what must have happened by looking at the clues that remain. In the story of evolution, the clues are a billionfold.
There are clues from the distribution of DNA codes throughout the animal and plant kingdoms, of protein sequences, of morphological characters that have been analyzed in great detail. Everything fits with the idea that we have here a simple branching tree. The distribution of species on islands and continents throughout the world is exactly what you'd expect if evolution was a fact. The distribution of fossils in space and in time are exactly what you would expect if evolution were a fact. There are millions of facts all pointing in the same direction and no facts pointing in the wrong direction.
British scientist J.B.S. Haldane, when asked what would constitute evidence against evolution, famously said, "Fossil rabbits in the Precambrian." They've never been found. Nothing like that has ever been found. Evolution could be disproved by such facts. But all the fossils that have been found are in the right place. Of course there are plenty of gaps in the fossil record. There's nothing wrong with that. Why shouldn't there be? We're lucky to have fossils at all. But no fossils have been found in the wrong place, such as to disprove the fact of evolution. Evolution is a fact.
Still, so many people resist believing in evolution. Where does the resistance come from?
It comes, I'm sorry to say, from religion. And from bad religion. You won't find any opposition to the idea of evolution among sophisticated, educated theologians. It comes from an exceedingly retarded, primitive version of religion, which unfortunately is at present undergoing an epidemic in the United States. Not in Europe, not in Britain, but in the United States.
My American friends tell me that you are slipping towards a theocratic Dark Age. Which is very disagreeable for the very large number of educated, intelligent and right-thinking people in America. Unfortunately, at present, it's slightly outnumbered by the ignorant, uneducated people who voted Bush in.
But the broad direction of history is toward enlightenment, and so I think that what America is going through at the moment will prove to be a temporary reverse. I think there is great hope for the future. My advice would be, Don't despair, these things pass.
You delve into agnosticism in "The Ancestor's Tale." How does it differ from atheism?
It's said that the only rational stance is agnosticism because you can neither prove nor disprove the existence of the supernatural creator. I find that a weak position. It is true that you can't disprove anything but you can put a probability value on it. There's an infinite number of things that you can't disprove: unicorns, werewolves, and teapots in orbit around Mars. But we don't pay any heed to them unless there is some positive reason to think that they do exist.
Believing in God is like believing in a teapot orbiting Mars?
Yes. For a long time it seemed clear to just about everybody that the beauty and elegance of the world seemed to be prima facie evidence for a divine creator. But the philosopher David Hume already realized three centuries ago that this was a bad argument. It leads to an infinite regression. You can't statistically explain improbable things like living creatures by saying that they must have been designed because you're still left to explain the designer, who must be, if anything, an even more statistically improbable and elegant thing. Design can never be an ultimate explanation for anything. It can only be a proximate explanation. A plane or a car is explained by a designer but that's because the designer himself, the engineer, is explained by natural selection.
Those who embrace "intelligent design" -- the idea that living cells are too complex to have been created by nature alone -- say evolution isn't incompatible with the existence of God.
There is just no evidence for the existence of God. Evolution by natural selection is a process that works up from simple beginnings, and simple beginnings are easy to explain. The engineer or any other living thing is difficult to explain -- but it is explicable by evolution by natural selection. So the relevance of evolutionary biology to atheism is that evolutionary biology gives us the only known mechanism whereby the illusion of design, or apparent design, could ever come into the universe anywhere.
So why do we insist on believing in God?
From a biological point of view, there are lots of different theories about why we have this extraordinary predisposition to believe in supernatural things. One suggestion is that the child mind is, for very good Darwinian reasons, susceptible to infection the same way a computer is. In order to be useful, a computer has to be programmable, to obey whatever it's told to do. That automatically makes it vulnerable to computer viruses, which are programs that say, "Spread me, copy me, pass me on." Once a viral program gets started, there is nothing to stop it.
Similarly, the child brain is preprogrammed by natural selection to obey and believe what parents and other adults tell it. In general, it's a good thing that child brains should be susceptible to being taught what to do and what to believe by adults. But this necessarily carries the down side that bad ideas, useless ideas, waste of time ideas like rain dances and other religious customs, will also be passed down the generations. The child brain is very susceptible to this kind of infection. And it also spreads sideways by cross infection when a charismatic preacher goes around infecting new minds that were previously uninfected.
