Note that the article say Carter's book has "750,000 copies in print" rather than "750,000 copies sold". Are there truckloads of the book sitting somewhere?
Carter is truely delussional if he thinks ANAYONE wants to hear what he has to say...Not even the Europeans care. They used him as an anti American cudgel to whach America.
Mr. Carter's book has sold nearly all of the 310,000 copies in its initial printing, said Mr. Rosenthal of Simon & Schuster, and the company has since pushed the number in circulation to 675,000. Mr. Carter has had best-selling books before, most notably his 2001 memoir, "An Hour Before Daylight," which sold 300,000 hardcover copies.
******
In Our Endangered Values, Carter offers a personal consideration of "moral values" as they relate to the important issues of the day. He puts forward a passionate defense of separation of church and state (I don't remember him complaining about Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, John Kerry campaigning in churches), and a strong warning of where the country is heading as the lines between politics and rigid religious fundamentalism (like abortion & gay marriage) are blurred.
Now, he describes his own involvement and reactions to some disturbing societal trends that have taken place during the last few years. These changes involve both the religious and the political worlds as they have increasingly become intertwined (like having Jesse Jackson "counsel" Bill Clinton during Monicagate while having his own affair), and include some of the most crucial and controversial issues of the day -- frequently encapsulated under "moral values." (oral sex in the oval office doesn't count)
Many of these matters are under fierce debate. They include preemptive war, women's rights (abortion), terrorism, civil liberties (gay marriage), homosexuality, abortion, the death penalty, science and religion, environmental degradation (peanut farming), nuclear arsenals, America's global image (Castro & Chavez, Jimmy's buddies, don't like us), fundamentalism, and the melding of religion and politics (it's only allowed if the left, including Jimmy, does it).
SBC (Southern Baptist Convention) is a primary target of the former president’s harshest criticism in his latest book, “Our Endangered Values.”
Carter’s criticism of the conservative direction of the SBC is longstanding. In 1993, he and his wife publicly announced their allegiance with the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship (a breakaway group of liberals and moderates, formerly of the SBC but now stridently anti-SBC), and in 2000 he felt compelled to announce with fanfare once again his break with the SBC.
Despite his claim that the other members of his church agree with him about the SBC, his church, Maranatha Baptist Church in Plains, Georgia, continues to contribute financially to Southern Baptists’ cooperative missions, ministries and theological education.
ON ABORTION:
"I am convinced that every abortion is an unplanned tragedy, brought on by a combination of human errors,” he has stated, adding, “I have never believed that Jesus Christ would approve ... abortions.”
However, his public record doesn’t match his private beliefs.
While governor of Georgia, Carter publicly supported family planning programs that included abortion. Writing the forward, he also endorsed a book titled “Women in Need” advocating a woman’s right to abortion. As president, he organized the White House Conference on Families in 1979, which stated the right to abortion as a national priority. Finally, he hired Sarah Weddington as a White House staffer -- the lead attorney who argued for abortion in Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court case that made abortion legal.
ON HOMOSEXUALITY:
Carter having declared that he personally believes that marriage should be reserved for a man and a woman, while also publicly advocating civil unions for homosexuals.
In 1992, Carter served as the honorary co-chair of the Human Rights Campaign, a homosexual advocacy group. Not surprisingly, he believes that a marriage amendment to the U. S. Constitution is unnecessary. He has stated that homosexuality is a sin, but sees nothing wrong with a “Christian” homosexual being ordained. In fact, he compares the sin with adultery, but forgets that Jesus told the woman caught in adultery, "Neither do I condemn you; go and sin no more" (John 8:11, NKJV).
Moreover, he stated to the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship’s general assembly that homosexuality is one of several issues that “in God’s eyes fade into relative insignificance, as did circumcision in the first days of the early church.”
ON THE ORDINATION OF WOMEN:
In Southern Baptist life, only local churches have authority to ordain men and women to church office and the convention has not restricted churches in this action. Based on our understanding of the Bible, the majority of Southern Baptists strongly embrace women in ministry, but reserve pastoral leadership for men. Carter decries this democratically arrived at position as the primary reason he “decided to sever my ties” with the SBC.
ON THE SBC’S RECOGNITION OF THE COMPLIMENTARY ROLES OF HUSBAND AND WIFE:
Carter makes the outlandish claim that by encouraging women to submit to their husband’s "servant leadership," as taught in Scripture, conservative Christians somehow want to subjugate women like those in some Islamic nations.
In the article on the family in the SBC’s statement of faith, he apparently missed the language about “equal worth” of the husband and the wife before God, or the statement that the wife “being in the image of God as is her husband” is “thus equal to him.” He also ignored the charge to husbands that they should love their wives to the point of dying for them as Christ sacrificially loved the Church.
http://tinyurl.com/7bxab