Posted on 08/06/2012 12:35:49 PM PDT by CHRISTIAN DIARIST
Mike Lofgren used to be a Republican. Then he “retired” last year – so he claims – from a staff job on the U.S. Senate Budget Committee doing grunt work for GOP lawmakers.
Nowadays, Lofgren gets paid to bash the party of Lincoln (and Reagan), which has been taken over by the “religious right,” he laments, in his just-published, oh-so-cleverly-titled book, “The Party is Over.”
“Religious cranks ceased to be a minor political nuisance in this country in the 1970s,” writes Lofgren, “and grew into a major element of the Republican rank and file.” Today, he reckons, these “religious fundamentalists” make up the GOP’s “largest single voting bloc.”
It’s because of “the rise of religious right,” claims Lofgren, and “its insertion into the public sphere by the Republican party” that “(a)ll around us now is a prevailing anti-intellectualism and hostility to science.”
The author’s supposed proof: That “the American people poll more like Iranians or Nigerians than Europeans or Canadians on questions of evolution, scriptural inerrancy, the presence of angels and demons, and so forth.”
So, in Lofgren’s mind, only the 15 percent of Americans who, according to polls, believe that man transmogrified from monkey are receptive to science.
And only the 17 percent who, according to polls, dismiss the Bible as a book of fables and legends, and the 14 percent who refuse to accept that there is spiritual warfare going on between angels and demons are intellectual.
Lofgren’s views are those of the secularist left – with which the supposed Republican clearly identifies – which is culpable for much of the social decay this nation has suffered over the past half-century.
That includes the devaluation of marriage, the breakdown in families, the slaughter of the unborn, the decline in educational achievement, the increase in violent crime and the coarsening of our popular culture.
The rise of the religious right that began in the 1970s, that Lofgren decries, actually is an equal and opposite reaction by God-fearing Americans to the misguided public policy to which the secular left has condemned this country over the past half-century.
From the presidential reign of Lyndon Johnson to Jimmy Carter to Bill Clinton to, now, Barack Obama.
Author Lofgren warns that the religious right aims to create an American theocracy. Its leaders “would drag us back,” he fears, “to the Salem witch trials.”
But that’s not the America the religious right envisions.
It’s a nation that honors God, defends traditional marriage, promotes family values and holds sacred the sanctity of life.
It isn’t that the Religous Right took over, its that God left both parties in the 1960s
Bye Bye!
Mr. Lofgren may despise Christianity - which is certainly his prerogative - but what would be the ideas of his apparent dream party: an anti-Christian GOP?
He seems to be lacking vision.
I don’t suppose that he’s particularly concerned that the Democrat Party has been taken over by Marxists.
When that pesky Jesus came to the Temple back in ‘32 and started turning tables, I’ll bet the establishment said the same thing.
"Romney Promptly Offers Him Prime Time Speaking Slot at Republican Convention, Short-Lists Him as Potential Running Mate."
The 2010 mid terms were a little inconvenience for this genius’s thesis.
Otherwise why would he take out after the religious conservatives who tend to vote Republican (when they vote). A real quick estimate puts them at no more than 40% of the party ~ when they are identified as Social Conservatives. That's about the voting strength of African-Americans inside the Democrat party.
Sure, it's a lot, and they are going to have their own representatives up at the bargaining tables, but they don't run things.
Lofgren could be counting the Roman Catholic faction (a relatively new one for Republicans) in with the Protestants, but that would mislead any analyst if he imagined they all thought the same way.
Clue ~ Catholics and Protestants in America are not interchangeably identical. Nor do they want to be!
My 2 cents worth is that Lofgren is not going to be a popular writer.
bleeech.
I think Ralph Reed recently totally sold out to the Mittbots, so you might want to check WHICH lord he’s working for these days.
This is typical of who we have working as staffers for Republicans in Congress. This is why conservatives have so little power. This guy just happened to come out and admit it after he retired. The Congressmen and Senators change, but the staffers remain constant.
Believers in God are not hostile to discoveries by science of God-given natural laws.
Doesn't sound like he's a Republican anymore, in name or in any other way.
His target isn't the Religious Right, it's the Republican Party as a whole, particularly the backbenchers in Congress.
Anything to sell a book, I guess. There's a good rebuttal of his article over here.
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