You've said that raising children in a religious tradition may even be a form of abuse.
What I think may be abuse is labeling children with religious labels like Catholic child and Muslim child. I find it very odd that in our civilization we're quite happy to speak of a Catholic child that is 4 years old or a Muslim of child that is 4, when these children are much too young to know what they think about the cosmos, life and morality. We wouldn't dream of speaking of a Keynesian child or a Marxist child. And yet, for some reason we make a privileged exception of religion. And, by the way, I think it would also be abuse to talk about an atheist child.
You are working on a new book tentatively called "The God Delusion." Can you explain it?
A delusion is something that people believe in despite a total lack of evidence. Religion is scarcely distinguishable from childhood delusions like the "imaginary friend" and the bogeyman under the bed. Unfortunately, the God delusion possesses adults, and not just a minority of unfortunates in an asylum. The word "delusion" also carries negative connotations, and religion has plenty of those.
What are its negative connotations?
A delusion that encourages belief where there is no evidence is asking for trouble. Disagreements between incompatible beliefs cannot be settled by reasoned argument because reasoned argument is drummed out of those trained in religion from the cradle. Instead, disagreements are settled by other means which, in extreme cases, inevitably become violent. Scientists disagree among themselves but they never fight over their disagreements. They argue about evidence or go out and seek new evidence. Much the same is true of philosophers, historians and literary critics.
But you don't do that if you just know your holy book is the God-written truth and the other guy knows that his incompatible scripture is too. People brought up to believe in faith and private revelation cannot be persuaded by evidence to change their minds. No wonder religious zealots throughout history have resorted to torture and execution, to crusades and jihads, to holy wars and purges and pogroms, to the Inquisition and the burning of witches.
What are the dark sides of religion today?
Terrorism in the Middle East, militant Zionism, 9/11, the Northern Ireland "troubles," genocide, which turns out to be "credicide" in Yugoslavia, the subversion of American science education, oppression of women in Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, and the Roman Catholic Church, which thinks you can't be a valid priest without testicles.
Fifty years ago, philosophers like Bertrand Russell felt that the religious worldview would fade as science and reason emerged. Why hasn't it?
That trend toward enlightenment has indeed continued in Europe and Britain. It just has not continued in the U.S., and not in the Islamic world. We're seeing a rather unholy alliance between the burgeoning theocracy in the U.S. and its allies, the theocrats in the Islamic world. They are fighting the same battle: Christian on one side, Muslim on the other. The very large numbers of people in the United States and in Europe who don't subscribe to that worldview are caught in the middle.
Actually, holy alliance would be a better phrase. Bush and bin Laden are really on the same side: the side of faith and violence against the side of reason and discussion. Both have implacable faith that they are right and the other is evil. Each believes that when he dies he is going to heaven. Each believes that if he could kill the other, his path to paradise in the next world would be even swifter. The delusional "next world" is welcome to both of them. This world would be a much better place without either of them.
Does religion contribute to the violence of Islamic extremists? Christian extremists?
Of course it does. From the cradle, they are brought up to revere martyrs and to believe they have a fast track to heaven. With their mother's milk they imbibe hatred of heretics, apostates and followers of rival faiths.
I don't wish to suggest it is doctrinal disputes that are motivating the individual soldiers who are doing the killing. What I do suggest is that in places like Northern Ireland, religion was the only available label by which people could indulge in the human weakness for us-or-them wars. When a Protestant murders a Catholic or a Catholic murders a Protestant, they're not playing out doctrinal disagreements about transubstantiation.
What is going on is more like a vendetta. It was one of their lot's grandfathers who killed one of our lot's grandfathers, and so we're getting our revenge. The "their lot" and "our lot" is only defined by religion. In other parts of the world it might be defined by color, or by language, but in so many parts of the world it isn't, it's defined by religion. That's true of the conflicts among Croats and the Serbs and Bosnians -- that's all about religion as labels.
The grotesque massacres in India at the time of partition were between Hindus and Muslims. There was nothing else to distinguish them, they were racially the same. They only identified themselves as "us" and the others as "them" by the fact that some of them were Hindus and some of them were Muslims. That's what the Kashmir dispute is all about. So, yes, I would defend the view that religion is an extremely potent label for hostility. That has always been true and it continues to be true to this day.
