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For God's Sake
By Paul Krugman
The New York Times
Friday 13 April 2007
In 1981, Gary North, a leader of the Christian Reconstructionist movement -
the openly theocratic wing of the Christian right - suggested that the
movement could achieve power by stealth. "Christians must begin to organize
politically within the present party structure," he wrote, "and
they must begin to infiltrate the existing institutional order."
Today, Regent University, founded by the televangelist Pat Robertson to provide
"Christian leadership to change the world," boasts that it has 150
graduates working in the Bush administration.
Unfortunately for the image of the school, where Mr. Robertson is chancellor
and president, the most famous of those graduates is Monica Goodling, a product
of the university's law school. She's the former top aide to Alberto
Gonzales who appears central to the scandal of the fired U.S. attorneys and
has declared that she will take the Fifth rather than testify to Congress on
the matter.
The infiltration of the federal government by large numbers of people seeking
to impose a religious agenda - which is very different from simply being
people of faith - is one of the most important stories of the last six
years. It's also a story that tends to go underreported, perhaps because
journalists are afraid of sounding like conspiracy theorists.
But this conspiracy is no theory. The official platform of the Texas Republican
Party pledges to "dispel the myth of the separation of church and state."
And the Texas Republicans now running the country are doing their best to fulfill
that pledge.
Kay Cole James, who had extensive connections to the religious right and was
the dean of Regent's government school, was the federal government's
chief personnel officer from 2001 to 2005. (Curious fact: she then took a job
with Mitchell Wade, the businessman who bribed Representative Randy "Duke"
Cunningham.) And it's clear that unqualified people were hired throughout
the administration because of their religious connections.
For example, The Boston Globe reports on one Regent law school graduate who
was interviewed by the Justice Department's civil rights division. Asked
what Supreme Court decision of the past 20 years he most disagreed with, he
named the decision to strike down a Texas anti-sodomy law. When he was hired,
it was his only job offer.
Or consider George Deutsch, the presidential appointee at NASA who told a Web
site designer to add the word "theory" after every mention of the
Big Bang, to leave open the possibility of "intelligent design by a creator."
He turned out not to have, as he claimed, a degree from Texas A&M.
One measure of just how many Bushies were appointed to promote a religious
agenda is how often a Christian right connection surfaces when we learn about
a Bush administration scandal.
There's Ms. Goodling, of course. But did you know that Rachel Paulose,
the U.S. attorney in Minnesota - three of whose deputies recently stepped
down, reportedly in protest over her management style - is, according
to a local news report, in the habit of quoting Bible verses in the office?
Or there's the case of Claude Allen, the presidential aide and former
deputy secretary of health and human services, who stepped down after being
investigated for petty theft. Most press reports, though they mentioned Mr.
Allen's faith, failed to convey the fact that he built his career as a
man of the hard-line Christian right.
And there's another thing most reporting fails to convey: the sheer extremism
of these people.
You see, Regent isn't a religious university the way Loyola or Yeshiva
are religious universities. It's run by someone whose first reaction to
9/11 was to brand it God's punishment for America's sins.
Two days after the terrorist attacks, Mr. Robertson held a conversation with
Jerry Falwell on Mr. Robertson's TV show "The 700 Club." Mr.
Falwell laid blame for the attack at the feet of "the pagans, and the
abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians," not to
mention the A.C.L.U. and People for the American Way. "Well, I totally
concur," said Mr. Robertson.
The Bush administration's implosion clearly represents a setback for
the Christian right's strategy of infiltration. But it would be wildly
premature to declare the danger over. This is a movement that has shown great
resilience over the years. It will surely find new champions.
Next week Rudy Giuliani will be speaking at Regent's Executive Leadership
Series.
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