How would we be better off without religion?
We'd all be freed to concentrate on the only life we are ever going to have. We'd be free to exult in the privilege -- the remarkable good fortune -- that each one of us enjoys through having been being born. An astronomically overwhelming majority of the people who could be born never will be. You are one of the tiny minority whose number came up. Be thankful that you have a life, and forsake your vain and presumptuous desire for a second one. The world would be a better place if we all had this positive attitude to life. It would also be a better place if morality was all about doing good to others and refraining from hurting them, rather than religion's morbid obsession with private sin and the evils of sexual enjoyment.
Are there environmental costs of a religious worldview?
There are many religious points of view where the conservation of the world is just as important as it is to scientists. But there are certain religious points of view where it is not. In those apocalyptic religions, people actually believe that because they read some dopey prophesy in the book of Revelation, the world is going to come to an end some time soon. People who believe that say, "We don't need to bother about conserving forests or anything else because the end of the world is coming anyway." A few decades ago one would simply have laughed at that. Today you can't laugh. These people are in power.
Left Behind: Liberals Examine the "Religious Far Right"
Some of those aforementioned liberal activist groups held a conference in New York City this past weekend to study the weird creatures (to them at least) called "conservative Christians." The Conference, "Examining the Real Agenda of the Religious Far Right," was sponsored by the City University of New York and supported by People for the American Way, Americans United for the Separation of Church and State, The Nation and The Village Voice. Attendees to the conference were regaled as speakers took a look at Christian conservative with the same attitude as renowned primatologist Jane Goodall might examine a tribe of apes. If you doubt the conference had an anti-religious tone here are the titles of some of the "discussions": Fundamentalism: The Fear and the Rage, Learning about the Christian Right, and What in the World to Do, and Christian Jihad. As reported by the Washington Times there appears to have been at least one rational speaker present, Chip Berlet, senior analyst at Political Research Associates. "Actually," Berlet was saying on Friday afternoon, "I don't like those labels at all, calling people 'religious extremists' or 'radical religious right.' You can't have a conversation when you start that way. I want to talk to these people. I want to engage them. ... I want to have a real discourse about religion and politics." If more people, on both the left and right of religious politics, behaved as Mr. Berlet suggests, true dialogue on the role of religion in public life might be possible.
07 May 2005
Bruce Simat, a genetics specialist from a small college in St Paul, Minnesota, wants to make one thing clear about his sceptical views on evolution. "First of all," he insists, "I'm not a cheesehead."
His defensiveness is understandable, given everything that follows in his presentation to the Kansas State Board of Education. Like almost every other witness attending a series of special hearings this week in Topeka, the Kansas state capital, Dr Simat thinks that Darwinian evolution is not a scientific theory so much as an expression of dogma -- a sort of blind faith among mainstream scientists predicated on a rejection of God as the creator of the Earth.
Dr Simat has come to Topeka to bolster the cause of Intelligent Design, a newish, relatively sophisticated variant on the old creationist theme that seeks to overturn 150 years of scientific orthodoxy and give God - or whatever else you want to call the eponymous Intelligent Designer - pride of place in the debate on the origins of humanity.
Luckily for him, he has a receptive audience. The chair of the Board of Education, Steve Abrams, is a Young Earth creationist, which is to say he believes the world was created by the Almighty no more than 6,000 years ago. The two other board members selected to attend the hearings are also Christian conservatives, who won election to their posts by pledging to insert prayer and religious principles into America's ruggedly secular public education system.
Together, the threesome is charged with approving a new set of science standards for Kansas schools. To call it a contentious issue would be a vast understatement. As far as secular groups like Kansas Citizens for Science are concerned, it is like handing control of a blood bank over to a cabal of vampires.
Religion and Politics Clash
Religion and politics clash over a local church's declaration that Democrats are not welcome.
East Waynesville Baptist asked nine members to leave. Now 40 more have left the church in protest. Former members say Pastor Chan Chandler gave them the ultimatum, saying if they didn't support George Bush, they should resign or repent. The minister declined an interview with News 13. But he did say "the actions were not politically motivated." There are questions about whether the bi-laws were followed when the members were thrown out.
(posted at 7:30am, 5/6/05)
